BURMA: Poppy Cultivation Down But Growers Starve

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK , Nov 2 2005 (IPS) - Burma, the world’s largest producer of opium after Afghanistan, has succeeded in drastically slashing poppy cultivation but tens of thousands of erstwhile cultivators now face starvation.

According to the annual report of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released on Wednesday, military-ruled Burma has slashed by 26 percent the area under poppy cultivation, mainly in the notorious north-eastern part of the country.

Currently, poppy cultivation in the hilly areas of Burma’s Shan State is spread over 32,800 hectares, down from 44,200 hectares in 2004, states the ‘Myanmar Opium Survey 2005’.

Overall production of opium in Burma – renamed Myanmar by Rangoon’s junta- has also fallen to 312 metric tons from 370 metric tons last year, a 16 percent drop, adds the U.N. agency’s annual survey.

The anti-opium drive in Shan state began after a 1999 agreement between Rangoon and the ”local authorities of the drug-production areas” to make the region free of poppy cultivation by 2014.

This effort was given an added boost in June this year when Burma’s drug barons, former rebel leaders from the ethnic Wa group, declared their intention to eradicate poppy cultivation in the areas they control.

”In terms of eradication efforts, Myanmar is on track to meet the (2014) deadline,” Akira Fujino, head of the UNODC’s East Asia and Pacific office, told reporters here during the launch of the survey.

Yet, Fujino expressed worry that the farmers who depended on this crop to escape poverty are facing a food and economic crisis. ”The majority of farmers have still to benefit from the assistance given to the drug eradication programme,” said Fujino. ”Assistance is necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis.”

The U.N. food relief agency echoed similar sentiment. ”Losing about 60 percent of their income due to the poppy ban has put tremendous pressure on these farming communities,” said Hakan Tongul, deputy country director in Burma for the World Food Programme (WFP). ”Many face great difficulties in feeding their families for the entire year.”

Close to 100,000 former poppy farmers are in need of food assistance, he revealed during an interview over telephone from his office in Rangoon. ”If the communities are not presented with alternative development options, the current ban will push these families into abject destitution and question the appropriateness of the ban under such humanitarian crisis.”

Coming in the way of the much-needed humanitarian assistance for the poor farmers is the prevailing international political climate, where Burma is subject to tough sanctions from the United States and the European Union due to oppressive record of the junta.

The development programmes to help the rural communities, forced to move away from poppy as a source of income to alternative sources of income, have also been affected by the efforts to isolate Burma for its long list of human rights violations.

”Without longer term development strategies there is danger of failure in carrying the current opium eradication plans,” Tongul told IPS. ”Without established alternative livelihoods the farmers have been told to quit their main income-earning activity.”

According to the UNODC, the annual income of farmers who grow poppy is 292 U.S. dollars, of which over half, or 152 dollars, comes from their opium fields. ”This confirms that opium production is linked to poverty.”

Currently, an estimated 193,000 households are involved in poppy cultivation, which is a 26 percent drop, or 67,000 households less from the previous year, states the U.N. agency.

And over half of the households surveyed in the report-both those that grow opium and those that do not – admitted to facing food problems. ”Food deficiency is acute in the Wa region with 89.5 percent of villagers reporting food insecurity.”

Burma’s efforts to gain respect as a responsible global citizen through its anti-narcotics drive is dramatically different from the image it had gained in the 1980s as the world’s leading producer of opium, averaging about 700 metric tons per year in the mid-1980s.

By 1996, opium output of Burma had peaked, with the output that year hitting 1,600 metric tons, states the UNODC. Today, by contrast, Burmese opium makes up only 21 percent of the poppy grown around the world compared to 23 percent last year.

”In Myanmar, it is the poorest of the poor who are poppy growers; for them opium production is a survival means,” says Fujino. ”We cannot allow opium poppy to disappear and at the same time allow the communities to disappear.”