Afghanistan opium production leaps

The annual United Nations survey on opium production in Afghanistan has confirmed that there has been a huge increase in production.

It says the country's farmers produced an estimated 3,400 metric tons of opium in 2002.

That is around 18 times higher than last year's unusually low figure of 185 tons, which followed a ban on cultivation imposed by the Taleban in the last year of their rule.

The UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, which released the survey, blames the increase on poverty-stricken farmers taking advantage of the power vacuum which preceded the collapse of the Taleban to resume planting.

These figures represent bad news for the UN's drug control programme - and for the British Government, which is co-ordinating international efforts to help stamp out opium production in Afghanistan.

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The final figure is considerably higher than initial estimates given by the UN earlier this year.

It means that drug production is now back at the high levels of the late 1990s, when Afghanistan was producing 70% of the world's illicit opium.

The only piece of good news is that this year's production is 25% lower than the record breaking crop of 1999, before the Taleban banned poppy cultivation.

The United Nations stresses that neither it - nor Afghanistan's new transitional government which has announced its own ban on drug production - should be blamed for the rise.

It says Afghanistan's hard-pressed farmers took advantage of the collapse of law and order prior to the fall of the Taleban to resume poppy planting.

The UN is now working with the transitional administration to try to stamp out illicit production.

But it has a huge task ahead, particularly as the new poppy planting season is imminent and much needed long-term development aid is only trickling in.

The Executive Director of the UN's drug control office, Antonio Maria Costa, called on donors to provide more support to Kabul as it struggles to build its drug control and law enforcement agencies and provide Afghan farmers with a viable alternative to poppy cultivation.