Estimates: 61,000 acres of opium grown in Mexico

MEXICO CITY – Mexico and the United Nations announced on Wednesday the results of a new study that estimates opium poppies were planted on about 61,000 acres (24,800 hectares) in Mexico between 2014 and 2015.

The study is the first of its kind in Mexico, so authorities can’t compare the results with past years to determine whether opium growing has expanded.

The head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Mexico, Antonio Mazzitelli, said a second part of the study will try to estimate what the crop yield is in Mexico.

Mazzitelli said production is concentrated in nine states along Mexico’s Pacific coast, including Guerrero, Sinaloa and Nayarit.

The Mexican government said it had destroyed about the same acreage of poppy plantations in the same period, but it was unclear if that corresponded to the area mentioned in the study.

U.S. authorities estimate that about half of the heroin seized there came from Mexico. Most of the rest of U.S. heroin comes from South America.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has said poppy cultivation in Mexico is on the rise, with 17,000 hectares in 2014 and an estimated potential production of 42 metric tons of heroin.

The governor of Guerrero state, one of the country’s biggest opium producing areas, proposed earlier this year allowing farmers to produce opium poppies for legal, medicinal use.

The federal government said it will continue to combat poppy cultivation. But Assistant Foreign Relations Secretary Miguel Ruiz Cabanas said the government will use the new study not just to eradicate poppy plantations, but also to try to help the impoverished farmers who frequently grow the crop.