Art Pottery, Politics and Food
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
 
Bar & Poppy's Boy


Not often enumerated, as another gigantic Bush failure, is Afghanistan’s current and ongoing multi billion-dollar narco-economy.
I've previously posted on Afghan heroin and its impact within the United States here and here.
According to our own government, “Afghanistan still remains the largest cultivator of illicit opium poppy in the world, accounting for approximately 87 percent of illicit opium worldwide.”
Today’s corporate press is abuzz with reports of the now annual eradication photo op by enfeebled elements of the Karzai and US forces:

It looks to be a bumper year. Some 320,000 acres are currently blanketed in rows of dandelion-like sprouts that eventually produce almost 90 percent of the world's heroin…an army of 500 tractor-driving Afghans hopes to plow the plants under.

The news accounts are full of facts provided by the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report just released by the United States Department of State.
That document provided a few facts about last year’s tractor plow-off:

Government forces [in 2005] conducted limited eradication. The CPEF was able to eradicate only a little over 200 hectares because of local resistance…200 hectares represents less than two-tenths (.002 percent) of one percent of the area planted to opium.

Are tractors to Afghan opium what schoolbuses were to stranded Big Easy citizens?

Modified Image: Poppies.org, WhiteHouse.gov
- posted by Sean @ 11:19 AM
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