Kabul, Sep 3 (DPA) Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has soared by 59 percent this year, largely due to a dramatic increase in the insurgency-hit southern provinces of the country, said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

"These are very alarming numbers. Afghanistan is increasingly hooked on its own drug," UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said here Saturday after presenting the results of the UNODC Annual Opium Survey for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai.

The survey showed the area under opium cultivation reached a record 165,000 hectares in 2006 compared with 104,000 in 2005.

In the restive southern province of Helmand, where Taliban insurgents have stepped up their attacks on Afghan government and foreign forces, cultivation has increased 162 percent to 69,324 hectares.

"This year's harvest will be around 6,100 tons of opium - a staggering 92 percent of total world supply. It exceeds global consumption by 30 percent," Costa said.

Costa said the southern region was displaying the ominous hallmarks of incipient collapse, with large-scale drug cultivation and trafficking, insurgency, terrorism, crime and corruption.

In other provinces, especially Badakhshan in the northeast, opium crop increases were the result of weak governance, poverty and the influence of powerful warlords.

Only six of the country's 34 provinces are now opium-free, including the capital.

"Public opinion is increasingly frustrated by the fact that opium cultivation in Afghanistan is out of control. The political, military and economic investments by coalition countries are not having much visible impact on drug cultivation," Costa said.

"As a result, Afghan opium is fuelling insurgency in western Asia, feeding international mafias and causing 100,000 deaths from overdoses every year," he added.

Costa called on the Afghan government to take tougher action against drug traffickers and opium-farming landlords, and on Western governments to do more to curb drug abuse in their own countries.