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".
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