Reprinted from the Hoosier Times.

Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium poppy despite efforts by the war-battered country to stop trade and cultivation of the crop that is used to make heroin, the U.N. drug agency said Monday in a new report.

Opium grew more profitable in 2002 than in the last years of Taliban rule in spite of efforts by the government of President Hamid Karzai and international workers to stamp out production and sales, the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said.

Afghanistan's opium production was 3,750 tons in 2002, more than 15 times that of 1979, when the Soviets invaded. Production hit a peak in 1996 at nearly 5,070 tons of opium.

Production fell to almost insignificant levels in 2001 following a Taliban-imposed ban on cultivation. Trade was still legal, however, leading to speculation that the move was intended to increase the price of opium poppy. Prices jumped tenfold following the ban.

From 1994 to 2000, opium brought in about $150 million per year — or $750 per family involved in its production. By 2002, gross income had risen to $1.2 billion — or $6,500 per family, the report said.

Although much of that cash ends up in the hands of smugglers and warlords, the amounts are dizzying in a country where the average wage does not exceed $2 per day.

Only a handful of legal crops, such as truffles at $365 per pound, are more profitable than opium, it said.

Noting that poppy is produced with the cheap labor of women, children and refugees, the U.N. office urged authorities to create more jobs for women and provide better education to children, especially girls.

"The opium economy of Afghanistan is an intensely complex phenomenon," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. drug office. "Spawned after decades of civil and military strife, it has chained a poor rural population — farmers, landless labor, small traders, women and children — to the mercy of domestic warlords and international crime syndicates."