Afghan opium increasingly confined to south

By Isabel Reynolds

TOKYO (Reuters) - An opium crackdown is bearing fruit in the north and east of Afghanistan, but progress there has been outweighed by increased production in the south, the U.S. coordinator on the issue said in Tokyo on Monday.

Thomas Schweich is in Japan for an international conference on Afghanistan, amid deepening gloom over the burgeoning narcotics trade, which has funded increasing violence by insurgents since the U.S.-led invasion more than six years ago.

But he said pessimism over Afghanistan's future was based on incomplete information.

"To say that the whole place is falling apart is not accurate," Schweich told Reuters in an interview.

"In the north and the east of the country there has been a very significant shift away from poppy production."

Thirteen of the country's 34 provinces are poppy-free and the State Department calculated that 24 will be opium-free or nearly so by June this year, he said.

Overall production has nonetheless risen over the past two years because of sharp increases in production in southern provinces, he added.

"We have a very tenacious problem in the south of the country that tends to eclipse the positive developments in the rest of the country. That's really what we're focusing on this week," he said.