TOKYO, Feb 4 (bdnews24.com/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 US 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.

Last year, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said the total export value of Afghan opiates stood at about $4 billion, equivalent to more than half of the country's legitimate gross domestic product.

Taliban insurgents, warlords and drug traffickers shared the bulk of that total, it said, with farmers retaining about 25 percent.

The Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board, which brings together Afghan ministers and representatives of donor countries, meets in Tokyo on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Host nation and key donor Japan hopes to draw international attention to the worsening plight of Afghanistan, a Foreign Ministry official said last week.

Afghanistan is set to release a paper refining its own counter-narcotics policy, while Schweich said he also hopes to see progress on the reform of the judicial system.

"That's really important because you're not going to be able to stop the narcotics problem unless there's a functioning court system," he added.

Some in the US government favour aerial spraying of herbicides over poppy crops, as practised in Colombia, but this is opposed by the Afghan government because it would likely alienate the public and spark health concerns.

Schweich said the idea had not been raised again by the US State Department since it was rejected by Afghan President Hamid Karzai last year.

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