Government accused over opium crop

The amount of opium poppy produced in the troubled country is set to top 8,200 tonnes this year - up 34% from 2006, according to a UN report. The southern province of Helmand - where British troops have been engaged in fierce and increasingly deadly clashes with the Taliban - saw a 48% rise in cultivation and is responsible for more than half the crop.

Altogether Afghanistan now accounts for 93% of global production, and insurgents are actively promoting the trade to earn money, the report concluded.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, said the situation was "dramatic and getting worse by the day", adding: "No other country in the world has ever had such a large amount of farmland used for illegal activity, beside China 100 years ago.

"The government has lost control of this territory because of the presence of the insurgents, because of the presence of the terrorists, whether Taliban or splinter al Qaida groups. It is clearly documented now that insurgents actively promote or allow and then take advantage of the cultivation, refining, and the trafficking of opium."

Some 3.3 million of Afghanistan's 25 million people are believed to be involved in producing opium, the report says.

Shadow defence secretary Liam Fox insisted more needed to be done to discourage Afghan farmers growing poppy - the raw material for heroin.

"The British Government has overall responsibility for dealing with poppy production in Afghanistan and is failing spectacularly," he said. "There needs to be a redoubling of reconstruction effort ensuring alternative incomes for Afghan farmers so that poppy eradication does not drive them into the arms of the Taliban.

"There also needs to be an unequivocal effort by the Afghan Government to deal with the corruption which encourages poppy, and ultimately heroin, production."

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said the rise was a "real cause for concern", and the figures in Helmand were "particularly disappointing".