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Poverty not fueling Afghan opium crop, according to report

"It appears that the wealthier provinces were actually more likely to cultivate opium than the poorer ones."

UN Office on Drugs and Crime report

Afghan poppy farmers are some of the richest in the country, so poverty is not a big factor driving drug production in Afghanistan, which last year produced 93 percent of the world's opium, a UN report said.

Despite millions of dollars spent to eradicate the crop and encourage farmers to turn to others, opium production has risen sharply since US-led and Afghan forces toppled the hardline Islamist Taliban government in 2001.

But some of the poorest Afghan farmers do not grow the poppies from which opium is produced, while those on some of the richest farmland are the biggest producers of the drug, which is processed to make heroin and exported to the West.

"Poverty does not appear to have been the main driving factor in the expansion of opium cultivation in recent years," said a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) received by wire agencies yesterday.

"There is no evidence that opium poppy cultivation is the choice of the poorest of the poor farmers," it said.

While it is difficult to measure income in Afghanistan the UNODC study looked at farmers' key assets.

The southern province of Helmand, which produces around 70 percent of Afghanistan's drug crop, has the country's highest level of car and motorcycle ownership and the second highest ownership of trucks, combine harvesters and tractors.

"It appears that the wealthier provinces were actually more likely to cultivate opium than the poorer ones," the report said.

The biggest factor in whether farmers grow opium is the level of Taliban insurgency.

Afghan and mostly British forces are engaged in almost daily battles trying to wrest control of the string of towns and villages along Helmand's fertile strip from Taliban insurgents.

Forty-four percent of Helmand households said their economic situation had improved in the last year, compared to 27 percent nationwide, the UNODC said.

Meanwhile, a suicide bomber blew up an explosives-filled car near international troops in eastern Afghanistan yesterday, killing an Afghan child, a provincial governor said.

The bombing just outside the city of Khost was the second suicide attack in Afghanistan since Thursday when a blast in Kabul killed six civilians and wounded four international soldiers.

First reports said the blast damaged a vehicle of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said Arsalla Jamal, governor of Khost.

Jamal said that there were no injuries among the ISAF troops.
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