Afghan dope production falls

Reuters/NY Times:

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22 percent this year as prices for the drug tumbled causing farmers to switch to other crops, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Some 1.6 million Afghans, or 6.4 percent of the population, are involved in the illegal drugs trade compared to 2.4 million last year, according to an annual U.N. report, a rare bit of good news for Western efforts in the country, where an 8-year-old war against the Taliban is at its most violent.

While the industry is mainly controlled by criminal gangs and corrupt officials, the Taliban are said to siphon off millions of dollars from the opium trade by imposing taxes on farmers and smugglers in return for ensuring safe passage of the drug.

Western officials say the illegal narcotics trade also fuels rampant corruption and crime, and undermines the Afghan state they are trying to prop up.

Afghanistan has long been the producer of about 90 percent of the world's opium, a thick paste from poppy that is processed to make heroin. In 2007, it broke all records, but cultivation has since started to decline.

"The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. These results are a welcome piece of good news and demonstrate that progress is possible," said U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa in the report issued on Wednesday.

This year, 123,000 hectares were used to grow opium poppy, compared to 157,000 hectares in 2008, the UNODC said.

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The story attributes the decline mostly to market conditions, but growers and smugglers have also had to deal with a greater concentration of forces in the main area of production. Both the US Marines and British forces have seized production labs and confiscated large amounts of refined product. They have also destroyed equipment and chemicals used in processing the dope.