UN reports more opium coming from Myanmar

[Coventina]

Source: International Herald-Tribune

BANGKOK: Opium poppy cultivation inched up by 3 percent last year in Myanmar, according to a United Nations report released Monday, the second consecutive annual increase that appears to signal a reversal of years of declining opium production in the so-called Golden Triangle.

"Containment of the problem is under threat," Gary Lewis, the representative for East Asia of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said at a news conference Monday. "Opium prices are rising in this region," he said. "It's going to be an incentive for farmers to plant more."

The Golden Triangle, the area where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar meet, once produced two-thirds of the world's opium, most of it refined into heroin. But pressure by the Chinese government to eradicate opium in Myanmar helped lead to steep declines, with a low point of 21,500 hectares, or 53,000 acres, of poppies planted in Myanmar in 2006.

Since then, opium cultivation has bounced back by around 33 percent, to 28,500 hectares last year.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/02/02/asia/drug.1-421051.php

[DCKit]

1. Developed countries should be buying the raw sap....

directly from the farmers and burning whatever can't be used to manufacture pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.

Everybody wins.

[Vattel]

2. If I lived in Myanmar

I would grow poppies myself. The govt. there has impoverished the nation. If we had invaded Myanmar instead of Iraq, we would have eliminated on of the top ten worst governments, it would have been inexpensive, and we would have been greeted as liberators by everyone except the tiny minority that have power there.