Opium production in Afghanistan has reached a new high of 6,100 tons this year, witnessing a rise of nearly 50 percent year-on-year, said a senior UN anti-drug official on Saturday, who asked the Afghan government to exercise iron control over the illegal business.

"This year's harvest will be around 6,100 tons of opium (in Afghanistan) a staggering 92 percent of total world supply," Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said at a press conference held here.

Opium output was 4,100 tons in Afghanistan last year.

"These are very alarming numbers. Afghanistan is increasingly hooked on its own drug," Costa told reporters after a talk with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Costa called on the Afghan government to take much tougher action to root out corruption and arrest major drug traffickers and wealthy opium-farming landlords, seizing their assets.

"Significant arrests and convictions will set an example and serve as a deterrent," he said, adding "governors and police officials presiding over opium growing provinces should be removed and charged."

UNODC's Annual Opium Survey for Afghanistan showed the area under opium cultivation in the country reaches a record 165,000 hectares in 2006, which is a rise of 59 percent from 104,000 in 2005.

In the southern province of Helmand, a hotbed of Taliban militants, cultivation soars 162 percent to 69,324 hectares this year, according to the UNODC.

The UNODC chief said southern Afghanistan is displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency and terrorism, crime and corruption.

"Public opinion is increasingly frustrated by the fact the opium cultivation in Afghanistan seems out of control," he added.

Only six of the country's 34 provinces are now free from opium, the raw material for making heroine.

At the press conference, Habibullah Qaderi, Minister of Counter Narcotics of Afghanistan, said huge opium production has brought " a bad name for the country," and "this is a year of setback for the ministry."

He blamed insecurity, international drug smuggling, officials' corruption for the increase of opium cultivation.

Costa also emphasized the importance of replacement economy by saying "drug-free areas (in Afghanistan) should be rewarded with more substantial and more visible development aid."

However, he criticized aid money by the international community gets stuck to bureaucratic delays in this country, and some money is misused, or even stolen by corrupt administrations.

Source: Xinhua