Australia should boost aid and security assistance to Asia amid fears rising numbers of unemployed in the region will turn to narcotics trafficking, a senior United Nations drug official said.
Gary Lewis, United Nations representative for East Asia and the Pacific from the Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said a rise in regional crime rates would be a direct result of the global financial meltdown.
"We would expect that with the global financial meltdown many people will be unemployed, many more than are currently unemployed," Lewis told AAP.
"As a result of that their survival strategy will first be to do what they can within the realms of the law to meet the basic the economic and social needs of their families. But when those options are exhausted they will turn quite naturally to other means to survive.
"Some of those will involve trafficking in illicit and narcotic products and that is something that I would imagine is going to be an inevitable result," he said.
The warning came on Monday as the UNODC released its latest report on opium poppy cultivation in South East Asia covering Laos, Burma and Thailand.
Over 70 per cent of Australia's illegally sourced heroin, the by-product of opium, is sourced from the region once known as the Golden Triangle.
But the region has witnessed a dramatic drop in opium production over recent decades.
Over the past decade the cultivation of opium in Laos, Burma and Thailand has fallen from a total estimated 157,900 hectares cultivated in 1998 to just 30,400 hectares in 2008.
The UN report warned the progress made in South East Asia in reducing opium production was under threat.
The report said that due to a loss of opium-generated income families which used to grow opium are now facing difficult living conditions, often with widespread food shortages for several months of the year.
With high levels of poverty, the recent rapid increase in the price of raw opium and an absence of effective law enforcement, there is a high risk of a return to opium poppy cultivation in these communities of Southeast Asia, which still represented 15 per cent of global illicit poppy cultivation, the UN report said.
Lewis, in a separate interview, called on Australia to lift assistance to South East Asia's regional countries faced with the threat of an increase in drugs trafficking and crime rates.
He said Australia, domestically, would need to employ better enforcement that was targeted and was more intelligence driven.
Also, in efforts to reduce the demand for heroin Australia needed to increase prevention work and more funding for treatment.
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