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

Patrick Meehan

doi:10.1111/joac.12446

Abstract

AbstractThis 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.

Highlights

Khun Aung Win1 began cultivating opium poppy in 2008 and has been growing it ever since
I provide a brief overview of the shifting contours of armed conflict and changing agrarian dynamics across south-western Shan State in order to situate my empirical analysis of how the opium economy has become rooted in systems of borderland rule and deepening capitalist social relations
As one local historian in Taunggyi surmised, “as long as the gun barrel is not pointed at them [the Army] they are happy to let anything go.”20 Drug businesses linked to the Pa-O National Organization (PNO) and ex-Mong Tai Army (MTA) militias facilitated the spread of opium production across the Pa-O hills by establishing trade networks, which often worked in the following way: Businesses recruited “agents” in each village to encourage farmers to grow poppy, typically by providing credit and a guaranteed buyer

Summary

Introduction

Khun Aung Win1 began cultivating opium poppy in 2008 and has been growing it ever since. Through exploring the experiences of farmers like Khun Aung Win, this article asks: How has the illegal opium economy in south-western Shan State been shaped by wider processes of agrarian change?

Results

Conclusion