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 The area under opium poppy cultivation dropped by a quarter between
2015 and 2017, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a
report released on Wednesday.
"The drop in opium production is welcome, but it is not a victory,"
Jeremy Douglas, the UNODC's chief in Southeast Asia and the Pacific,
told Reuters.
"It appears to confirm that the shift in the regional drug market to
synthetic drugs is well underway, and that the opium economy is
being disrupted."
China and most Southeast Asian countries have reported growing
demand for methamphetamine - a highly addictive synthetic drug also
known as speed, shabu and yaba - and the Philippines is waging a
bloody "war on drugs" to tackle it.
Meanwhile, regional demand for heroin, which is derived from opium
poppies, has remained stable or decreased, with many younger drug
users preferring methamphetamine, according to UNODC data.
The UNODC estimated that Myanmar's Shan and Kachin states cultivated
41,000 hectares of opium poppy in 2017, a 25 percent drop from the
54,500 hectares reported in its last survey in 2015.
For the previous decade, opium cultivation had increased annually
before stabilizing at high levels, according to UNODC data.
The area under cultivation in Afghanistan, the world's biggest opium
producer, hit a record high of 328,000 hectares in 2017, the UNODC
said last month.
Myanmar's interior minister, Kyaw Swe, said in a statement released
by the UNODC that his government was "pleased to see progress" and
would support programs that provide alternative livelihoods to
opium-growing communities.
Myanmar is the source of most of Southeast Asia's methamphetamine,
which is mostly produced in lawless border regions outside the
government's control.
Douglas also said it was "reasonable to assume" that Asian organized
crime groups were making or planning to make fentanyl, a synthetic
opioid many times more potent and profitable than heroin.
SHIFTING MARKET
In October, President Donald Trump said "the flood of cheap and
deadly fentanyl" in the United States was fuelling a public health
emergency of opioid addiction and death.
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"People like to stretch profits in any business, and fentanyl is the
ultimate profit-stretcher," said Douglas. "You can cut out the poppy
farmers completely."
Growing opium poppies employs or provides incomes for hundreds of
thousands of people in Myanmar, most of them in remote, mountainous
areas of Shan and Kachin states.
Cultivation and production of opium poppies continued to flourish at
2015 levels in conflict-plagued areas of those states, which
remained a "safe haven for those who run the drug trade", said
Douglas.
Government troops have been fighting insurgencies by various ethnic
minority guerrilla groups for decades, and both sides have been
implicated in the drug trade.
According to the UNODC survey, opium cultivation plummeted in 2017
despite the government scaling back its poppy-eradication efforts.
Myanmar destroyed 3,533 hectares of opium poppies in 2017, down from
13,450 hectares in 2015.
Its giant neighbor China remained the largest market for the heroin
made from Myanmar's opium.
But China was also reporting what Douglas called "a significant
shift in market dynamics", with demand for heroin dropping alongside
rising demand for methamphetamine.
"The regional drug market is changing, and governments need to
change how they deal with it," he said.
He urged countries to increase their focus on synthetic drugs and
the precursor chemicals used to make them, and to do more to tackle
demand through prevention campaigns and voluntary, community-based
rehabilitation programs.
(Reporting by Andrew R.C. Marshall; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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