Financing Dispossession: China’s Opium Substitution Programme in Northern Burma
Publisher: Tom Kramer & Kevin Woods
Date: 2012
Topics: Dispute Resolution/Mediation, Economic Recovery, Governance, Land, Livelihoods, Renewable Resources
Countries: Myanmar
Northern Burma’s1 borderlands have undergone dramatic changes in the last two decades. Following decades of war, a series of cease-fire agreements concluded between the military government and different armed opposition groups in the end of the 1980s and early 1990s brought some relief to the local population. However, the end of open warfare also brought new unsustainable economic developments that have had a detrimental impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. While the international community has mostly focused on recent political developments in central Burma, this report highlights the significance of the rapid socioeconomic changes taking place in the resource-rich ethnic northern borderlands.
Three main and interconnected developments are simultaneously taking place in Shan State and Kachin State in northern Burma. These are (1) the increase in opium cultivation in Burma since 2006 after a decade of steady decline; (2) the increase at about the same time in Chinese agricultural investments in northern Burma under China’s opium substitution programme, especially in rubber; and (3) the related increase in dispossession of local communities’ land and livelihoods in Burma’s northern borderlands. These overlapping land investment and drugs production patterns in northern Burma since the mid-2000s are set to a backdrop of a dramatic rise in Burmese and foreign industrial agricultural land concessions throughout the country.
Opium cultivation in Burma, once the world’s largest opium producer, steadily declined from 1997 to 2006. The most important reason for this was a number of opium bans in key opium-cultivating areas declared by ceasefire groups in northern Shan State. After decades of war and isolation, they hoped to gain international political recognition and support for the development of their impoverished regions. Another important factor, which has received less attention, was the trend in the global market. Heroin of Burmese origin was almost completely pushed off the American and European markets by heroin from Colombia and Afghanistan, respectively, in the course of the 1990s. Furthermore, production of amphetamine-typestimulants (ATS) increased significantly in the last decade.