By IRNA,
London : The British government has welcomed the latest UN drugs report for Afghanistan showing a 19 percent reduction in poppy cultivation this year but warned there is ‘no room for complacency’.
“It will take a long time for Afghanistan to be in a position to run a self-sustaining legal economy, police force, justice system and public services. We are in this for the long haul,” Foreign Office Minister Lord Malloch-Brown said.
“Afghanistan is still the world’s biggest supplier of heroin,” Malloch-Brown said. In particular, he said, ‘high cultivation levels are concentrated in the unstable south’ of the country.
Commenting on the publication of The United Nations Office on Drugs (UNODC) 2008 Opium Survey for Afghanistan, he said that the number of provinces free from poppy has increased from just three in 2004 to 18 in 2008, representing over half the country.
Over 95 percent of poppy cultivation this year ‘occurred in just five insecure provinces’, including Helmand, where British troops are based and where 103,000 hectares were cultivated, virtually the same as in the record crop of 2007.
The minister repeated his call on the international community to provide support to Afghanistan, arguing that the UK, the lead nation of the country’s counter drugs strategy, was providing ‘significant funds’.
This, he said was for efforts ‘to improve farmers’ livelihoods, to bring traffickers to justice, to break the links between the drugs trade and the insurgency, and to reduce the demand for drugs’.
Between 2005 and 2008, the UK spent pnds 290 million (dlrs 575 m) on aid, including two million pounds by the Department for International Development to help farmers in the form of wheat, seed, fertilizer and expert advice.