Word: costas
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...over? Perhaps. According to the latest report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, opium cultivation has crashed in just one year, with prices at their lowest level since the late 1990s. "The bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market," says Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the agency, which released its annual opium survey on Sept...
...failure," because the strategy has focused on destroying poppy fields, without offering farmers an equivalent income if they opt to grow other crops. Fewer than 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) have been eradicated - accounting for less than 4% of Afghanistan's opium crop. Despite that small result, Costa says the military campaign has made Afghanistan's farmers far more secretive, further complicating international efforts. "Before, opium stocks were in shacks and warehouses," he says. "Now they are underground, and not as visible." (See pictures of the hunt for Afghanistan's archeological treasures...
...languished under a temporary Taliban ban against growing poppies, produced huge bumper crops. Those were harvested just as drug users in Europe, opium's biggest market, began to shun heroin in favor of cocaine and synthetic drugs like ecstasy. "There is definitely an issue of stocks over consumption," Costa says. "Starting in about 2006 Afghanistan has been producing a lot more opium than the world can digest...
That glut, however, could spell disaster down the road. U.N. drug officials estimate about 10,000 tons of opium have been unaccounted for since 2006 (the figure was about 8,000 tons a year ago). Costa believes the Taliban and drug traffickers in the region have stockpiled the drugs, fearing a crash in world prices if they sold the opium surplus. But the stockpiles could hugely complicate NATO's efforts to eradicate opium in Afghanistan and persuade farmers to grow other crops. That's because while some farmers seem to have switched their production, plenty of opium lies stored, potentially...
...pandemic makes no distinctions.' OSCAR ARIAS, the Nobel Peace Prize--winning President of Costa Rica, announcing on Aug. 11 that he had contracted the H1N1 virus. Arias, who has been mediating talks to resolve the ongoing leadership crisis in Honduras, is expected to recover and will work from home while convalescing...