Afghanistan: a nation abandoned to drugs: [booming business] exported 87 per cent of the world's supplies

News: "Afghanistan: a nation abandoned to drugs | By Nick Meo in Jalalabad and Leonard Doyle | 19 November 2004

Country produces 87% of global opium. One in ten Afghans works in opium trade. UN: state is world's second worst to live in

Three years after the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations issued a dramatic plea for help yesterday, saying that Afghanistan's opium crop is flourishing as never before and the country is well on the way to becoming a corrupt narco-state.
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British officials point out that the Afghan economy is booming, that three million refugees have returned home and that four million children are in schools. But yesterday's report reveals that the engine of economic growth is opium production. Last year Afghanistan exported 87 per cent of the world's supplies. Opium is now the "main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among previously quarrelsome peoples", according to the UN. ...
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The UN report for 2003 found that one in 10 Afghans - many of them unemployed returned refugees - is involved in the drugs trade which last year employed 2.3 million people, and made up 60 per cent of gross national product.