Re: AFGHANISTAN: Opium harvest 30% above world demand

AFGHANISTAN = GREAT BIG BUSH CREATED DRUG FARM

So much for old Nancy Reagan's "just say no" with all the opium being
harvested in Afghanastan now destributed world wide "just say no" sure
just went right out the fuckin' window now didn't it. George W Bush,
destroying one 'former' Whitehouse legacy at a time..

My God did America elect a total fucking idiot..

Roger wrote:
AFGHANISTAN: Opium harvest set to increase by 60 percent - UN report
04 Sep 2006 15:44:42 GMT

KABUL, 4 September (IRIN) - Afghanistan's opium harvest is set to increase
by nearly 60 percent this year due to a massive jump in cultivation in the
insurgency-hit south, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
says.

UNODC's Annual Opium Survey found the area used for opium cultivation had
reached a record 165,000 ha in 2006 compared with 104,000 in 2005.
Afghanistan produces more than 90 percent of the world's opium, which mostly
ends up in the heroin markets of western Europe and Russia.

"That is a crop of staggering size: 6,100 mt, which is well above - 30
percent above - world demand," Antonio Maria Costa, UNODC's executive
director, said in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Saturday.

In Helmand, the southern province where Taliban insurgents have been
attacking Afghan government and international troops, cultivation soared 162
percent to 69,324 ha, accounting for more than 40 percent of the total area
under cultivation in the country, the UNODC survey revealed.

"These are very alarming numbers. Afghanistan is increasingly hooked on its
own drug," Costa said.

The rise follows a 21 percent drop in cultivation in 2005, officials from
the Ministry of Counter Narcotics said.

Government and international agencies have spent millions of dollars trying
to halt the booming opium trade.

The UN was concerned that the bumper crop was helping fuel the deadly
Taliban-led insurgency in the south.

Costa said southern Afghanistan was displaying the "ominous hallmarks of
incipient collapse", with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking,
insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption.

Costa said that some high-ranking government officials including governors,
police and soldiers were involved in the drug trade.

"The final period of the governor of Helmand in power between September and
December last year is what caused a massive planting [of poppy] which became
the massive harvest of 2006," Costa said.

Only six of the country's 34 provinces were now opium free. Cultivation fell
in eight other provinces this year, mainly in the north of the country,
UNODC said.

Habibullah Qaderi, the minister for counter narcotics, said that poppy
eradication programmes were insufficient and that more help and
developmental projects were needed to provide farmers with alternative
livelihoods.

"There needs to be more incentive to give to farmers to stop cultivating
this crop," Qaderi said.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/d037e072e25983e66f5ef527b1fff7f3.htm

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