By DPA
Bangkok : Instability, poor law enforcement and corruption have paved the way for a 29-percent jump in opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar this year, UN experts said Thursday.
After six years of successive decline in production, opium cultivation rose this year to 27,700 hectares with yield estimated at 460 tonnes, up 46 percent compared with 2006 figures, according to the 2007 opium poppy survey by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
The lion’s share of the illicit crop was being grown in the southern part of Shan State, which borders Thailand.
This year, opium production has increased in both Myanmar and Thailand, two nations in the so-called Golden Triangle, but it declined 40 percent in Laos, the triangle’s third country, where the international aid community is pouring in money for crop-substitution programmes.
Although the region’s total output accounts for a mere five percent of the world’s total and is dwarfed by Afghanistan’s crop, experts said they are worried by the upward trend, especially as the increased production is taking place in Myanmar’s most unstable region.
“The opium-producing area is focused now in the south Shan State, where sometimes it’s hard to know who controls what,” said Shariq Bin Raza, the UN office’s Myanmar country official.
South Shan State, situated just east of the ruling junta’s new capital in Naypyidaw, 350 km north of Yangon, is a patchwork of armed ethnic groups, many of which have “returned to the government fold” after signing ceasefires with the junta.
“In this particular area, you also have government troops,” said Xavier Bouan, the regional illicit crop-monitoring expert for the UN agency.
There have been persistent reports of collusion between Myanmar’s military regime and the crime organizations controlling both the opium and much larger methamphetamine trade in the country’s much-contested northeastern region.
“It’s a combination of corruption, law enforcement, border control, … any weaknesses in those areas that contribute to an increase in opium cultivation,” Raza said in Bangkok.
The increase has also been driven by a doubling of opium prices in neighbouring Thailand and Laos, where opium now fetches about 1,000 dollars per kg.
Thailand’s opium cultivation, although small compared with Myanmar’s, shot up 31 percent this year.
The increase was blamed primarily on lax law enforcement in the aftermath of the excesses of the “war on drugs” launched by the previous government of deposed premier Thaksin Shinawatra.
As a result of Thaksin’s war, which left 2,500 people dead from extra-judicial slayings, opium cultivation in northern Thailand declined from 800 hectares to less than 100, said Pipop Chamnirkaipong, director of the narcotics crop survey institute under Thailand’s office of narcotics control board.
Thaksin was overthrown by a military coup last year and is now under investigation for human rights abuses committed in his war on drugs.
“It seems the new government doesn’t care or doesn’t direct its eye on the problem of opium because it is quite recent,” Pipop said. “There are now some teenagers who have gone back to their homes and try to grow opium.”
He noted that opium cultivation was occurring mainly in the remote Um Koi district of Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, and a government eradication programme was already under way in the area.