UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 26--Opium production in Afghanistan declined by 6 percent this year, the sharpest decline since the United States toppled the Taliban rulers there, according to a U.N. report released Tuesday. Afghan opium production was down about 500 tons, according to the U.N. 2008 Afghanistan Opium Survey. The amount of land dedicated to opium poppies fell even more dramatically, dropping 19 percent because of severe drought and the efforts of a handful of Afghan governors, tribal and religious leaders to persuade local farmers to abandon the elicit crop.
The U.N. report cautioned that Afghanistan remains the world's top source of opium, producing more of the illicit drug than the world consumes. It expressed caution that Afghan growers had stockpiled massive stores of opium that will guarantee large supplies on the international market even if new supplies dwindle.
Still, U.N. officials characterized the decline as a watershed that showed that internationally backed Afghan efforts to curb the trade were not doomed to failure. "The opium flood waters in Afghanistan have started to recede," Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the Vienna-based UN Office of Drugs and Crime, wrote in the report. "This year, the historic high-water mark of 193,000 hectares of opium cultivated in 2007 has dropped by 19 percent to 157,000 hectares."
The Bush administration welcomed the findings, saying the report provided vindication for its much-criticized counter-narcotics strategy in Afghanistan. But a State Department spokesman said "the drug threat in Afghanistan remains unacceptably high. We are particularly concerned by the deterioration in security conditions in the south, where the insurgency dominates."
The number of Afghan provinces where opium cultivation has ceased increased last year by fifty percent, from 13 to 18, including Badakshan, Balkh and Nangarhar. The most significant turnaround occurred in Nangarhar, Afghanistan's second highest opium producing province in 2007. This year, Costa wrote, Nangarhar, "has become poppy free."
Today, more than fifty percent of Afghanistan's 34 provinces are opium free, according to the report. Most of the country's opium cultivation --about 98 percent-- is now concentrated in seven provinces in south-west Afghanistan that house permanent Taliban settlements and provide organized crimes groups that pay taxes to the Islamic movement in exchange for a free hand in running their illicit trade.
"The most glaring example is Hilmand province, where 103,00 hectares of opium were cultivated this year -- two thirds of all opium in Afghanistan," Costa wrote. "If Hilmand were a country, it would once again be the world's biggest producer of illicit drugs."
The Taliban earned $200 million to $400 million last year through a 10 percent tax on poppy growers and drug traffickers in areas under its control, Costa said in an interview in June. He estimates that Afghan poppy farmers and drug traffickers last year earned about $4 billion, half of the country's national income.
Britain's ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles told the BBC that "we're not satisfied and we will never be satisfied until we really start squeezing poppy cultivation out of the Hilmand economy."
"We have an extremely competent governor in Helmand who has a plan . . . for getting farmers to switch from poppy cultivation in the coming season," Cowper-Coles said.