KABUL (AFP) — Afghanistan's vast and lucrative opium production may drop slightly this year from a record spike, but world-high cannabis output is likely to rise, a United Nations survey released Wednesday said.
Opium from Afghanistan, which makes up more than 90 percent of world supply, will likely earn Taliban insurgents tens of millions of dollars over the year, UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) chief Antonio Maria Costa said.
It will continue to be grown at an "alarming rate" in the insurgency-hit south and southwest, perhaps more than last year when it accounted for 78 percent of total opium cultivation in Afghanistan, said the survey.
But decreases were expected in the north and centre, areas that see less of an insurgency by the Taliban, who were in government until 2001, and where the government has more authority.
"Afghanistan is becoming a divided country, with clear drugs and insurgency battle lines," Costa said in a statement.
A 10 percent "tax" paid by most farmers in the south would generate close to 100 million dollars for insurgents this year and extra money would reach the militants by running heroin labs and through drug exports, Costa said.
Sometimes this tax goes to mullahs and corrupt local security commanders.
The survey found that overall around 192,000 hectares (474,000 acres) of opium poppy, used to make heroin, has been planted in Afghanistan -- most of it in the south.
This was a decrease of about 1,000 hectares from last year, a record high for Afghanistan.
Final output would depend on the success of government eradication drives and agricultural yields, said a statement released with the survey. Output was 8,200 tons last year, up 34 percent on 2006.
"Opium cultivation in Afghanistan may have peaked, but the 2008 amount will still be shockingly high," Costa said.
Foreign Minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta said Afghanistan was determined to slash poppy production by 25 percent this year.
"Afghanistan believes we have only one choice," Spanta said. "Poppy can destroy us or we destroy the poppy. We don't have any other choice."
"We believe this year we can reduce 25 percent of poppy production in Afghanistan," said Spanta, in Tokyo for a meeting of Afghanistan's donors where the UN survey was released.
The US official in charge of anti-drug policy in Afghanistan, Thomas Schweich, was optimistic the total amount of opium produced here would dip this year with the north and east becoming almost "poppy free".
Schweich told reporters in Tokyo that the world should not underestimate the impact of drugs on the country's development.
"It has a threat to undermine everything else that Japan, the United States and other countries are doing in Afghanistan," he said.
The survey said the sharpest increase in opium cultivation was expected in the arid southwestern province of Nimroz which borders Iran and Pakistan and is a major trafficking area.
"They are turning Nimroz into a blooming desert," said Christina Oguz, the UNODC's representative in Afghanistan in a separate statement.
Drugs traffickers were often able to give farmers more support than the government, she said.
"They provide easy advance credit against future opium harvests. They provide seeds and fertilisers. They bore wells so that poppy can be cultivated in arid areas."
The latest UN survey also found that of 469 villages polled, 18 percent reported growing cannabis, compared with 13 percent last year, and output was likely to grow on last year's 70,000 hectares.
In "addition to supplying 90 percent of world opium, Afghanistan has become the world's biggest supplier of cannabis," Costa said.
The country's internationally backed efforts to cut back opium -- which feeds heroin into Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia -- include persuading farmers to grow other crops, and eradication of opium poppy fields.
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