Afghan push back towards opium producing due to High Prices

Afghan officials concerned on Sunday that opium’s prices have reached on almost doubled in 2010, that it is the fear that more Afghan farmers would turn to the illegal crop due to non availability profitable alternatives and the prices of opium’s prices reaching on almost doubled in 2010.

Mohammad Ibrahim Azhar, Deputy Counter-Narcotics Minister said the opium crop, which facilitates fuel the insurgency, had been reduced by 48 percent in 2010 by a still unknown stain.

Big jumps in prices already intend farmers were earning far more for their crops than in 2009.  He said the price for opium, a thick paste from poppy plants developed into heroin, had gone up 190 percent by the end of December 2010. 

Afghanistan has long been the producer of about 90 percent of the world’s opium. Most of it is exported in a prosperous world trade estimated at US$ 65 billion a year, although the number of fanatics in Afghanistan is also growing.

The Taliban in Afghanistan obtain US$ 100 to 400 million dollars a year in forms of revenues charged from drug production and trafficking, according to United Nations data, promoting the mutiny and threatening volatility across South and Central Asia and into Russia.

He also said after delivering departmental conclusions for December 2010 increasing demand and prices without adequate support from the outside contributors to provide substitute will leave farmers few options but to implant poppy fields again.

 Azhar told in a news conference in Kabul, “Our report from the month of December illustrates that opium prices have gone up till 190 percent, which has shocked our concerns and fear.

Afghanistan’s government and its Western supporters have resisted to arise on the possible substitutes, sorting from wiping out poppy fields to encouraging wheat and other crops, since the Taliban were exiled  in late 2001.

The situation will be much worsening, if the international community doesn’t provide us substantial support and help. He said without giving alternative sources to the 1.7 million farmers who grow opium, mostly in the Taliban heartland in the south and east devastating poppy fields will never give us fruitful results.

The farmers who were generating US$ 604 million in income from opium in 2010, 38% up as compared to 2009 according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report in September.

In 2009, wheat prices rose and poppy prices fell, giving farmers a reason to review their planting plans for fields produced in 2009. In 2010, the reverse was true, with farm-gate opium prices at times reaching $169 per kg of dry opium and higher in 2010 compared with $64 per kg in 2009.

Output for 2010 has been estimated at around 3,900 tonnes, the lowest since 2003, compared with 6,900 tonnes in 2009. Even so, opium production last year accounted for 5 percent of gross domestic product, up from 4 percent in 2009.

Aside from leading the world in opium production, Afghanistan has become the biggest producer of hashish, or cannabis resin, turning out between 1,500 and 3,500 tonnes a year.

Foreign enforcement agencies are increasingly seeking ways to curb the opium trade as part of the wider battle against Taliban-led insurgents, who use profits from the trade to battle about 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Military and civilian casualties are at record levels, with 711 foreign troops killed in 2010, by far the bloodiest year of the war.