MOSCOW, July 03. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia keeps expanding its volume of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan after another Emergencies Ministry’s plane delivered 38 metric tons of cargo consisting of food and tents to Central Asian country’s fourth largest city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Alexander Drobyshevsky, a spokesman for the Russian ministry, said on Thursday.

This was the second Russian plane this year with the humanitarian aid for Afghanistan. The first plane delivered in mid-May 40 metric tons of cargo, which included mobile power generators, tents, blankets, food and other goods.

Stability in the Central Asian state is particularly important for Russia as the country is one of the largest destinations for heroin from Afghanistan, the world’s main heroin producer. Economic instability, poverty and continued military conflicts across the country nourishes the drugs production in Afghanistan.

Russia earlier drafted and adopted a plan, code-named Raduga-2 (Rainbow-2), which envisaged among other targets the elimination of all poppy plantations in Afghanistan and implementation of a program to boost the Central Asian country’s economy through the infrastructural development and creation of some two million workplaces.

At a session of international anti-drug experts in Moscow in late March Viktor Ivanov, the chief of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, proposed all interested states to initiate a special commission under the UN secretary general on the alternative development of Afghanistan by means of the country’s accelerated industrialization.

The head of the Russian anti-drug agency also proposed holding an international conference on the issue of the alternative development of Afghanistan later in the year in Russia’s southwestern Siberian city of Omsk.

Speaking earlier in the year, Ivanov said that the scale of poppy plantations in Afghanistan reached its historic maximum in 2013 and, according to UN estimations, spanned a record of 209,000 hectares.