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Bid to stop opium trafficking UN launches security belt around Afghanistan

UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations has launched a $ 65 million drug control initiative in the countries that border Afghanistan in a bid to stem trafficking from the world's top producer of opium, a senior UN official said on Monday.

The "security belt" projects in Central Asia include training for border police and law enforcement officials and help in establishing national drug control agencies and policies, said Pino Arlacchi, the head of the UN Drug Control and Crime Programme.

The target countries for the UN programmes are Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Pakistan, Kazakstan and Kyrgyztan.

"The problem of illicit narcotics production in Afghanistan and related trafficking has reached alarming proportions," Arlacchi told a closed meeting of regional representatives.

The region now has the highest rates of heroin addiction in the world and surplus production may fuel efforts to develop new markets elsewhere, he said, according to his prepared remarks.

Despite pledges by Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia to ban poppy cultivation, the country expanded lands under harvest and produced 4,600 metric tonnes (5,070 US tonnes) of opium last year Ñ almost twice as much as the previous year.

A recent report from the International Narcotics Control Board, a UN organisation that monitors adherence to UN drug treaties, said Afghanistan now produces 75 percent of the world's opium.

In response to the UN report, the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, issued an edict ordering a one-third reduction in poppy cultivation.

But Taliban officials have said they cannot persuade Afghanistan's farmers to stop cultivating the illegal crop altogether because they have no other way of supporting themselves.

The United Nations has launched pilot projects in four regions of Afghanistan to help farmers switch poppy harvesting, but the organisation estimates it will need $ 25 million a year for five years to establish alternative development projects that would wipe out production altogether, Arlacchi said in an interview.

In the meantime, the United Nations wants to stem the trafficking through border control and other projects, including projects to stem the import into Afghanistan of the chemical precursors needed to make opium.

He said the budget for the programmes $ 65 million for two-to-four years Ñ would have to come from donors. He said the United Nations had already received pledges from several countries and that he expected the programmes to be fully funded.

Arlacchi outlined the projects in a meeting of the so-called "six-plus-two" group on Afghanistan, which includes Afghanistan's neighbours Ñ Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Iran and China Ñ plus Russia and the United States.