‘Opium killed us more than the war’: The paradoxical spatialities of plantation substitution from opium to bananas on Myanmar’s trans-Asian borderlands.

Abstract

Recent work on borderland plantations in Southeast Asia has shown how Chinese private capital, supported by state-led opium substitution programs, has turned thousands of hectares of forests and smallholder farmlands into banana and other monoculture plantations — trapping displaced and refugee communities as cheap plantation labor, and dumping (dangerous) pesticides on indigenous lands beyond China’s borders (Sarma et al 2023, Meehan and Seng Lawn Dan 2023.) This ongoing paper builds on this scholarship, and enters an empirical paradox, as voiced by an interlocutor — “If there is so much opium substitution and eradication, why is there still so much opium and drugs in the market for our children?”. Such sentiments reflect a 33% increase in opium production in Northern Myanmar (especially Shan State) in the last season of 2022 (UNODC 2023). This paper starts with this paradox and explores the narratives of ethnic minority and indigenous communities in Myanmar/Burma’s highlands who live with it in the context of active war. Claims of land grabs in the name of drug eradication and substitution (with other monocultures) are a key facet of this conflict. In particular, the paper highlights resistance narratives from anti-opium and anti-plantation resistance movements among the Palaung (Ta’an) and Kachin civil society movements in Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin states; tracing them in wider political histories of colonial and postcolonial agrarian resource frontier formations and assemblages in the region. The paper ends with critiques and contributions to rich debates on state and capitalist-led substitution policies in the region.