BRITAIN: Police and intelligence agencies have been warned that Britain is facing a potentially huge increase in heroin trafficking because of massive and unchecked replanting of the opium crop in Afghanistan. the Guardian has learned.
The expectation is that the 2002 crop will be equivalent to the bumper one of three years ago, which yielded 4,600 tonnes of raw opium. Deep concern within law enforcement circles, particularly MI5 (British counter-intelligence), MI6 (British intelligence) and customs, has been reinforced by the latest assessment of the UN office for drug control and crime prevention, based in Vienna. Its field workers have just finished a study in Afghanistan and early analysis of their work has revealed that "substantial regrowing has taken place in several provinces".
The UN spokesman, Mr Kemal Kurspahic, warned yesterday that unless there was urgent action to stop the crop being harvested at the end of March, then the "best ever opportunity" to suffocate the illegal trade would be lost.
Afghanistan is the source of 75 per cent of the world's heroin, and 90 per cent of Britain's supply.
A ban on poppy growing in Afghanistan introduced by the Taliban in July 2000, coupled with severe droughts last year, reduced the country's opium yield by 91 per cent in 2001, but this had negligible effect on the market in Europe because traders had signif- icant stockpiles along their traditional supply routes. The UN estimates these stockpiles will be exhausted by the end of this year.
Mr Kurspahic said the organisation was in a race against time to stop the fresh harvest restoring the trafficker's supply.
"If we don't stop the flow of drugs then everything else will have been in vain," he said. "If there was no new production in Afghanistan this year then shortages in Europe would be felt by the end of the year. We don't have much time... we have a window of opportunity. Sustaining the ban would present the most promising ever development in drug control." Even though Afghanistan's interim government, led by President Hamid Karzai, introduced its own extensive ban on poppy growing last month, the almost complete lack of law enforcement outside the capital, Kabul, has rendered it meaningless.
One British official said yesterday that "enormous pressure" was being put on Mr Karzai's government by the UN and western governments, but that the situation was "immensely complicated in the current political situation" because of fears the issue could destabilise the fragile administration. "It is a political nightmare which could undermine the whole peace process," a western intelligence source said.
Though poppies are grown throughout the country - including areas controlled by the Northern Alliance - they are cultivated mainly in the Pashtun-dominated south and east of Afghanistan.
"Isolate the Pashtuns and you may dissuade them from backing the administration," the source said. One possible solution is for European governments to buy the poppy crop, but this would be highly controversial as well as costly.