Oral answer to question provided on Monday, 29 January 2007 in the House of Lords, by Baroness Amos (Labour).

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Afghanistan: Opium

Answer

My Lords, a number of noble Lords have asked this question, and I specifically asked for some detailed briefing on it. There are currently no central Government and law enforcement mechanisms in place in Afghanistan to set up and administer a system of licit cultivation, so traffickers would be free to continue to exploit the illicit market. There is also an issue of pricing, because there is no evidence to show that Afghan opium would be economically competitive in a global marketplace. For example, Australia, France, India, Spain and Turkey currently dominate the export market for licit opiates. I will give noble Lords a sense of the cost. In countries such as India and Turkey, licit production requires market support. In Australia, for example, the production costs for the equivalent of 1 kilogramme of morphine in 1999 was $56. In Afghanistan, it would be $450.