Afghan Opium Poppy Cultivation At All Time High

Amid the thick smoke of the latest opium production statistics from Afghanistan one obvious trend is emerging – the country is going to pot.

Not literally. Poppy production is the leading export among the mind boggling agents produced in the war torn nation.

Actual weed is a secondary product, cultivated after the April-May main harvest when poppies are scratched and bleed their pricey goo.

"The link between insecurity and opium cultivation observed in the country since 2007 continued to be a factor in 2014; the bulk of opium poppy cultivation - 89% - was concentrated in nine provinces in the southern and western regions, which include the most insecure provinces in the country," the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime said in its 2014 report.

It continued: "Helmand province, registering a 3% increase in cultivation, remained Afghanistan's leading crop grower (taking 46% of the national total)".

In fact, the production trend from Helmand, where British troops were first deployed in 2006 and which they left last month, has been steadily up.

One could conclude the poppy eradication programme the British were supposed to lead at the request of then Prime Minister Tony Blair has been a failure.

The truth is that it was abandoned very quickly as a silly idea. It was bad enough that ill-equipped and outnumbered British troops were sent to kick the hornet's nest of drug Khans under the guise of fighting the Taliban (who had a negligible presence in Helmand).

It would have been much worse to take away the nation's most lucrative crop. Not least because, according to UN sources, at least 70% of drug profits wound up in the pockets of government figures who were the NATO allies.

Proof that the NATO forces brought little to Helmand than violence lies in the fact that, aside from a brief dip during the worst of the fighting from 2007-2011, farmers had no choice but to grow opium.

When Helmand was being torn up in battles with an indeterminate enemy (Taliban? Drug lord? Who knew?) the region's plentiful pomegranates, grapes, water melon, mulberry, and even wheat and rice crops perished before they could be brought to market.

Opium is little money. It's a good, non-perishable, easily transportable medium of exchange. So war forced its growth. And the presence of war became almost a necessary condition for its cultivation.

Yields have gone up 27% in the south. As a result the price has dropped by 20%

Over the last year 13% of areas known as "food zones" set up by the Afghan government have been turned over to poppy while British and American forces who policed them have been withdrawn.

That means local farmers believe more conflict is coming as drug Khans battle for control of the industry and the Taliban tries to drive the government out of the small islands of territory it has actually controlled.

So there's not much prospect of peace or a decline in poppy production. That, said one senior police officer only half in jest, is good news for the UK.

"Cheap heroin means fewer burglaries," he said.