The new report, the Afghanistan Opium Survey for 2013, projects that the land area used for opium cultivation in Afghanistan, long the dominant supplier of most of the world’s heroin, reached a historic high in 2013 of 516,000 acres, a 36 percent increase from 2012. Now, 19 of the country’s 34 provinces are opium growers, also an increase, and overall production was up by almost half — 49 percent — from the previous year, according to the report, officially released on Wednesday.

“This has never been witnessed before in the history of Afghanistan,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the departing leader of the Afghanistan office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which produces the annual survey.

Image Credit... The New York Times

At the same time, opium crop eradication efforts have flagged, with the overall area targeted down 24 percent from the previous year.

Still, Afghan law enforcement officials insisted that they were having an effect. “Last year alone we confiscated 14 percent of the narcotics produced in Afghanistan and arrested 4,000 smugglers, including small, midrange and major smugglers,” said Maj. Gen. Khalilullah Bakhtiyar, head of operations for the Afghan government’s Counter Narcotics Police. He noted that official Afghan government figures for 2013, however, were not yet available since the year has not finished.