KABUL - Poppy cultivation and opium production have plunged 95 per cent in Afghanistan since the Taliban authorities banned the crop, according to a United Nations report published on Sunday.
Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban authorities have vowed to end illegal drug production in Afghanistan.
In April 2022, they banned the cultivation of the poppy plant, from which opium and heroin are made.
The report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that poppy cultivation collapsed to just 10,800ha in 2023 from 233,000ha the previous year.
Opium production followed suit, plummeting from 6,200 tonnes to 333 tonnes in 2023.
This year’s estimated harvest amounts to between 24 and 38 tonnes of exportable heroin, compared with 380 to 580 tonnes last year.
The UNODC warned of potential “humanitarian consequences for many vulnerable rural communities” due to the sudden contraction of Afghanistan’s opium economy.
This is because growers have had to turn to far less lucrative alternative crops.
Farmers’ incomes, estimated at US$1.36 billion (S$1.84 billion) in 2022, have fallen by 92 per cent to US$110 million this year, according to the UNODC. The loss is expected to impact the country’s already struggling economy more broadly.
In 2022, poppy crops accounted for almost a third by value of total agricultural production in Afghanistan, the world’s leading producer.
“Today, Afghanistan’s people need urgent humanitarian assistance... to absorb the shock of lost income and save lives,” UNODC executive director Ghada Waly said in a statement.
“For all the other production – cotton, wheat – they need much more water,” she said at a briefing on the report, while the country was experiencing “three years of consecutive drought”.
The Afghan interior ministry’s narcotics department said it agrees “to a certain extent” with the UNODC report’s estimates of the area under poppy cultivation.
But it dismissed other elements of the report, such as those regarding opium production and socio-economic data, because they were not based on field-based surveys, relying instead on satellite images and previous years’ data. AFP
