As Myanmar's opium production plunges, farmers need alternative income sources – UN

Myanmar's opium poppy cultivation has fallen 80 per cent since its peak year in 1996, but poverty has escalated among farmers in one of the world's largest opium producers, making them vulnerable to exploitation, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reports.

Myanmar's total potential opium production in 2005 was estimated at 312 tons, down from 370 in 2004 and compared with the 1996 peak of 1,760 tons, while the area under opium poppy cultivation was 32,800 hectares in 2005, down from 44,200 hectares in 2004, UNODC's 2005 Myanmar Opium Survey, based on satellite images and ground verification, showed.

The number of families involved in growing opium poppies declined by 26 per cent to 193,000 in Myanmar, the second largest producer after Afghanistan, according to the Survey.

While welcoming the decline in cultivation, UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said the rapid progress in eradication over the past decade could be reversed if the growing problems of poverty and under-nourishment among farm families were not addressed.

"The world will not condone counter-narcotic measures that result in humanitarian disasters," Mr Costa said. "The international community must have the wisdom to fight drugs and poverty simultaneously, to eliminate both the causes and the effects of these twin afflictions. Food security and income generation programmes must remain in place in Myanmar and be strengthened to support both the farmers' decisions not to plant opium and the enforcement measures to eradicate opium that is planted against the law."

The loss of opium income means that poor farmers and their families lose their coping mechanism to deal with endemic poverty, a chronic food shortage and the lack of health services and schools, he said.

Farm families end up being very vulnerable to exploitation – "from human rights abuses to enforce the opium bans to internal displacement or human trafficking to survive the bans," Mr. Costa said.