Opium Replacement - The Case of Thailand

The Case of Thailand

Thailand is widely considered to be the most successful example of opium replacement. Although peak production in Thailand was never especially high (perhaps 150 tonnes - 200 tonnes, compared to 3,500 tonnes last year in Afghanistan), Thailand's approach is widely admired because of the strength and depth of the licit agricultural economy that has been introduced to replace opium. More than 150 crops have been successfully introduced to farmers, usually from temperate climates (as the opium growing regions are much cooler than the tropical lowlands), including cabbage, lettuce, kidney beans, tea, coffee, peaches, apples, various kinds of herbs and decorative flowers. In general, the crops were cash crops of medium to high value. It is notable that many of these crops have entered permanently into Thai cooking and therefore Thai culture, even though most are not native to Thailand. Thailand is also noted for having two particularly successful projects that are still operative. These are the Royal Project (established in 1969) and the Doi Tung project (established in 1988). Both have completely removed opium from their project areas and have helped farmers to improve living conditions a great deal, and so are studied and visited by practitioners of opium replacement from other countries.

It is arguable that no other country has been able to achieve a similar level of success to Thailand. In Colombia, much of the opium cultivation takes place under the protection of armed groups opposed to the government, and so the process has not had much of an effect on total production. Mexico has never received the resources and attention that other countries have. Laos has experienced very steep declines in cultivation, but former opium farmers are in many cases shockingly poor- the country does not have the vibrant licit economy that Thailand has. The same observation goes for Laos and Pakistan, and the latter is now experiencing an increase in cultivation due to overspill from Afghanistan. It is hard to comment on the process in Burma, as saying anything at all about Burma founders on the incredibly Byzantine politics of that country. The United Nations has one project in the Wa region (in the north-east), the Japanese development agency had a project for some time (that failed) and the Doi Tung project of Thailand also initiated some activities. These projects cover areas too small to have much of an effect on national production. In fact, production does seem to have been falling, but it is believed that this is simply because of a decision by warlords in Burma to concentrate on methamphetamine. At any rate, Burma is not the poster child of opium replacement. Lastly, there is Afghanistan, whose production and hectare dwarf even Burma at its peak. The opium replacement project there is a few years old now, but it is slow going, because of the scale of the cultivation, the size of the country, terrible security, destruction of infrastructure and weakness of government institutions.