“Ploughing the land five times”: Opium and agrarian change in the ceasefire landscapes of south‐western Shan State, Myanmar

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between the illicit opium economy and processes of agrarian change in south‐western Shan State, Myanmar. This is a region where opium production has risen significantly since the 1990s despite the declining territorial control of insurgent groups long blamed for the country's illegal drug economy and alongside the deepening integration of the region's agriculture sector into national and global markets. This paper reveals how illicit opium cultivation has offered distressed smallholders a way to mitigate the worsening livelihood insecurities that have accompanied the commercialization of smallholder agriculture. Yet at the same time, opium cultivation has locked farmers into a set of highly unequal social relations that has enabled militias, businesspeople with ties to local (armed) authorities, moneylenders, and agricultural brokers to accumulate capital through their control over rural markets and credit systems while leaving poppy cultivators with little more than the means to reproduce their livelihoods. This paper thus shows how opium cultivation has enabled farmers to respond to worsening precarity by sustaining smallholder farming despite the worsening “reproduction squeeze” facing many households, although the opium economy has simultaneously played an instrumental role in reinforcing and deepening agrarian class relations.

Difficult Development Trade-Offs Amidst ‘Transition’: Exploring Power and Politics in Post-2010 Myanmar

“…However, this policy narrative ignores tl1e fact tl1at in some areas, poppy cultivation has become the alternative livelihood strategy for farmers who have been negatively impacted by debt, dispossession and land grabs that have accompanied the expansion of commercial agriculture and increased inflows of investment into rural Myanmar. The vulnerabilities that have pushed farmers into the illegal opium economy-for example, in regions of Shan State south of Taunggyi-are not simply the result of the region's marginalisation and lack of integration into markets, but stem from new forms of insecurity facing smallholder farmers as a result of agricultural commercialisation (Meehan 2021 ). A relational framework thus allows researchers to consider how forms of poverty and vulnerability can become embedded in the kinds of economic development promoted by governments and donors, rather than indicating a failure of development.…”