Anti-poppy Campaign Bears Fruit

A mother’s work is never done : Carrying her baby on her back, an Aini woman works on a 67-hectare plantation of tropical fruits run by the government of the Fourth Special District of the eastern Shan State of Myanmar.

On the morning of April 25, 37-year-old Parsa was turning up soil with a hoe on a slope overlooking the road winding south from Mengla to the hinterland of Shan State in Myanmar.

He was preparing to plant peanuts after harvesting bananas a month before in the same field. Speaking in the local Shan language through a translator, the deeply tanned man said peanuts were more profitable than bananas.

Working with him were his wife and two daughters. On the ground near him were a teapot, a bamboo basket of sticky rice, and a hunting rifle.

Parsa carries the rifle every where even though he does not get many chances to use it in the plains. It is a habit from the highlands, he said.

Parsa’s family is just one of hundreds of families in the autonomous Fourth Special District of the eastern Shan State that moved from the highlands to the plains and planted various cash crops such as sugar cane, fruit and rice, instead of their traditional crop – opium poppies.

Until seven years ago, the ethnic Aini family had lived in the mountainous area of the Myanmar region bordering Menghai County in Xishuangbanna in Southwest China’s Yunnan Province. For generations, Parsa’s family had made their living by planting opium poppies.

Seven years ago, they reluctantly said goodbye to opium poppies and moved to the plains. They now make a living by planting rice, bananas and peanuts.

A rice life : With technical support from China, this special district has developed about 4,000 hectares of hybrid rice and is almost self-sufficient in grain.

Parsa’s family is just one of hundreds of families in the autonomous Fourth Special District of the eastern Shan State that moved from the highlands to the plains and planted various cash crops such as sugar cane, fruit and rice, instead of their traditional crop – opium poppies.

Old habits die hard : Parsa continues to carry his hunting rifle wherever he goes even though he has moved from the uplands to the plains with his family

Anti-drug campaign

The special district was formally founded on June 30, 1989. According to Xie Bin, deputy president of the special district’s Military and Political Committee, the region’s top authority, 1,099 hectares of poppies were planted in 262 of the region’s 401 villages at that time. The total annual output of opium came to 9,800 kilograms.

In May 1991, the local government set fire to the Mengla heroin processing factory, thus starting its tough anti-drug campaign in this isolated part of the Golden Triangle spanning the border areas of Myanmar, Laos, and Thailand. The special district covers an area of 4,952 square kilometres with a population of 74,000.

By the end of 1997, a total of 792 hectares of opium poppies had been uprooted and farmers had been persuaded to stop cultivating some 405 hectares of poppies, said 57-year-old Xie at his home in the district seat of Mengla.

Xie joined the local Burmese armed forces in the 1960s from China’s bordering Yunnan Province and has lived in the region ever since.

“Since then, poppy cultivation has basically been eliminated in the Fourth Special District, even though from time to time we found poppies planted covertly in some remote areas,” he said in putonghua with an obvious Yunnan accent.

According to Xie, more than 6,000 opium-planters moved from the special district to neighbouring areas in Shan State, Laos and even Thailand and continued their traditional life.

“Sometimes they return and plant poppies secretly,” he said.

At the end of 2001, about 4.7 hectares of poppies were found in the special district’s southern border area. Local police officers uprooted the poppies after a 200 kilometre journey.

“That’s why we have co-operated with the Chinese police to make an inspection tour for poppy cultivation every year since 1998,” Xie said.

Help from China

The official attributed many of the local achievements to the help from the Chinese side.

In the agriculture bureau of Menghai County in Xishuangbanna, bureau director Cao Hongqiang said that Menghai has helped Mengla’s campaign against opium planting since 1990.

At that time, the Mengla local government asked the Chinese to help in develop and improve food processing.

“After their farmers gave up planting poppies, they needed to start up new trades to make a living,” Cao said.

So bureau technicians planted hybrid rice in an experimental plot of 0.66 hectare in Mengla in 1991.

It turned out to be a big success, with the average output per hectare amounting to 7,722 kilograms.

At present, about 4,000 hectares of hybrid rice are cultivated in the special district. The total output reached 20.1 million kilograms in 2001.

Director Cao said: “The local government of Mengla spent 1 million yuan (US$ 120,480) buying grain from China 10 years ago. Now it is almost self-sufficient in grain.”

At the end of 1992, the bureau helped the Myanmar build up an eight-hectare tea plantation. It has since expanded to 15 hectares.

As the price of sugar was high in 1994, Menghai County encouraged Mengla to plant sugar cane on a 53-hectare experimental plot.

In 1996, Mengla exported about 1,000 tons of sugar cane to China. The planting area of sugar cane expanded to 667 hectares in the special district in 1998.

The bureau has also promoted the planting of rubber trees, mangos and watermelons in Mengla.

Cao said the country had invested more than 2.4 million yuan (over US$ 289,000) to date in projects that help Myanmar replace poppies with other profitable plants.

More than 1,000 Chinese experts have visited the special district to provide technical support. Menghai invested 10 million yuan (US$ 1.2 million) in upgrading the road in the region.

“To a country with a revenue of only 80 million yuan (US$ 9.6 million) last year, these were all big sums of money,” Cao said.

“And they have helped prevent the influx of at least 1,000 kilograms of heroin into our country per year. Our efforts are worthy.”

Mengla has benefited even more from China’s prosperous market, said Xie Bin.

Catering to the needs of Chinese tourists, Mengla has developed from a shabby town 12 yeas ago to a relatively modern tourist destination at present.

A newly completed golden pagoda stands on top of a hill overlooking Mengla and the Sino-Myanmar border about 2 kilometres north.

Near the pagoda, the Myanmar-style building of the anti-narcotics museum in conspicuously pink. Hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and casinos line the well-paved streets. Most sings are in Chinese.

According to Xie Bin, Mengla has witnessed an influx of 350,000 tourists per year since 1996. Most of them are day trippers from China.

“Benefiting from the big Chinese market, tourism is becoming one of the special district’s pillar industries,” the official said.

Market challenge

Over the years, the local farmers have also experienced the downside of a market economy. This year, after farmers harvested more than 4,500 tons of watermelons in the special district, they found that the purchasing price offered by Chinese entrepreneurs was only about 0.2 yuan (2.4 US cents) per kilogram. But local consumption was too limited.

“We have to sell the watermelons no matter how low the price is,” said Aigan, an ethnic Shan farmer who lives in Baka village, about 15 kilometres from Mengla.

“We can’t let them rot in the fields. But I won’t plant watermelons next year,” he said.

A more serious problem affected the planting of sugar cane in the region.

In 1998, the local government invested 900 million kyat (US$ 3.6 million) in the construction of a sugar refinery capable of processing 800 tons of sugar cane per day.

However, the factory went into operation for only one season and produced about 2,500 tons of sugar in 2000. It wasn’t until the factory began to produce sugar that Myanmar officials realized that there was already a huge surplus of sugar production in China and quite a lot of sugar refineries in China were losing money too. It couldn’t get an export quota from China.


Children peddlers : Three children from the mountainous areas near Mengla sell charcoal at the morning market in Mengla.		“Just say no” shrine : The Anti-narcotics Museum in the Fourth Special District of the Eastern Shan State of Myanmar has become a hot spot for Chinese day trippers.		Multi-purpose factory : A large workshop at the sugar factory has been rented to a Chinese businessman to process wooden floor boards.

As a result, sugar was distributed to local government employees as part of their income. A lot of sugar cane rotted in the fields. The large-scale cultivation of sugar cane has since disappeared in the region.

Speaking in the empty refinery, local official Yang Zi said: “At our peak, we had more than 400 people working in the factory. Now only four workers have been kept on as caretakers.

“We really hope the Chinese government will give the green light for our sugar,” he added. “Otherwise, our machines will have to be scrapped in a year or two.”

In Menghai, Cao Hongqiang said he still feels guilty for failing to secure the sugar quota.

The 100 hectares of rubber trees planted in the Fourth Special District with the bureau’s technical help will soon begin to yield rubber, so the official has already started trying to secure a rubber quota.

“This time, I have a good chance of getting a quota for their rubber,” he said.

Far left : As the landmark of Mengla, the golden pagoda is also the symbol of the region’s booming tourism.

Left : With 1,600 pigs and marketing eight pigs a day, the pig farm, run by the government in the special district, can only satisfy part of the needs of the local market, as Mengla consumes 40 pigs everyday.

“To help people in the special district root out opium forever, I think we should co-operate with them and offer them more preferential policies for their development. By helping them, we help ourselves.”