Thread: UN: Opium Production in Afghanistan to Hit Record High in 2014

The United Nations says opium production in Afghanistan will hit a new high this year.

A new report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says the country's opium harvest jumped 17 percent from last year to about 6,400 tons.

The report says total land area used for the production of opium expanded in Afghanistan by 7 percent this year, to around 224,000 hectares.

Analysts say Afghanistan produces more than 80 percent of the world's illicit opium, and profits from the illegal trade help fund the Taliban insurgency.

The U.S. has spent $7.8 billion fighting the drug trade in Afghanistan since invading in 2001.

The UNODC’s Jean-Luc Lemahieu said the drug trade accounts for roughly 20 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product. He said the industry indirectly employs more than 410,000 people.

This harvest season one kilogram of dry opium sold for $114, a 20 percent drop from last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Lemahieu said some expansion in the poppy industry was expected as the U.S.-led military coalition winds down its combat operations.

After this year, just 12,500 foreign troops will remain in Afghanistan to focus on counterterrorism and on training Afghan troops.

UN: Opium Production in Afghanistan to Hit Record High in 2014

Originally Posted by misskit

The U.S. has spent $7.8 billion fighting the drug trade in Afghanistan since invading in 2001

ya... how much of that do you really think went to "fighting the drug trade"? 5 or 6 guys at the top probably skimmed what? 90%?

and... I am sure somehow, someway, Haliburton and Dead Eye Dick Cheney got some of it too... just guessing...

Originally Posted by Pound Hound

ya... how much of that do you really think went to "fighting the drug trade"? 5 or 6 guys at the top probably skimmed what? 90%?

Spot on.

Originally Posted by Pound Hound

and... I am sure somehow, someway, Haliburton and Dead Eye Dick Cheney got some of it too... just guessing...

Even more spot on.

The US invaded Afghanistan to control the Opium/Heroin.

Shit, peoples memories are short.. (Today fukkers get away with news stories claiming Taliban benefit from Heroin - They hate it and won't allow it)

The Taliban STOPPED opium production - that's why Bush sent his crew in.

Bush sent his people in , to get revenge for 9/11

revenge for 9/11 why he not send them to Saudi Arabia then.?

Originally Posted by misskit

This harvest season one kilogram of dry opium sold for $114, a 20 percent drop from last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Do they deliver to your door?...

The CIA has to get it's funding somewhere.

Originally Posted by zygote1

It went to Iran and Russia.

source please.

Originally Posted by zygote1

The Taliban never stopped the opium trade

Originally Posted by Nathan Napalm

Originally Posted by zygote1

The Taliban never stopped the opium trade

http://www.newsweek.com/2013/06/12/t...ia-237524.html

Taliban leaders, in other words, are a lot richer than they used to be just a few years ago—and the source of their sudden influx of wealth is no secret in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The Taliban are more involved than ever in systematically promoting, financing, organizing, and protecting the drug trade,” Ahmad Woror, the director of narcotics control in Helmand province, tells Newsweek. “Drugs are ultimately providing the money, food, weapons, and suicide bombers to the insurgency and the good life to Taliban leaders in Quetta, Karachi, and across Afghanistan.”

The drug trade, of course, has been an important part of Afghanistan’s economy for a long time—exploited by former Northern Alliance warlords, corrupt government officials, and other major traffickers. Local Taliban leaders have long benefited as well. But now the Taliban’s central leadership has decided it wants in. And drug trafficking has become such a pervasive part of the organization’s mission that it raises an alarming prospect: should the Taliban’s influence grow following the U.S. withdrawal, is Afghanistan in danger of becoming the world’s first true narcostate?


HISTORICALLY, THE Taliban has had a complicated relationship with the drug trade. In some respects, the deep involvement of Taliban commanders in drug trafficking is nothing new, says Muhammad Abdali, speaking in his role as head of the Afghan government’s anti-drug task force in Helmand province. (Helmand is the country’s largest opium producer; according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, or UNODC, farmers are expected this year to sow more than the 185,000 acres of opium poppies they planted in 2012.) Abdali notes that Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, who today is arguably the Taliban’s most powerful commander, and the late brutal Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah Akhund were already thriving drug dealers back in 1994, just as the Taliban movement was launching. They quickly joined the Taliban soon after it gained traction in the mid-1990s.


The insurgency is earning upward of $200 million annually from the drug trade.

Mullah Mohammed Omar—who led the Taliban and ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 before going into hiding following the U.S. invasion—outlawed opium production and trafficking in the late 1990s as being haram, against Islam. Yet many local Taliban commanders in opium-producing areas, particularly in Helmand and Kandahar, have been using the opium industry to fund their local insurgent operations since the early 2000s, and the Taliban has long collected a 10 percent Islamic usher tax on farmers’ opium crops. According to a 2009 UNODC report on opium production, this tax is believed to have netted the insurgency some $22 million to $44 million a year—and the Taliban may have earned another $70 million by providing protection to drug-laden convoys traveling through their territory.

But something changed in the last two years: the Taliban’s central leadership now seems to be playing a much more pivotal role in the Afghan narcotics industry. They appear to be increasingly engrossed in both the upstream and downstream sides of the heroin and opium trade—encouraging farmers to plant poppies, lending them seed money, buying the crop of sticky opium paste in the field, refining it into exportable opium and heroin, and finally transporting it to Pakistan and Iran, often in old Toyotas to avoid detection.

Originally Posted by pseudolus

Originally Posted by zygote1

It went to Iran and Russia.

source please.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data...a/5.Heroin.pdf

Will you return and acknowledge that I am right?
Where do you think the heroin is sourced for addicts in two of the countries with the highest per capita addiction rates in the world? It isn't grown in the wheat fields of Australia or Argentina.

A quick search will bring you back hundreds of articles on the subject.

Funny enough , these Afghanistan farmers, who grow poppies for a living, did they learn from the 13 year friendship between Britain's rosy cheeky lads winning hearts and minds, that wearing a Poppy on 11 th Nov at 11 Greenwich mean time, you stand still.
Afghanistan remembers the Poppy, symbol of afghan victory.