Posted on 3-11-2003

Afghanistan's Narco-economy
By Ian Traynor in Zagreb, The Guardian UK, 30 October 2003


Opium trade threatens to destroy infant democracy, warns UN

Afghanistan risks degenerating into a state controlled by
"narco-terrorists" and drug cartels unless the soaring level of opium
and heroin production is curbed, the UN warned yesterday.

Two years after US airpower and northern guerrillas drove the Taliban
from power, the world's biggest source of heroin is cultivating opium
poppies and processing the opium into heroin at near record rates
despite the introduction of western programmes aimed at eliminating the
drug .

The UN's annual survey of Afghanistan's opium poppy cultivation and
production, released yesterday, paints a bleak picture of a drug culture
spreading vigorously in defiance of intense efforts by the international
community, humanitarian organisations and charities to wean Afghan
farmers off the lucrative crop.

The Vienna-based UN office on drugs and crime (UNODC) has been surveying
Afghan poppy production for the past decade and has concluded that this
year's harvest is the second biggest recorded, surpassed only by the
bumper production of 4,600 tonnes of opium in 1999, a year before
Taliban hardliners banned its cultivation.

This year's production of 3,600 tonnes represents a 6% year-on-year
increase, while poppy cultivation, at almost 81,000 hectares (200,000
acres), was up 8%. A further cause for concern is that opium poppies are
now being grown in 28 of Afghanistan's 32 provinces, against 18 in 1999.

"The country is at a crossroads," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of
UNODC. "There is a palpable risk that Afghanistan will again turn into a
failed state, this time in the hands of drug cartels and
narco-terrorists."

Afghanistan is by far the biggest source of the heroin trafficked in
western Europe, supplying 90% of the market.

The report found that Afghanistan produces 75% of the world's illicit
opium and that two in three opiate users take drugs from Afghanistan.
The poppy industry generates around half the official gross domestic
product.

The industry is controlled by warlords and crime cartels who use two
prime routes to ferry the contraband to western Europe. Raw opium is
refined into heroin at illicit laboratories all over Afghanistan.

The heroin is taken north, through the former Soviet states of central
Asia and up into the Russian Urals, before heading for western Europe
via Moscow and St Petersburg. Alternatively, it is dispatched Turkey and
then smuggled into western Europe via the Balkans.

"Out of this drug chest some provincial administrators and military
commanders take a considerable share. The more they get used to this,
the less likely it becomes that they will respect the law, be loyal to
Kabul," Mr Costa said.

"Terrorists take a cut as well. The longer this happens, the greater the
threat to security within the country and on its borders."

In one of his first moves on taking office last year, President Hamid
Karzai outlawed opium poppy cultivation, trafficking and consumption
while charities and other outsiders sought to develop crop substitution
projects and payments to farmers to eradicate poppy growing.

To judge by the figures released yesterday, there is scant evidence of
success. The bumper harvest of 1999 was followed in 2000 by the Taliban
prohibition, a gambit aimed partly at gaining international recognition
of the regime.

The ploy failed but the ban went ahead, slashing that year's opium
production. Last year, however, UNODC confirmed a "major resurgence" of
poppy growing".

Mr Costa called for stiff "interdiction measures", backed by the
international community, "to destroy the terrorists' and warlords' stake
in the opium economy".