BANGKOK: Opium production in Myanmar has fallen for the first time since a military coup in 2021, the UN said on Thursday (Dec 12), but the country remains the world’s biggest producer of the narcotic.
Poppies have long flourished in Myanmar’s remote borderlands, where ethnic minority armed groups and criminal outfits refine them into heroin and law enforcement turns a blind eye to the billion-dollar trade, analysts say.
Last year Myanmar became the world’s biggest producer of opium, harvesting 1,080 tons of the narcotic – more than double that of previous leader Afghanistan after the Taliban government cracked down on poppy cultivation.
Myanmar produced 995 tonnes of opium in 2024, according to the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).
There was a “strong correlation” between the reduced harvest and escalating conflict in traditional poppy-farming regions, research officer Inshik Sim told a news conference in Bangkok.
Parts of Shan state in the east, which produces around 80 per cent of the crop, have been embroiled in fighting this year, which the Myanmar Opium Survey 2024 says has pushed many poppy farmers to abandon their fields.
Limitations on movement to remote areas and an extreme monsoon season were cited as other possible factors for the decrease.
The report also found that oversupply in the regional heroin market and shifts in the drug’s global supply chain may have reduced demand for opiate exports and led to price drops.
But the UNODC said this year’s harvest still represents Myanmar’s second largest in the last two decades and a key source of its income.
Myanmar’s economy has tanked since the coup, with the World Bank this week forecasting a 1 per cent contraction in the fiscal year ending March 2025.
Masood Karimpour, the UNODC’s Regional Representative for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, said there was a high risk of further expansion as supply chains adjust and cultivation methods improve.
Myanmar authorities were facing “severe challenges” in curbing poppy cultivation, the junta’s home affairs minister told state media in June.
AFP have contacted the junta for comment about the UN’s latest findings.
The coup sparked social and economic turmoil and armed conflict across the country and has displaced more than three million people, according to the UN.