New Dam Helps Farmers Shake Off Poverty

August 01, 2002—Parsa was turning soil by hand on a slope overlooking the road that winds south from his village, located near the Burmese-China border, to the hinterlands of Burma's Shan State. He was preparing to plant peanuts after harvesting bananas a month before in the same field. Speaking in Shan through a translator, the deeply tanned man said peanuts were more profitable than bananas.

Working alongside him were both his wife and their two daughters. On the ground nearby lied a teapot, a bamboo basket of sticky rice and a hunting rifle that follows Parsa everywhere he goes, although it rarely sees any action here in the plains. Parsa, 37, says carrying the rifle is a habit he has not shaken since being relocated to the plains of northern Burma from the region's nearby mountainous highlands.

Until seven years ago, this ethnic Aini family lived in a mountainous area of Burma that straddles the Shan State's Menghai County and Xishuangbanna, in southwest China's Yunnan Province. For generations, Parsa's family made a living by planting opium poppies. However, seven years ago they reluctantly said goodbye to opium, and moved to the plains near Mongla, where they now make a living by planting rice, bananas and peanuts.

Parsa's family is just one of hundreds of families in Mongla, the district seat of the autonomous Fourth Special District of the eastern Shan State, that moved from the highlands to the plains here and—with the cross-border cooperation of China—were weaned away from their traditional cultivation of opium.

This effort also led to the founding of this special district, which is comprised of nearly 5,000 square kilometers and 74,000 people. The impetus of the drive can be traced to June 30, 1989 when Chinese-born drug lord Lin Ming-xian, who had previously operated in the area, pledged allegiance to the Burmese government.

According to Xie Bin, deputy president of the district's military and political committee, the region's top authority, 1,099 hectares of poppies were planted at that time in 262 of the 401 villages with an annual opium output of nearly 10,000 kilograms.

In May 1991, in an attempt to prove their sincerity in eradicating drugs, the local government set fire to a heroin-processing facility in Mongla, which had an estimated value of US$ 150 million. This marked the start of the anti-drug campaign--in this isolated area of the Golden Triangle that spans the border separating Burma, Laos and Thailand—in an area known for producing much of the world's narcotics supply.

Efforts to shift farmers away from the crop continued for years, officials and residents interviewed here say, bringing economic benefits to former opium farmers and slashing the supply of drugs to China, which lies just 10 kilometers from Mongla.

In an interview at his home in Mongla, 57-year-old Xie, a former member of China's Red Guards who joined the Burmese armed forces in the 1960s from Yunnan, says there has been a drastic change in opium cultivation over the years.

"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 says in Yunnan-accented Mandarin.

In fact, Xie says, more than 6,000 opium planters have moved from the special district to neighboring areas in Shan State, Laos and even Thailand and continued cultivating opium. "Sometimes they return and plant poppies secretly," he adds.

At the end of 2001, for instance, officials found 4.7 hectares of poppies in the special district's southern border area and uprooted them after a 200-kilometer journey. "That's why we have cooperated with the Chinese police to make an inspection tour for poppy cultivation every year since 1998," Xie says.

But Chinese assistance has gone beyond police action. Officials in Menghai County in Xishuangbanna, across the border, say helping communities in the special district turn away from opium undercuts the supply of narcotics that flow into China.

In 1990, the Mongla government asked the Chinese to help in its campaign against opium planting. The agriculture bureau of Menghai assisted it in developing alternative livelihoods, such as food processing.

"After their farmers gave up planting poppies, they needed to start up new trades to make a living," Menghai agriculture director Cao Hongqiang explains.

Bureau technicians planted hybrid rice in an experimental plot in Mongla in 1991, and today about 4,000 hectares are planted with it, producing 20.1 million kilograms last year.

Cao says: "The local government of Mongla 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 agriculture bureau helped Burma build an eight-hectare tea plantation, which has since expanded to 15 hectares. Menghai officials also encouraged Mongla residents to plant sugarcane, rubber trees, mangoes and watermelons.

Cao said the county had invested more than 2.4 million yuan (US$ 289,000) to date in projects that help Burma replace poppies with other profitable plants, and invested 10 million yuan (US$ 1.2 million) in upgrading the region's roads. Since the relocations began, more than 1,000 Chinese experts have visited the Fourth Special District to provide technical support.

"To a county with a revenue of only 80 million yuan (US$ 9.6 million) last year, these were all big sums of money," Cao says. "And they have helped prevent the influx of at least 1,000 kilograms of heroin into our country per year."

''Actually we're trying to copy the Chinese way of development,'' says Yang Zi, a police officer in the Fourth Special District also in charge of enterprises invested in the area.

Yang, 32, migrated from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, to Mongla in 1992, in a movement that underlines the ties between Burma and China. More than 80 percent of employees of the district's government are Chinese migrants, he says.

In the Meantime, Mongla has also been looking beyond agriculture. Catering to Chinese tourists, which has allowed it to transform itself from just another bump on the road 12 years ago, to a tourist destination today.

A newly completed golden pagoda stands atop a hill overlooking Mongla and the China-Burma border about 2 kilometers north. Also near the pagoda, lies the conspicuous looking pink anti-narcotics museum. Hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, casinos line the well-paved streets. Most pedestrians are Chinese as are most signs.

According to Xie Bin, Mongla has witnessed an influx of 350,000 tourists per year since 1996, most of them day-trippers from China.

But in the years since shifting from opium, the special district in the eastern Shan State has also experienced the downside of a market economy. This year farmers lost money, after the Chinese offered too low a price for more than 4,500 tones of watermelons. The farmers say they had little choice but to sell due to a limited local demand.

Four years ago, the local government invested 900 million kyat (US$ 3.6 million) in the construction of a sugar refinery only to find out that there was no market for it in China, which had surpluses of it.

Speaking in the now-empty refinery, Yang says, ''We really hope the Chinese government will give the green light for our sugar. Otherwise, our machines will have to be scrapped in a year or two."

Over in Menghai, Cao still feels guilty for failing to secure a sugar quota for Mongla, but is now working to get a rubber quota as the 100 hectares of planted rubber trees across the border will soon begin to yielding rubber. These concerns are quite different from the ones locals used to have when the district was dependent on opium, and underline the changes that have shaped this part of the China-Burma border region.

''To help people in the special district root out opium forever, I think we should cooperate with them and offer them more preferential policies for their development," says Muses Cao. "By helping them, we help ourselves.''

This article was reprinted with permission from Inter Press Service. www.ipsnews.net

Chen Liang is a reporter for China Daily in Beijing. He wrote this article under the IPS media fellowship program: "Our Mekong: A Vision amid Globalization".