VOA News
Zsombor Peter
December 12, 2023

BANGKOK — Myanmar has overtaken Afghanistan as the world’s top opium producer in 2023 after a third consecutive year of expanding cultivation fueled by the country’s civil war, the United Nations says in a new report.

After more than two decades as the world’s leading supplier of opium, Afghanistan saw its cultivated area plummet from 233,000 hectares in 2022 to under 11,000 this year, owing to the ruling Taliban’s strict enforcement of a ban on poppy farming.

At the same time, more and more farmers in Myanmar have been turning to opium since the economy’s nosedive following a military coup in 2021 that has plunged the country into a nationwide civil war.

After surging 33% last year, the area under opium poppy cultivation in Myanmar jumped another 18% in 2023 to 47,000 hectares, according to the U.N. report, Southeast Asia Opium Survey 2023, released Tuesday.

That makes for the most land Myanmar has had growing opium since 2013, and the first time it has led Afghanistan since 2002.

“The instability and lack of security in Myanmar have caused really significant economic turmoil the past couple of years, resulting in people turning to other ways to make money. So, essentially people that had options before, when the economy was doing comparatively well, are going back to opium production. It’s basically an income earner for them when they have few or no other options,” Jeremy Douglas, the regional representative of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, told VOA.

More and more people are finding it hard to eat well, or simply to eat enough. In a country where most families make their living off the land, nearly half of farming families say they worry about having enough food, according to a survey by the World Bank in May, up from 26% a year earlier.

Making opium all the more attractive, the drug traffickers and middlemen buying up crops paid more per kilo this year than last and continued investing in farmers’ fertilizer and irrigation systems, which boosted yields, making each hectare more productive.

“You put it all together, and of course you’re going to see an increase,” Douglas said.

The UNODC estimates that Myanmar’s farmers grew enough poppy this year to produce up to 1,080 metric tons of dry opium, earning up to $2.5 billion for all involved, most of it going to the traffickers shipping the product across Asia and as far as Australia, often as heroin.

Most of that heroin flows through neighboring Thailand on its way further afield. In September, Thai police seized over 440 bars of heroin along with some 15 million methamphetamine tablets after a two-year investigation of a major trafficking ring.

Prin Mekanandha, director of law enforcement for Thailand’s Office of the Narcotics Control Board, told VOA that the $8.2 million drug bust was the largest in the country’s history.

The UNODC report adds that the global opium and heroin shortage expected to follow Afghanistan’s poppy crash is likely to drive prices higher still, which should give farmers in Myanmar an even greater incentive to start growing poppy or expand the poppy farms they already have in the season to come.

Douglas said the same shortage is also likely to see heroin from the infamous Golden Triangle region — where the crime-riddled borderlands of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand converge — making its way beyond the Asia-Pacific to Europe and North America once more.

Afghan heroin started taking over the European and North American markets from the Golden Triangle more than a decade ago as the drug gangs in Southeast Asia mostly switched their focus from opium to methamphetamine.

Now, as Afghan supplies start drying up, Douglas said, “there’s still significant demand out there, and it’s highly likely that we’re going to start seeing Golden Triangle heroin returning to markets that it hasn’t been in for quite some years.”

He said that will be a boon as well for many of the armed groups in Myanmar’s civil war, both those fighting with and against the junta. While most of the groups involved in Myanmar’s drug trade traffic mainly in methamphetamines these days, opium and heroin are still steady earners.

“If the global heroin supply continues to dry up due to the situation in Afghanistan, it’s going to be an incentive to back more cultivation and start trafficking a lot of heroin. There’s going to be increasing supply in the country and it’s going to go somewhere,” said Douglas. “So, they’re going to benefit from this for sure.

The surge in opium farming inflicts costs on Myanmar as well.

The UNODC’s research finds that those who grow opium are more likely to use it themselves than those who don’t, so more cultivation is likely to mean more addicts, and a growing need for programs to treat them.

Rising opium prices will also make it harder to expand a program the U.N. has been running in Shan state, the epicenter of the country’s opium industry, to convince farmers to switch to growing coffee and to stick with it.

The UNODC sees little chance of reversing the current trends while intense fighting in Myanmar continues and puts off any hope of a significant economic rebound. It is expecting to see even more areas put under opium poppy cultivation in 2024.

“Farming communities are caught between insecurity and economic hardships,” said Benedikt Hofmann, the UNODC’s deputy regional representative.

So long as those conditions last, he added, “even more people will look at opium as a viable crop if there are no alternatives, especially in the absence of the rule of law.”