**There has been a sharp drop in Afghan poppy cultivation and production, a United Nations report says.**The UN Office on Drugs and Crime says opium cultivation has fallen by 22% in a year and production by 10%, with the biggest fall in Helmand province.
But the figures are still higher than three years ago, when British troops began fighting Taliban militants there.
The UN says the drugs trade, which helps fund the insurgency, threatens the legitimacy of the Afghan state.
It has called on the international community to sustain progress in Afghanistan, which produces 90% of the world’s heroin.
The UNODC report praised the introduction of UK-backed “food zones”, which distribute wheat seed for farmers to plant.
‘Enormous cost’
It said 20 of the country’s provinces are now poppy-free, but the BBC’s Chris Morris in Kabul says that does not mean they are free of the refining and trafficking of drugs.
The UN report concludes that the bottom is starting to fall out of the Afghan opium market, with the price of opium at a 10-year low.
The UNODC’s Antonio Costa said the report was a welcome piece of good news at a time of pessimism about the situation in Afghanistan.
But he warned that Afghan drugs still have catastrophic consequences - funding criminals, insurgents and terrorists, encouraging corruption and undermining public trust.
Mr Costa also said overall attempts to eradicate opium growing were still a failure, with just 4% of the total crop wiped out over the past two years at “enormous human and economic cost”, reports the UK’s Press Association news agency.
This year there were 69,833 hectares devoted to poppy growing in Helmand province, a sharp fall from 103,590 hectares in 2008, the report found.
But this year’s figure was more than double the 26,500 hectares in 2005, the year before British troops deployed in the province.
Helmand continues to account for nearly 60% of the country’s total production of the drug, the UNODC report said.