A decade ago, Myanmar seemed on course to wipe out the opium fields and heroin jungle labs along its eastern border, which formed part of the notorious Golden Triangle. However, today, valley after valley in the east’s mist-shrouded mountains are covered with resplendent opium poppies, tended by farmers perched on steep hillsides to harvest the plant’s sticky, intoxicating sap.
Poppy cultivation in Myanmar has nearly tripled since 2006, reaching close to 60,700 hectares, according to UN surveys.
Yet even that steep rise fails to capture the full extent of the country’s resurgence as a major player in the global heroin business. Experts say that over the past few years, an increasing number of Burmese farmers have produced two opium crops a year, the second of which is not included in the UN surveys.
Photo: AFP
Growing opium poppies is illegal in Myanmar, but farmers in the remote and desperately poor east say they have few viable options.
“We don’t want to grow poppy our whole lives,” said Sang Phae, 36, a farmer who spent nearly a decade in Thailand and returned with knowledge of modern cultivation techniques. “We know this is not good for society and other countries don’t like it, but there’s no other way for us now.”
Myanmar remains a distant second to Afghanistan in global production of opium, the key ingredient in heroin. The UN estimates the 222,600 hectares in Afghanistan were dedicated to growing poppy last year, more than three times the area farmed in Myanmar.
However, Golden Triangle heroin has a reputation for superior quality and fetches much higher prices, especially in China, which appears to be its primary market.
Until the 1980s, Myanmar was the world’s largest supplier of heroin. However, Afghan production surged around the turn of the century and supplies from the Golden Triangle — which covers parts of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand — plummeted as China pressured ethnic groups along its border with Myanmar to stop growing poppy.
Yet instead of disappearing, opium production simply migrated away from the Chinese border into southern areas of Myanmar controlled by a patchwork of ethnic groups, some of them allied with the government, some of them hostile. Although the government controls the big towns, upland areas are the fiefs of militias and ethnic armies, and the new center of the opium-growing business.
Myanmar’s return to drug trafficking, which also includes a thriving trade of methamphetamine, comes as the country opens up to the world and sheds the shackles of five decades of isolation and dictatorship. With the government preoccupied with the challenges of a budding democracy, opium money is lining the pockets of officials charged with cracking down on the illegal trade.
“The government turns a blind eye,” said John M. Whalen, who was the director of the US Drug Enforcement Administration office in Myanmar until he retired in June last year.
Even local government officials and military officers not directly involved in the trade are “paid to look the other way,” he said.
The Burmese military, which is battling a number of ethnic armies even as the government professes peace, is wary of cracking down on drugs, fearing it could jeopardize tenuous alliances it has built with other militias, Whalen said.
“You have various militia groups that are allowed to carry on because the government needs them,” said Whalen, now a director at Singapore-based consultancy Search.
In Bang Laem, poppies are grown in the mountainous backcountry controlled by longtime adversaries of the central government: the southern faction of the Shan State Army, a group that like many other upland ethnic groups has been fighting for autonomy.
Known as a “black zone,” the area is beyond government control and generally off-limits to foreigners. When a team of UN officials and journalists entered recently, the anti-narcotic police officers escorting them stayed behind. Early last month, a week before the visit, a policeman was shot in a clash with rebels, UN officials said.
US officials have long maintained that the Shan State Army South is involved in the drug trade, but group spokesman Sai Hla said it was a “priority to eliminate the drug trade as much as we can.”
Those who accuse the group of being involved in the drug trade are “aiming to discredit the SSA and our struggle,” he said.
Opium poppies have been used medicinally in that part of Myanmar for as long as anyone can remember. Small amounts of raw opium are used to treat fevers and stomach ailments, as a salve for snake bites and to treat ailing farm animals. Yet it was less than a decade ago that farmers took on opium as their main cash crop, abandoning cheroot tobacco, which is used for cigars.
Opium is not only more profitable, but the traffickers also help finance the cultivation. The opium boom drew farmers from other parts of Myanmar and each year, migrants have cleared swaths of hillside jungle to plant more poppies.
For farmers inured to conflict — almost everyone has a tale of being forced to flee the area when rival armies and militias battled — poppy has been a low-risk cash crop. It takes only four months from planting to harvest and the bounty is portable: a year’s harvest for a typical farmer fits inside a pillowcase.
Villagers say they find themselves locked into a treacherous opium economy. Brokers come to buy the raw opium as soon as it is harvested, but villagers must also reckon with the thuggish elements of the underground economy, including countless requests for payoffs, often at gunpoint.
“You can get double or triple from poppy, but you have to pay taxes to so many people,” said Ba Sang Jyan, 73, a grandmother who owns a small grocery store and has an opium field in her backyard.
Jyan and other villagers offer a long list of people they pay off: the police, the army, the Shan State Army and intelligence officers.
There is no electricity in the village, no government office or police station nearby and before this year, when the UN carved out a dirt road that winds up a mountainside, it was only accessible via a dirt footpath.
The UN has persuaded families to dedicate part of their fields to coffee plants, a pilot project led by Jochen Wiese, an official with the UN anti-narcotics office who spent nearly three decades in Peru and started a successful crop substitution program there for farmers of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine.
Crop substitution programs have failed numerous times before in Myanmar, notably with buckwheat and sugar cane, both of which were difficult to carry over dilapidated roads. However, Wiese said he is confident he can make a name for Burmese coffee and leverage his connections to make sure the coffee makes it to market.
Farmers say they are willing to try cultivating coffee, which takes three years to produce beans, but are not yet ready to abandon their poppy fields.
“We’d love to stop producing opium as soon as possible,” said Nang Wan, 23, as she watched over her toddler while her husband harvested opium sap. “But if you only plant coffee, you’ll have nothing to eat.”
Last month, Wiese spent three days answering a barrage of skeptical questions from opium farmers about coffee prices and whether he had the funds and the commitment of international donors who are helping finance the coffee program.
“We won’t overcome the drug problem here,” he said in an interview. “But you have to show people that there is a possibility to change from an illegal economy. What we are doing here is just a first step.”
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