U.S. Reverses Afghanistan Opium Policy
June 29th, 2009 by Rick
The U.S. has changed it’s policy when it comes to eradicating poppy fields in Afghanistan, that’s done nothing but put Afghani farmers out of work.
Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan said at the G8 conference in Trieste, Italy on Saturday:
The Western policies against the opium crop, the poppy crop, have been a failure. They did not result in any damage to the Taliban, but they put farmers out of work. [...] We are not going to support crop eradication. We’re going to phase it out.
The new plan, being all about bringing the fight to the drug lords and drug suppliers, seems more like an old plan, seeing how the drug lords in these regions are also the Taliban. The U.S. has been in that region fighting the Taliban since the invasion in 2001, yet according to the U.N., Afghanistan’s opium production has risen 40-fold.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the effort has been a “sad” joke and:
Sad because many, many Afghan policemen and soldiers … have been killed and only about 5,000 hectares were eradicated, about 3 percent of the volume.
The U.S. plans on reducing the budget it allocates for crop eradication in Afghanistan and spending several hundred million dollars on supporting legal crops.
