Afghanistan this year is likely to produce less opium, the raw material for heroin and a major source of revenue for its Taliban-led insurgency, as yields decrease, a UN survey released Wednesday found.
Although an assessment conducted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) predicted a production drop, it also said land under poppy cultivation would be stable in 2010 at 123,000 hectares, the same amount as last year, DPA reported.
"Bad weather during the current growing season may reduce the productivity of the crop this year and thus volume of opium produced in the country," the survey found. "This would continue the decline that has seen production fall from a massive 8,200 tons in 2007 to 6,900 tons last year."
The expected production fall follows bumper yields for Afghan opium farmers off 56 kilograms per hectare in 2009, compared with 10 kilograms per hectare in the Golden Triangle area of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand, the UN said.
The epicentre for Afghan poppy cultivation is in the south, where Taliban insurgents are most active.
The UN survey found that 61 per cent of farmers in areas where government authority is established said that they did not grow poppy plants because it was banned, compared with 39 per cent of farmers citing the same reasons in regions where the government writ is weaker.
"There is a strong correlation between insurgency and cultivation," it said. "The UNODC assessment shows that almost 80 per cent of villages with poor security conditions grew poppy while opium grows in only 7 per cent of villages unaffected by violence."
"This is further proof of the overlap between high insecurity and high cultivation," the office's executive director, Antonio Maria Costa, said in a statement.
Around 15,000 Afghan, US, British, French and Estonian troops are poised to begin an offensive that is being called the biggest since the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001, and is to take place in Helmand, the biggest opium-producing province in the country.
Operation Mushtarak, which means together, is aimed at driving Taliban militants out of the southern province's Marjah district, Afghanistan's main market for drug traffickers, where drug barons are said to operate with impunity under Taliban protection.
Taliban militants are said to benefit from the illicit trade in the poppy, a crop they banned for one year when they ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
The United States and NATO, which together have around 113,000 forces currently in the country, kept their soldiers from engaging in counter-narcotics battles for several years.
But as the ties between the Taliban and drug traffickers became more obvious, the international forces changed their strategy and have destroyed tons of drugs and arrested people involved in the trade in the past two years.
"The message is clear: in order to further reduce the biggest source of the world's deadliest drug, there must be better security, development and governance in Afghanistan," Costa said.
"The Afghan authorities must lead and own their drug-control strategy. The rest of the world has a vested interest in its success."
UN predicts Afghan opium crop to drop in 2010
