The opium trade in Afghanistan

Opium poppy (Image: SuperFantastic, Wikipedia Commons)

How Afghanistan’s 100-million-dollar opium trade helps fund the Taliban and threatens the stability of the country.

More than ninety percent of the world’s opium – the raw ingredient in heroin – comes from Afghanistan. And that opium trade helps fund the Taliban. Over the last year, BBC correspondent Kate Clark was given rare access to the international counter-narcotics effort to police Afghanistan’s poppy fields.

The poppy plant poses the biggest threat to the fledgling democracy in Afghanistan. According to the U.N., the Taliban made an estimated 100 million dollars in 2007 from the opium trade. The BBC’s Kate Clark investigates how Afghanistan’s opium fuels the insurgency and threatens the stability of the country.

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