Afghanistan...

Testimony by Mark L. Schneider, Senior Vice President, International Crisis Group to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on “Counternarcotics and Police Training” in Afghanistan, 4 October 2007

...poppy cultivation is directly linked to insecurity and “inversely related to the degree of government control”. That report shows that from virtually no opium cultivation in the final year of the Taliban regime in 2001, today Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s opium, cultivated on 193,000 hectares or 500,000 acres of land, a 17% increase after last year’s 59% increase. Afghanistan opium poppy now grows on land equal to nearly the size of the state of Rhode Island. Equally worrisome is that potential opium production in 2007 probably hit a world record at 8200 metric tons, a rise of 34%.

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