Kabul - The production of opium in Afghanistan has "soared to frightening record levels," according to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released in Kabul Monday. Production levels of opium, from which the class A drug heroin is manufactured, are expected to reach 8,200 tons in 2007, up from 6,100 tons in 2006.
The amount of land used for the production of opium has also increased to 193,000 hectares from 165,000 in 2006, the report said.
Afghanistan is now responsible for 93 per cent of global opium production, according to the UNODC.
"The amount of Afghan land used for growing opium is now larger than the combined total under coca cultivation in Latin America - Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.
"No other country has produced narcotics on such a deadly scale since China in the 19th century," the report said.
The UNODC report highlighted differences between the relatively drug-free north and the "lawless" south of the country, where 80 per cent of the opium poppies were now being grown.
Opium production rose by 48 per cent in Helmand alone, the most volatile area of the country where the rebel Taliban are strong, making the province the world's biggest source of illegal drugs, the UNODC report said.
The province of 2.5 million people was producing more drugs than Colombia, the report said.
The Taliban was using funds from drug production to finance its insurgency.
"The Afghan opium situation looks grim, but it is not yet hopeless," UNODC executive director Antonio Maria Costa told a press conference in capital Kabul on Monday.
"Opium cultivation is inversely related to the degree of government control," Costa said. "Where anti-government forces reign, poppies flourish."
Afghan acting minister for counter-narcotics, General Khodaidad, speaking at the same press conference, admitted that his government failed to carry out their eradication campaign in southern Afghanistan.
He also praised the northern province for succeeding to double the number of provinces where the poppy cultivation came to zero compared to last year.
He cited the reason for the increase of cultivation in southern regions, as "insecurity, bad governance" and vowed that the Afghan government will take action against those governors and district chiefs who failed to conduct the eradication in their area of control properly.
Costa called on the international community to increase its efforts in Afghanistan.
"It would be an historic error to let Afghanistan collapse under the blows of drugs and insurgency," Costa said.
He called on NATO, which leads the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, to do more in the fight against drugs.
This was in the interests of the coalition as the drugs were funding the insurgency against them, he said.
Costa also urged the Afghan government to get tough on corruption, "the lubricant that oils the wheels of the drugs trade."
The UN should add the names of a dozen drug-traffickers to the United Nations list of al-Qaeda and Taliban members so that it could seize their assets, ban them from travelling and extradite them more easily.
"Of course I am adding, we don't only like to add Afghan names, but to add other names, for example Iranians, and other international mafia, Italians, Nigerians and so forth," Costa said.
The UNODC also appealed to countries where heroin is consumed to do more to prevent and treat addiction to the drug which it says kills over 100,000 people annually.
The UNODC said that, following the successes in the north of the country where the number of opium-free provinces decreased from 13 in 2006 to six this year, the organization believed that a target of half of Afghanistan's 34 provinces free from opium production in 2008 was "plausible."
