Forces of Change in the Thailand Opium Zone

Abstract

Hill tribes in Thailand illegally grow opium for cash income. Degeneration of physical resources is forcing adoption of alternative crops. Additional economic change is foreseen because recent political pressures to eliminate opium production are causing strict enforcement of the Thai antiopium law. Future production will be limited to small areas near the Burma border. Study of social change is needed to assuage hardships that could result from a new economic system. T HE interlocking, forest-clad mountains of northern Thailand are a part of the infamous Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. The region also includes the rugged Shan Plateau and Kachin Hills of northeastern Burma and the highlands of northern Laos (Fig. 1). The term Golden Triangle was popularized by Western journalists during the early 1970s to designate one of the principal source areas in the world for illicit opium and its derivatives, morphine and heroin. The term refers to the millions of dollars made from the sale of these drugs by international traffickers, and it can be misleading because it in no way reflects the economic reality of the povertystricken hill-tribe producers in the region. Most Asian opium was grown in southwestern China before 1950. During the following decade, the Golden Triangle became increasingly important as a commercial exporter of this drug because of its suppression by the new communist regime in China.1 Opium production in Thailand during most of the post-1950 period has been promoted inadvertently by policies designed to protect the northern Thai border against communist infiltration and to prevent hill-tribe insurgency. However, population pressures and resource scarcity in northern Thailand have reached a level where natural resources are barely sufficient to sustain opium production by shifting cultivation. Some hill-tribe villages are responding by turning to alternative methods of cultivation and sources of subsistence income such as field labor and marketing of new crops. * I gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Geographic Society Committee for Research and Exploration and from the Kutztown University Research Committee. 1 Leonard P. Adams II, China: The Historical Setting of Asia's Profitable Plague, in Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 357-375. * DR. CROOKER is an assistant professor of geography at Kutztown University, Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530. Copyright ? 1988 by the American Geographical Society of New York This content downloaded from 157.55.39.69 on Sun, 06 Nov 2016 04:46:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW