Opium cultivation doubled in Southeast Asia: UN
Opium cultivation in Southeast Asia has doubled over the last six years as growing demand for heroin in China and the rest of Asia lures more farmers to grow poppies, the UN said yesterday.
Opiate users in East Asia and the Pacific now account for about a quarter of the world total, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report.
China alone has more than one million registered heroin users, and consumes most of the drug in the region, it said, adding farmers in Laos and Myanmar are pushing into increasingly remote land to avoid their crops being destroyed by authorities.
The findings cast doubt over the future of opium eradication programmes that were successful in driving down cultivation in both countries in the decade until 2006.
With prices rising, cultivation in Laos soared 66 percent to 6,800 hectares in 2012, and by 17 percent to 51,000 hectares in Myanmar, the world's second largest producer after Afghanistan, according to UN estimates.
The study estimates opium produced by Laos and Myanmar to be worth $431 million in 2012, a third more than the previous year. Farm-gate prices per kilogram reached $1,800 in Laos amid scarce supply, and $520 in Myanmar.
The number of people engaged in cultivation has risen in parallel with up to 38,000 "opium growing households" in communist Laos and 300,000 in Myanmar.
The rise indicates Myanmar farmers -- mainly in northeastern Shan state -- will only turn away from opium cultivation if alternative livelihoods are available, the report said.
In the 1980s, Myanmar was the world's largest producer of illicit opium, until it was replaced by Afghanistan in 1991.
Cultivation there has been so successful that Afghanistan's poppy crop covered more than 131,000 hectares in 2011, two-and-a-half times more than Myanmar's this year.
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