Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...hardly news that Afghanistan's huge opium crops supply more than 90% of the world's heroin. But now U.N. officials say Afghanistan is also the world's biggest producer of another drug - hashish. In its first attempt to calculate how much cannabis is grown in the country, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime says in a report released in Kabul on Wednesday that Afghan farmers earned up to $94 million last year from selling 1,500 to 3,500 tons of hash - the resin extracted from cannabis crops...
...NATO officials believe that at least part of this revenue goes to insurgent groups to finance their attacks against coalition forces in southern Afghanistan, where almost all of the 139 soldiers killed this year have died. The report found that farmers grow about 42,000 acres (17,000 hectares) of cannabis in half of the country's 34 provinces - largely in the south. That is where Afghanistan's most fertile land is, the report says, and its rich soil produces an "astonishing yield" of potent hashish of about 320 lb. (about 145 kg) per hectare (about 2.5 acres) - more than...
...their land. Because of this, the farmers have not been deterred by a government ban on growing hash. "The high sale price of cannabis and the relatively low costs of cultivation were the most frequently mentioned reasons for cultivating cannabis," says the report. (See pictures of President Obama in Afghanistan...
Despite the new U.N. findings, Afghan and NATO forces are unlikely to start trying to eradicate the cannabis crops, in part because Western policies over the past several years aimed at eradicating Afghanistan's mammoth opium crops are widely regarded by U.S. officials as having failed miserably. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, told G-8 leaders in Italy last year that the antidrug efforts in Afghanistan "did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work." (See pictures of Afghanistan's dangerous Korengal Valley...
Dempsey believes farmers could be better persuaded to give up growing opium and cannabis if Western and Afghan officials introduced big incentives and subsidies for growing food crops and helped farmers sell them. One crucial problem, he says, is that the roads in southern Afghanistan are too dangerous for farmers to drive their crops to local markets. Groups of armed drug traffickers, meanwhile, travel through the countryside, buying opium and cannabis at the farm gates for cash. For many farmers in the area, making a living and staying alive - sadly - go hand in hand...