Afghanistan's opium harvest jumped by 34 percent this year to a new high with the country almost the exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug, the United Nations announced Monday.
The southern province of Helmand had meanwhile become the world's biggest source of illicit drugs, surpassing the output of entire countries, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in its 2007 Annual Opium Survey.
This was despite a multi-million-dollar effort led by Britain and the United States to cut the opium trade which finances the growing Taliban insurgency that has killed thousands of people, including Western soldiers. The production of opium, used to make heroin, had soared to "frightening record levels in 2007," the UNODC said in a statement on the survey.
The total opium harvest for the year was estimated at 8,200 tonnes, up from 6,100 tonnes last year, a 34 percent spike, it said. The harvest normally ends around late July. The area planted with opium poppies had risen to 193,000 hectares (476,710 acres) from 165,000 in 2006, representing a 17 percent rise, it said. Afghanistan had become "practically the exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug", accounting for 93 percent of the global opiates market, the survey said.
The amount of Afghan land used for growing opium was now larger than the combined total used to grow coca - the raw ingredient for cocaine - in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, it said.
"No other country has produced narcotics on such a deadly scale since China in the 19th century," it said. It said opium cultivation was "closely linked" to the Taliban insurgency with the insurgents using the drug economy to fund arms, logistics and pay. About 80 percent of opium poppies are grown in a handful of provinces along the border with Pakistan, where instability is worst, the survey said.
The extremist Taliban movement was driven from government in late 2001 by a US-led coalition and is now waging a deadly insurgency that is undermining the fragile country's efforts to leave behind nearly three decades of war.