Poppy cultivation resumes – INCB report

Poppy cultivation has resumed in Pakistan, though on a small scale, says a new report from the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB). The board has urged Islamabad to intensify its eradication efforts to avoid the country becoming a major source of opium and heroin. The INCB is an independent body monitoring the implementation of United Nations drug-control conventions. “The main theme for the 2005 INCB report is ‘alternative development’ like crop substitution for communities cultivating illicit drugs,” Vincent McClean, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Pakistan said earlier this week releasing the INCB’s annual report in the capital, Islamabad. In Pakistan, through a series of intensive measures in the 1980s and 1990s, poppy cultivation was reduced from over 14,000 ha of land to being virtually poppy-free in 2000. Since then there has been a gradual re-emergence of opium poppy cultivation, particularly from 2003 onwards. Poppy is now being cultivated in parts of the southern province of Balochistan and districts of the Khyber agency and Kohistan in North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Lack of monitoring and eradication combined with poverty remain the key reasons for the re-emergence of opium cultivation. Efforts to stem opium cultivation in neighbouring Afghanistan have also forced some growers across the border. The US government said on Wednesday the cultivation of opium poppies in Afghanistan fell by nearly half in 2005. Despite this, because of good weather, the yield on the poppy crop was very high, so the amount of opium actually exported fell by only 10 percent, meaning the country remains the world’s leading supplier of the highly lucrative drug. The INCB annual report welcomed the resumption of talks between India and Pakistan, which could lead to efforts to combat drug trafficking across the border between the two countries.