Myanmar surges to nine-year high production of Opium
Myanmar
Production of opium in Myanmar Rose by a third last year ending what had
been a seven-year decline that's according to the United Nations which
puts the rise down to increasing economic hardship opium resin is used to make
heroin and the global price for it has risen with that thought to be another
factor in stimulating production of the crop at a news conference in the Thai
Capital Bangkok in chick SIM from the United Nations office on drugs and crime
gave more details about the scale of Myanmar's opium trade so because of the
increases in the area of open Puppy cultivations combined with the amount of
potential yield per hectare the open open production in 2022 in Myanmar reached
nearly 800 tons up to 2 billion US Dollars have been generated from this opiate
economy in 2022.
The farmers cut is quite small but nonetheless it's increased quite a bit because
of the increases in price of opium and an amount of opium as well southeast Asia
correspondent Jonathan head is following the story for us the reasons for for
opium cultivation declining in recent years are partly because the big syndicates
that make money in many of the Lawless areas of Myanmar have been switching to
synthetic drugs like methamphetamines and production of that's gone up even more
and also there have been successful campaigns to persuade Farmers there to
go to Alternative crops this is a very striking reversal of the trend up by
just by a third in just one year .
The UN assumes this is because Farmers opium
provides a lot of jobs it's labor intensive it's one of the reasons the
syndicates prefer to make synthetic drugs but it does provide a lot of work
in a country that has lost well over a million jobs since the coup because of
the catastrophic disruption to the economy I mean there's a civil war raging and
much of Myanmar and in these these traditionally quite problematic areas there are
very few alternative sources of income people often use to leave them to go to jobs
elsewhere in Myanmar those jobs no longer exist so that's one factor and it is a
worrying Trend because you've got that happening at the same time there is a
veritable tsunami of synthetic drugs pouring out of the same region of Myanmar
because again because of the instability all these various armed groups that operate
there need more funds and more money and they're just producing Yaba pills as
they're known these methamphetamine pills they're so cheap here in Thailand
you can get one pill for less than a bottle of water and that's causing enormous
social problems in The Villages of Thailand and many other countries in
the region .
.jpg)
Comments
Post a Comment