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Afghanistan Opium Said Wiped Out
U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan �� once the world's largest producer �� since banning poppy cultivation in July.
A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation's largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.
``We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,'' said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier �� a sea of blood-red poppies.
A US State Department official said Thursday all the information the United States has received so far indicates the poppy crop had decreased, but he did not believe it was eliminated.
Last year, Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of opium, about 75 percent of the world's supply, U.N. officials said. Opium �� the milky substance drained from the poppy plant �� is converted into heroin and sold in Europe and North America. The 2000 output was a world record for opium production, the United Nations said �� more than all other countries combined, including the ``Golden Triangle,'' where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet.
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, banned poppy growing before the November planting season and augmented it with a religious edict making it contrary to the tenets of Islam.
The Taliban, which has imposed a strict brand of Islam in the 95 percent of Afghanistan it controls, has set fire to heroin laboratories and jailed farmers until they agreed to destroy their poppy crops.
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