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My Profile Top News Reuters top ten news stories delivered to your inbox each day. Subscribe You are here: Home > News > International > Article Home Business & Finance News U.S. Politics International Technology Entertainment Sports Lifestyle Oddly Enough Health Science Special Coverage Video Pictures Your View The Great Debate Blogs Weather Reader Feedback Do More With Reuters RSS Widgets Mobile Podcasts Newsletters Your View Make Reuters My Homepage Partner Services CareerBuilder Affiliate Network Professional Products Support (Customer Zone) Reuters Media Financial Products About Thomson Reuters Afghan opium crop down, prices plummet U.N. Wed Sep 2, 2009 3:11am EDT Email | Print | Share | Reprints | Single Page [-] Text [+] By Jonathon Burch KABUL (Reuters) - Opium cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22 percent this year as prices for the drug tumbled causing farmers to switch to other crops, the United Nations said on Wednesday. Some 1.6 million Afghans, or 6.4 percent of the population, are involved in the illegal drugs trade compared to 2.4 million last year, according to an annual U.N. report, a rare bit of good news for Western efforts in the country, where an 8-year-old war against the Taliban is at its most violent. While the industry is mainly controlled by criminal gangs and corrupt officials, the Taliban are said to siphon off millions of dollars from the opium trade by imposing taxes on farmers and smugglers in return for ensuring safe passage of the drug. Western officials say the illegal narcotics trade also fuels rampant corruption and crime, and undermines the Afghan state they are trying to prop up. Afghanistan has long been the producer of about 90 percent of the world's opium, a thick paste from poppy that is processed to make heroin. In 2007, it broke all records, but cultivation has since started to decline. "The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market. These results are a welcome piece of good news and demonstrate that progress is possible," said U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa in the report issued on Wednesday. This year, 123,000 hectares were used to grow opium poppy, compared to 157,000 hectares in 2008, the UNODC said. Despite cultivating just 78 percent as much land, Afghan poppy farmers still produced 90 percent as much opium as last year, because of record yields caused in part by good weather. The 6,900 tonnes of opium Afghanistan produced is far more than the 5,000 tonnes the world's addicts consume, leading to a glut that has depressed prices to lows unseen since the 1990s. "There are stocks ... in south of Afghanistan, certainly in Pakistan and elsewhere. These stockpiles could be a very important way of funding terrorism worldwide, not only in the region," Costa told Reuters. Most of the reduction took place in the country's most violent province, Helmand, the opium growing heartland and main focus of U.S. and British war efforts. Cultivation there fell by a third to 69,833 hectares, from 103,590 hectares in 2008. ECONOMICS DRIVES DOWN PRICE The fall in price drove the total value of Afghanistan's opium crop down 40 percent to $438 million. Opium now makes up just 4 percent of Afghan GDP, compared to 7 percent in 2008 and a record 27 percent in 2002, a year after the Taliban were ousted. "All of that has created stocks, an excess supply, and on the whole has driven conditions such that it has become less and less attractive for farmers to cultivate opium," Costa told Reuters. Still, Costa said it was "too early to tell whether the decrease in cultivation and production over the past two years is a market correction that could be reversed, or a downward trend." Continued... View article on single page Share: Del.icio.us Digg Mixx Yahoo! 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