Following on the heels of a week of Stuxnet news, we have an interesting story coming out of Afghanistan. Apparently, a blight has halved the productivity of opium poppies in some of the main growing regions. Afghanistan grows roughly 90% of teh world's opium poppies.
Crop eradication has long been a goal of the UN Office of Drug and Crime as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and the U.S. is known to have pursued research of biological agents to kill drug crops in South America and Central Asia. There is no indication that this virus limiting opium yield from an acreage of poppies was engineered or designed intentionally, but this possibility warrants serious investigation.
The control of the opium trade has long provided a financial support and cause for violence in opium producing regions from Afghanistan to the Golden Triangle. The Taliban as well as unaffiliated warlords finance their armies by processing the opium and transporting it to Pakistan to be processed into heroin and shipped internationally. An additional northern route of distribution is expanding, with the initial processing taking place in Afghanistan and passing through central Caucus states and into Russia, a growing market for narcotics. The US government has an obvious stake in limiting the number of growers and the profitability of growing poppies.
