U.N. sees drop in Afghan opium cultivation

KABUL, Afghanistan - Opium cultivation could drop in Afghanistan this year in part because of a U.S.-sponsored crackdown on the world's largest illegal drug industry, the top U.N. counter-narcotics official said Saturday.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai's call for a "holy war" on drugs, and campaigns to eradicate opium poppy crops appear to have persuaded many farmers to plant legal crops, Antonio Maria Costa told The Associated Press.

"After a few years of bad news, I believe that 2005 may finally deliver some good news," Costa said after meeting officials in the Afghan capital. "The information we have from different sources ... shows that the effort is significant and the impact on the actual surface under cultivation could be important."

Costa, executive director of the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, declined to forecast how much the reduction would be in a crop which last year supplied about 90 percent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

With farmers in opium-growing heartlands such as eastern Nangarhar switching to wheat, Afghan and western officials in Kabul have estimated that cultivation could fall by 30 percent from a record 323,700 acres in 2004.

However, skeptics warn that production may merely shift to more remote areas, and Costa acknowledged that some farmers may have been deterred by lower opium prices rather than the urgings of the government.

Last year, the United Nations valued the opium trade in Afghanistan at $2.8 billion, or more than 60 percent of the country's 2003 gross domestic product, and warned that the corruption was turning the country into a "narco-state."

Costa said traffickers have large stockpiles from production, which has skyrocketed since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, and that authorities were trying to locate them as part of a clampdown plotted by U.S. and British anti-drug experts.

With plans laid also for a nationwide poppy eradication campaign, the United States and European governments have promised hundreds of millions of dollars to create jobs and develop Afghanistan's war-ravaged agriculture to soften the blow.

Costa said his biggest concern was that international aid be sustained over years and spent effectively - and that repressive measures don't go too far in a country slowly emerging from more than two decades of war.

"We should recognize that Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world," he said. "We don't want to cause, because of the eradication and the law enforcement against narcotics, a humanitarian disaster ... or any possible conflict within the country."