SOUTH ASIA: AFGHANISTAN

The survey found that there is large-scale cannabis cultivation in exactly half of the country’s 34 provinces.

Regarding hashish, Afghanistan’s cannabis crop yields some 145 kilograms per hectare of hashish, the resin produced from cannabis, as compared to around 40 kilograms per hectare in Morocco.

“While other countries have even larger cannabis cultivation, the astonishing yield of the Afghan cannabis crop makes Afghanistan the world’s biggest producer of hashish, estimated at between 1,500 and 3,500 tons a year,” said UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa.

HIGH YIELD, BIG PROFIT

Cannabis not only reaps a high return – 3,900 dollars in gross income per hectare as compared to 3,600 dollars from opium – but it is also cheap to harvest and process. It is three times cheaper to cultivate a hectare of cannabis in Afghanistan than a hectare of opium, says the Vienna-based UN specialised body.

However, opium is still favoured over cannabis among Afghan farmers, according to the survey, which noted that the latter has a short shelf-life and is a crop grown during the summer months, when less water is available for irrigation.

Costa added that in the past five years, cannabis cultivation has shifted away from the country’s north to the south. “Like opium, cannabis cultivation is now concentrated in regions of instability, namely the south of the country,” he explained.

Also like opium, cannabis trading centres are situated throughout the country, the UNODC reported in its survey released on March 31, 2010.

While some cannabis is consumed domestically as hashish (or “charas,” as it is known), the main trade flows seem to follow opium trafficking routes, particularly around hubs in the provinces of Balkh, Uruzgan and Kandahar.

THE REMEDY?

The UNODC chief stressed that “the remedy for Afghanistan’s drug problem remains improving security and development in the areas of the country that produce drugs.” By doing so, “we can knock out the world’s biggest supplies of both hash and heroin,” he said.

In a previous report on February 10 this year, the UN drugs and crime agency found a “correlation between insurgency and high cultivation, with nearly 80 per cent of villages with very poor security conditions growing poppies but in only 7 per cent of villages untouched by violence.”

The report pointed out that in parts of Afghanistan where the Government is more able to enforce the law, nearly two thirds of farmers said they did not grow opium because it is banned, whereas in the southeast, where authorities' reach is weaker, just under 40 per cent of farmers cited the ban as a reason for not cultivating poppies.

On that occasion, Costa noted that “The message is clear.” To curb opium production, he said “there must be better security, development and governance in Afghanistan.”

ALSO PAKISTAN

Another country severely hit by drugs is neighbouring Pakistan, where the U.S. also has a heavy military apparatus, regularly launching indiscriminate strikes killings hundreds of unarmed civilians especially through the continuing U.S. drone bombing as part of its proxy war on “terrorism” and Afghan Taliban militia.

In fact, the UN reported on March 28, 2010 a “massive seizure of drug-making chemicals in Pakistan”, pointing out the authorities at Pakistani port Qasim had seized 15.8 tons of acetic anhydride, the precursor chemical used to produce heroin from opium.

THE LARGEST-EVER

“This is the largest-ever seizure of acetic anhydride in Pakistan,” the UN informed, adding that the chemicals were found in barrels, labeled as paint destined for Karachi, in a container.

UNODC has been working with the Pakistani authorities since 2007 to strengthen their capacity to disrupt the trafficking of precursor chemicals and drugs via Pakistan. The programme is being extended to dry ports, also on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"This record-breaking seizure shows that UNODC can train and equip law enforcement agents to find needles in a haystack", the UNODC chief said.

"Pakistan's expertise in container security has developed so well that port officials who were trained by UNODC a few years ago are now trainers for other port authorities around the world, and its container terminals are regarded as models for neighboring states," said Ketil Ottersen, UNODC's senior coordinator for the Container Control Programme.

This is the latest in a steady stream of seizures made in ports that are part of the Container Control Programme, including in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ghana, Panama, Senegal and Turkmenistan.

QUESTION

The U.S. and its allies are certainly aware of this data and of the dimensions of a phenomenon that decimates tens of thousands of lives every year, mainly in the U.S. itself and its European 'partner' countries.

The question remains: while spending billions of dollars on its so-called fights on drugs and their traffickers in Latin America, mainly Mexico and Colombia, including a growing military presence in the later, why the U.S. and its Western allies seem to be 'incapable' of preventing increasing drugs cultivation and trafficking in the occupied Afghanistan and the semi-occupied Pakistan?

Difficult to answer. Unless one recalls that drug trafficking is the second largest illicit business on the world's list of modern killers, immediately after illegal weapons trade – and the U.S. is the biggest arms producer.

[Source: IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters]