Aug. 28, 2007 (LPAC)--Despite $600 million from U.S. taxpayers to "eradicate" poppy, a United Nations report on 2007 opium production in Afghanistan shows that production in 2007 rose by 17% over the record production in 2006. It is likely that Afghanistan's opium harvest in 2007 has crossed 7,000 tons. The highest amount of opium ever produced in Afghanistan prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, was only 4,000 tons.

The UN report pointed out that today, in Afghanistan, the land under opium cultivation is greater than the total amount of land under coca cultivation in all of Ibero-America. Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes Policy (which issued the report), called the new figures terrifying. Afghanistan today is cultivating megacrops of opium, he said at a news conference. "Leaving aside China in the 19th century, no other country has produced so much narcotics in the past 100 years."

Urging both the United States and the NATO to treat the opium explosion as part of nation's security threat, he said that it took almost two years for the U.S. and NATO to admit a link between opium and the growth in insurgency in certain provinces.

On the day the report was released, NATO and American officials announced the deaths of five foreign soldiers. Three American soldiers were killed Monday in Kunar in the northeast, American officials said. And officials announced that a NATO soldier was killed Monday in the eastern Afghanistan and a Dutch soldier was killed Sunday in Oruzgan in the south.