According to a Reuters report, Afghanistan's opium production has dramatically increased this year due to U.S.-led military strikes that toppled the Taliban rulers and enabled widespread poppy planting.  Opium output in Afghanistan this year is expected to be 3,400 tons. In 2001, 185 tons were produced when the Taliban rulers cracked down on poppy cultivation.  The shift was because "one regime was on the run in the autumn of last year while the new government was not even on the radar screen," said Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the United Nations' drug agency.  The forecast is made in a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.  The 2002 estimate remains 25 percent lower than the record output in 1999, when Afghanistan was providing about 70 percent of the world's opium. 

The new government under President Hamid Karzai banned the cultivation, processing, trafficking and consumption of opiates, but has been unable to enforce the ban.  Farmers were promised $350 per acre for not growing poppies, but there have been protests, some of them violent, in several southern towns over compensation payments.  Last month, the government reasserted the ban on poppy planting, but many farmers have defied it. With the country's economy devastated by war and drought, the attraction of the lucrative crop is huge.  Prices shot up tenfold when the Taliban's 2001 crackdown pushed down opium stocks, further encouraging farmers to sow the 2002 crop, Costa said.