From Produce to Poppy
The rising wave of opium farming
The impacts of antinarcotic policies on food systems across the globe are often overlooked. In our previous newsletter, we highlighted how peasant and Indigenous communities in illicit-crop cultivation regions stand at the frontlines of the war on drugs. Today, we will explore the farmer-focused realities of growing opium poppy.
Opioids are at the core of a rampant addiction crisis across the globe — from synthetic derivates like fentanyl or methamphetamine in the Minority World*, (see Canada, U.S., Europe), or heroin in Afghanistan. But despite measures like anti-drug policies and cultivation bans, opium poppy production and addiction rates remain on the rise.
This is part two of our series on the war on drugs, exploring its impacts on peasant and Indigenous communities in illicit crop cultivation areas around the world. Although drugs loom large in our collective imagination, how much do we associate them with the global peasantry and the lands in which they are produced? And how can visiblising this link help us understand the deeper socio-economic and environmental factors that sustain the narcotics trade, and the true cost of the war on drugs? Who designs international drug policies and who benefits from them? Who stands to profit and who suffers? Who is this war on really?
*Minority World refers to the countries commonly labelled as “developed,” and emphasises that while these countries tend to impose their will on the rest of the world, they are, in fact, the minority. Majority World refers to the countries commonly labelled as “developing,” who in fact make up the majority of the world’s population.
The use of opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, can be traced back to 3,400 B.C. in lower Mesopotamia, today’s Southwest Asia. From this powerful narcotic stem substances like morphine, codeine, heroin, and oxycodone.
Culturally, poppy flowers have been associated with sleep, death, and rebirth. In Greek mythology, the plant was a symbol of fertility. In Christianity, bright red poppies symbolise the blood of Christ, sacrifice, and remembrance. For different Native American cultures, it has symbolised sacrifice and renewal in religious ceremonies. In ancient Egypt, poppy was a staple in funeral rituals to help in the journey to the afterlife.
Throughout history, the medicinal and recreational uses of the plant have driven its demand and cultivation, which spread globally through the Silk Road, the network of trading routes between Europe and China.
Opium has historically been weaponised against communities for the benefit of the Minority World’s economic and geopolitical interests. In the 1800s, European colonial powers sought market control in China. Britain’s East India Company smuggled opium into the country, leading to a devastating surge in addiction, which pushed China into a socioeconomic crisis and two Opium Wars. Eventually, Britain, France, and others imposed trading privileges and policies that granted them profits, impunity, and territorial control. By the end of the Second Opium War, years under pressure, China legalised the cultivation of poppy.
“The recent rise of large-scale heroin production in Southeast Asia is the culmination of four hundred years of Western intervention in Asia. In the 1500s European merchants introduced opium smoking; in the 1700s the British East India Company became Asia's first large scale opium smuggler, forcibly supplying an unwilling China; and in the 1800s every European colony had its official opium dens. At every stage of its development, Asia's narcotics traffic has been shaped and formed by the rise and fall of Western empires.”
—The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred W. McCoy
The U.S. has also weaponised the plant. In his book Drugs, Oil, and War, author Peter Dale Scott explains how the U.S. government has relied on funding militias heavily involved in drug trafficking as an excuse for geostrategic interventions. In 1949-1950, the CIA decided to “provide arms and logistic support to the residual forces of the Chinese [Nationalist Party] Kuomintang in Myanmar”. In the years following, the U.S. also funded opium-growing Hmong tribesmen in northeastern Laos. Such tactics ended up granting the U.S. regional power without having to deploy their own military troops. Since the funds were flowing into organised crime, production rose in all opium-growing locations. With this newfound power, the U.S. was able to set up new oil extraction sites and transportation routes. Scott writes about the resource extraction that the U.S. was able to carry out as a result of these imperialist interventions: tungsten mining in Myanmar during the early 1950s, exploration for new oil discoveries on the shores of Thailand and Cambodia in 1968, and a wave of concessions to international oil companies on the South China sea floor by 1970.
Opium farming in Myanmar
As of 2021, Afghanistan produced about 80% of the world’s opium until the Taliban banned its cultivation in April 2022. Since then, the Golden Triangle, the area in which northeastern Myanmar, northwestern Thailand and northern Laos meet, has had a concerning spike in poppy cultivation and synthetic opioids production, which only fuel the internal and regional conflicts of the Triangle.
The Golden Triangle has historically been a poppy cultivation hotspot. In Myanmar, farmers in the Shan and Kachin states started growing opium poppy over a century ago. Traditional uses include the treatment of different illnesses such as high fever, chronic pain, bee stings, malaria, and skin and intestinal infections.
It’s believed that the crop’s cultivation spread in the country from border provinces in China. With the increased demand brought by the opium wars, it became the main livelihood of people in the highlands of eastern and northern Myanmar, expanding enough to become the nation’s leading cash crop.
Poppy flowers grow as tall bulbs filled with opium sap, which farmers scratch with multi-bladed tools to let it bleed out. Once scraped off the plant, this sap turns into resin, which carries one of the highest crop prices per weight on earth, making its trafficking a billion-dollar industry.
Since the late 1980s, Myanmar’s eastern Kachin State has been a target for extractivism, starting with a logging boom of rampant deforestation and road building, where business alliances along the border strengthened between military-state elites, non-state armed organisations and Chinese capital. During the late 2000s, as part of the Chinese-funded Opium Substitution Programme (OSP), large-scale banana plantations wiped out vast farmland and forests sustaining peasant agriculture, imposing extensive monocultures in their place. While local communities were increasingly at risk of land grabbing and dispossession, over 200 Chinese corporations expanded agribusiness ventures on 200,000 hectares of land across Myanmar and Laos by 2015.
The OSP was conceived to offer labour opportunities away from poppy cultivation, in response to a rising opium addiction in China. However, the devastating social and environmental impacts of extractivism have led to a steady rise in poppy cultivation and drug use. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), poppy production quadrupled in Kachin State between 2006 and 2020 from just over 1,000 hectares to more than 4,000. A separate survey by the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO), the largest ethnic armed organisation in Kachin State, reported even higher levels of poppy cultivation with almost 7,000 hectares in 2018/19.
On top of the major crises Myanmar has been facing since the military coup in 2021, the opium ban in Afghanistan raised the crop’s prices and turned Myanmar into the world’s biggest opium producer in 2023, with 1,080 tonnes of dry opium produced by the end of the year.
The number of farmers reliant on growing poppy keeps going up and, unfortunately, there are no systems in place to guarantee their dignified livelihoods, labour rights, access to fair crop substitution programs, or their participation in drug policy conversations.
As a recent report from the South China Morning Post states:
“Aye Aye Thein used to grow rice, corn, beans and avocado. But the plunging value of the local currency has made growing agricultural produce more costly. The situation worsened when she was forced to leave her fields during fighting between Myanmar’s ruling junta and armed rebel groups.
Then, Aye Aye chimes in, ‘It doesn’t make us wealthy, but it is enough for our family’s living. Our houses were destroyed.’”
Since the military coup, at least three million people have been displaced, disrupting the distribution of harvests and the export of foods like rice and corn. As a result, food insecurity and inflation are on the rise, conditions that have forced even more people into poppy cultivation. Another farmer shares:
“If we send our crops to the brokers’ centre, which is very far, there are many costs that we can’t afford. So, we started growing poppy flowers instead of corn this year.”
UNODC reports that many opium buyers have resorted to providing peasant farmers with seeds, fertilisers, and equipment to start growing poppy amidst rising demand. With each payment, buyers take money back for the inputs they provide to get farmers started. The establishment of these contract-farming systems renders the cultivation of other crops disadvantageous.
As we will see in future instalments on cannabis and coca leaf, poppy-producing countries also receive millions of funds in support of their counternarcotics initiatives. But as anti-drug budgets expand, so do production and demand. The U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars to domestically fight the war on drugs since 1971. In addition, billions have been directed towards anti-drug projects globally, in fact, more than $1.1 billion were spent in 2021 alone — a year where global aid funding on drugs surpassed school feeding and labour rights projects. Drug supply reduction is also heavily funded by European countries, but there's a lack of transparency as to where the money flows.
“I heard some foreign countries gave us some aid. I don’t know how these things work, but we didn’t benefit” —Anonymous farmer from Myanmar’s Shan State
The majority of global anti-narcotic strategies rely on prohibition, criminalisation, and production-focused tactics like forced eradication, where local governments instrumentalise military and police forces to uproot plants or burn crops. However, eradication measures have proven ineffective for decades, for they fail to address the rising demand for drugs and the root causes behind it. This results in billion-dollar policies with little to no positive impact felt by the communities. As Harm Reduction International puts it, “They [eradication measures] rely on and reinforce systems that disproportionately harm Black, Brown and Indigenous people worldwide.”
Just like poppy cultivation, the production of synthetics like methamphetamine has also risen in Myanmar, leading to a plummet in synthetics’ prices. By the end of 2023, meth tablets cost less than beer, water, and even some foods in neighbouring Laos. The socioeconomic crisis fueled by the 2021 coup is rippling through the region and leaving Myanmar on the brink of severe food insecurity. Farmers are forced to abandon food crops or flee from violence. Combat between armed groups and Myanmar’s central government in Northern Shan State in October 2023 has led to at least 800,000 displaced.
Brewing Hope
Many have switched to growing organic coffee as an alternative to poppy. Organised by the Green Gold Cooperative (GGC) in Myanmar, over 900 farmers have joined since 2015, transitioning from chemical-intensive agriculture to biodynamic models like agroforestry.
Although it’s hard to convince other farmers to join, coffee bean prices can compete with opium as European buyers look for high-quality coffee, making it an appealing alternative. GGC is part of an expanding group of coffee producers in illicit crop areas around the world supported by UNODC’s Alternative Development Programme. An agroecological association in Bolivia and a cooperative in Laos have joined the journey to shift sources of income for farmers.
Many questions come to the surface while unpacking the layers that make up opium trafficking and its unleashed dominion over communities the world over. Who stands at the profiting end of the trafficking thread? If cultivation bans have proven to be just as harmful as unchecked production, what would effective regulations look like in opium-growing regions like the Golden Triangle?
Much of the international pressure to solve opium’s rampant expansion falls on producing countries. Still, we must demand accountability from the countries that hold much of the global opium market demand. What cultures have they fostered around opioids? Who has profited from this demand? Are the ones who profit held accountable? Or does prohibition and criminalisation apply to drug users only? If inequality and impoverishment are triggering factors for drug use, why aren’t domestic and international drug policies focusing on the systemic conditions that could turn citizens to substance abuse? Who loses when human and environmental rights are part of the drug policy equation?
This is part two of our new series on the war on drugs. In upcoming newsletters we will explore the different realities that cannabis and coca farmers have had to face throughout history — from Mexico to Bolivia, South Africa to Colombia, we will unpack their long-fought journeys and challenges ahead. We’re also eager to explore the systemic oppression that the war on drugs has disproportionately waged on people of colour the world over, and how this violence can and has bled into and reshaped the globalised food system.
If this topic has sparked something in you, or if any questions have come to mind, please share them with us in the comments. What is it that particularly makes you feel curious about the war on drugs and its links to food systems? Are there any stories, podcasts, films or sources we should look into?
The book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy
This paper on opium cultivation and extractivism in the Myanmar-China borderlands
The Drug Policy in Myanmar resources by the Transnational Institute
This report on aid and the war on drugs by Harm Reduction International
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Great reporting! I’m sure you’ve come across it already but Kristina Lyon’s Vital Decomposition has a lot to contribute to the perspective of peasant farmers in the global drug trade
Great article but you missed some details about Afghanistan. The Taliban banned opium production in 2000 which resulted in a 95% drop in production. Once the NATO+ forces invaded in 2001 and established control the production returned to it’s previous levels until the Taliban resumed control of the country in 2022.