http://paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=149012
Afghanistan set to have record opium crop
KABUL: Afghanistan is set to produce its largest ever opium crop, with the biggest increase in Helmand province where British troops are engaged in bitter combat with the Taliban, western officials said.
The $1bn campaign to eradicate the crop has been "an absolute disaster", a top western counter-narcotics official said.
Stemming poppy cultivation in Helmand, which accounts for over a third of Afghanistan’s opium crop, was seen as essential to the programme’s success.
Recent estimates by western counter-narcotics officials suggest that Helmand’s poppy crop may more than double to 77,000 hectares, up from 26,500 in 2005. The United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime estimated in February that the province would see this year’s crop rise by more than half compared with the year before.
For Britain, which has deployed 3,300 troops in and around the province and is the lead nation for Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics programmes, the bumper harvest will be deeply embarrassing.
Five British soldiers have been killed in Sangin district, a major drug-producing region of Helmand, in the past three weeks. There are concerns that drug money is fuelling the insurgency.
"Drugs intensify and exacerbate the existing conflicts in a society," said Doris Buddenberg, head of the UNODC mission in Afghanistan.
In Taliban-held areas of Helmand, farmers were encouraged by insurgents to grow poppy and letters were sent ahead of the sowing season threatening them with violence if they did not comply.
However, corruption has also been a big problem in bolstering the drugs harvest.
"We really need to start focusing on corruption. There are up to 10,000 hectares of government land being used to grow poppy in Helmand," a US official said.
The booming poppy crop has opened up divisions within the international community.
A Nato official told the Financial Times that military officers were mulling a grace period for Afghan farmers so that reconstruction efforts could be rolled out by incoming forces across the south. "A grace period is being discussed. We have to get things done in the right sequence," he said.
Lieutentant General David Richards, who will take command of Nato forces in southern Afghanistan from the US at the end of this month, said at present Afghan farmers have no viable alternatives to opium.
To help create other options, he said Nato aimed to provide a security umbrella so that progress could be made on reconstruction, which has stalled due to rising levels of violence. The impact of "creating a secure environment in which the government and NGOs feel it is safe to restart their work ... would be felt very quickly," he said.
However, the UN has warned that focusing efforts on areas that cultivate the most poppy is not the best strategy. Boosting development in parts of the country where poppy cultivation was not the main earner "would build a line of defence against the spread of the crop", the UNODC’s Ms Buddenberg said.
Since 2001, poppy cultivation has spread from its traditional growing regions of southern and northeastern Afghanistan to the rest of the country.
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