BRUSSELS, Nov 18: Afghanistan's opium cultivation jumped 64 per cent to a record 131,000 hectares this year and drug exports now account for more than 60 per cent of the economy, the United Nations drugs office said on Thursday.

"This year Afghanistan has established a double record - the highest drug cultivation in the country's history, and the largest in the world," Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said at a news briefing.

Opium, the raw material for heroin, was grown in all Afghanistan's 32 provinces this year. Ten per cent of the population, or 2.3 million people, helped farm it because grinding poverty made it more attractive than other crops.

"Cultivation has spread ... making narcotics the main engine of economic growth and the strongest bond among previously quarrelsome peoples," Mr Costa said. "Valued at $2.8 billion, the opium economy is now equivalent to over 60 percent of Afghanistan's 2003 gross domestic product."

"The fear that Afghanistan might degenerate into a narco-state is slowly becoming a reality as corruption in the public sector, the die-hard ambition of local warlords, and the complicity of local investors are becoming a factor in Afghan life," he said.

While the area under cultivation soared, it was still less than three percent of the country's arable land, the U.N. said in a report posted on its website, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crop_monitoring.html. But heroin production rose just 17 percent to 4,200 tonnes, below the 1999 record of 4,600 tonnes under the radical Islamic Taliban regime, due to bad weather and an insect infestation.

The massive 1999 crop and another large harvest in 2000 led to a stock-build which forced prices down, leading the Taliban to all but eliminate opium production in 2001.-Reuters