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For Britain, which has deployed 3,300 troops in and around the province Helmand and is the lead nation for Afghanistan's counter-narcotics programmes, the bumper harvest will be deeply embarrassing.
Financial Times Deutschland
16 July 2006
Afghanistan is set to produce its largest ever opium crop, with the biggest rise in Helmand province, where British troops are engaged in combat with the Taliban, western officials said.
The $1bn campaign to eradicate the crop had been "an absolute disaster", a top western counter-narcotics official said. Stemming poppy cultivation in Helmand, which accounts for more than a third of Afghanistan's opium crop, was seen as essential to the programme's success.
As the harvest season sets in, western officials estimate that Helmand's poppy crop may more than double to 77,000 hectares, up from 26,500 in 2005. For Britain, which has deployed 3,300 troops in and around the province and is the lead nation for Afghanistan's counter-narcotics programmes, the bumper harvest will be deeply embarrassing.
In Taliban-held areas of Helmand, farmers were encouraged by insurgents to grow poppies. Letters were sent ahead of the sowing season threatening them with violence if they did not comply. But corruption has also been a big problem in bolstering the drugs harvest.
"We really need to start focusing on corruption. There are up to 10,000 hectares of government land being used to grow poppy in Helmand," a US official said.
The booming poppy crop has opened up divisions within the international community. A Nato official told the FT that military officers were mulling a grace period for Afghan farmers so that reconstruction efforts could be rolled out by incoming forces across the south. "A grace period is being discussed. We have to get things done in the right sequence," he said.
Lieutentant General David Richards, who will take command of Nato forces in southern Afghanistan from the US at the end of July, said Afghan farmers had no viable alternatives to opium. To help create other options, he said, Nato aimed to provide a security umbrella so progress could be made on reconstruction, which has been stalled by rising violence.
However, the UN has warned that focusing efforts on areas that cultivate the most poppies is not the best strategy. Boosting development in parts of the country where poppy cultivation was not the main earner "would build a line of defence against the spread of the crop", a UN official said.
(c) 2006 Financial Times Deutschland
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