Precarity, poverty and poppy: Encountering development in the uplands of Shan State, Myanmar

Addressing Socio-Environmental Challenges and Unintended Consequences of Peruvian Drug Policy: An Analysis in Two Former Cocalero Valleys

“…Furthermore, in these processes, marginalized farmers seeking to survive and to escape from poverty through AD are exposed to a new set of risks and forms of precarity, related to the possibility to invest in the long-term, to have access to fertile lands and to articulate with the global agroindustrial market (Meehan 2020). Likewise, those who decide to replant their coca or migrate to other coca-growing areas expose themselves to increased criminalization by the state.…”

“…These studies have shed light on unintended impacts of various AD programs. For example, in drug crop producing areas of Afghanistan (Attewell 2017;Bradford 2019), Myanmar (Meehan 2020), Colombia (Ballve 2012;Ciro 2020;Parada-Hernández & Marín-Jaramillo 2021) and Peru (Grillo 2018;Huamán & Palacios 2018; van Dun, Cabieses & Metaal 2013), 5 the promotion of global market chains and agricultural modernization under the framework of AD has in some cases reproduced vulnerabilities and risks that farmers experience in legal markets. Examples include: i) insecure access to land for crop cultivation and subsistence, especially for farmers who lease their land and work as harvesters, as well as for women growers; ii) privatization of land through largescale land-grabbing processes that lead to the displacement of local populations; and iii) increased vulnerability of small producers through their exposure to the volatile prices of licit crops and their difficulties in accessing fertile land and inputs to improve soil productivity.…”

“…In light of this evidence, some scholars have argued that the recent shift in conceptualization of AD assumes a general tendency towards capital-oriented development (Buxton 2020;Meehan 2020). They argue this narrative assumes that illicit crops are associated with a lack of development that manifests itself in a concentration of poverty, lack of access to land and legal markets, and poor agro-productive infrastructure.…”

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

“…Consequently, the cultivation of illegal opium has invariably been treated as residual to—or outside of—development processes. This approach has encouraged simplistic and linear narratives surrounding the relationship between drugs and development, which assume that the expansion of market economies and the consolidation of state control over conflict‐affected drug‐producing regions will overcome the drivers of illegal drug cultivation (Meehan, 2021). However, by defining illegal drug cultivation as a consequence of isolation from markets and the lack of state control—and by making state‐building and market‐led development the means through which to tackle drugs—drug policy narratives obscure a more complex set of relationships that exist between illicit drug economies and processes of agrarian change in Myanmar's contested borderlands.…”

“…11–15). However, a wide body of scholarship on agrarian transitions in upland Southeast Asia warns that processes of market‐led development create risks and opportunities that are distributed highly unevenly and lead to new drivers of poverty and insecurity (Akram‐Lodhi, 2005; Li, 2002, 2010; Meehan, 2021; Rigg, 2005; Sikor & Vi, 2011; Woods, 2020). A more critical understanding of the unequal social relations produced by market‐led development offers important entry points for understanding why the “qualities” of opium may remain important—or indeed become increasingly significant—to the livelihood strategies of poor smallholders.…”