OTHER IPS WIRE STORIES

• Villagers Build Lives Out of Unexploded Bombs
• Sand Dunes along Mekong Worry Activists
• Signs of Breakthrough Pick up, Scepticism Lingers
• NGOs Oppose Copper Project in Laos
• China's Plans to Dam Salween River Riles Critics
• Villagers Want Their Rivers - and Lives - Back
• For Exiles in Thailand, Burma is Both Near and Far
• Burmese Caught between Poverty in India, Oppression at Home
• Activists Cheer Pullout of French Firm from Lao Dam Project
• Electricity Changes Lives, But Has Cross-Border Impact

BANGKOK (IPS) — In Disnadda Diskul, Thailand has the perfect salesman to export a success story: the potent weapon this South-east Asian country has developed to wean communities away from poppy cultivation.

In early August, he made his pitch to an official delegation from the world's leading opium producer — Afghanistan — and won its officials over. The 17-member team from the war-torn country had just spent three days in the Doi Tung Development Project, up in the hills of Chiang Rai province, northern Thailand.

"We had to show them our success; we had to get them to see that it can be done," Disnadda, who heads the Doi Tung project, says of what he calls its humane approach to battling opium instead of the gung-ho strategies that depend on guns, bombs and chemical sprays.

"A Thai team will be going to Afghanistan soon to study the areas where we think work should begin," Disnadda told IPS. "The Afghan delegation wanted us to work on the entire country, but we prefer to start with three places."

The areas set to benefit from this Thai touch are the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, and Nangahar, in the east. Along with Badakshan in the north-east, these four regions top the list of the 25 provinces in Afghanistan where poppy fields flourish.

According to U.N. estimates, Afghanistan's opium production in 2002 was over 3,400 tonnes, which is 75 percent of the opium produced around the world. Over 85,000 hectares are under poppy cultivation.

In 1999, when Kabul was under the Taliban regime, opium production reached an all time high of 4,500 tonnes. Thereafter, the Taliban cracked down on this trade, pushing production down to 185 tonnes of opium by end-2001, the time the U.S. government launched an invasion to drive this extremist Islamic group out of power.

"Getting rid of opium is a challenge for us, and the Doi Tung project has given us hope to combat it," says Said Shah Waseq of Afghanistan's Counter Narcotics Directorate. He was a member of the delegation from Kabul, which also included a government minister, deputy ministers and provincial governors.

"An integrated, step-by-step approach has a good way of succeeding," Waseq told IPS. "Otherwise, pressure to rid opium in one area will only result it surfacing again in another part of the country."

If the Doi Tung model does gain a foothold in Afghanistan, as Waseq hopes, it will be the second country to have been converted to the Thai way of battling opium.

The first country to seek assistance from the Thais is neighbouring Burma, South-east Asia's largest producer of opium. U.N. statistics say that during 2002-2003, Burma produced some 810 tonnes of opium.

Three other countries — Laos, Bolivia and Peru — have also been drawn to the benchmarks the Thai project has achieved, but converting such interest into a reality is still a distant prospect.

'Doi Tung Two', as Disnadda likes to call the Burma project, began in January this year in Yong Kha, an area in the southern Shan state along the Thai-Burma border. This region is under the control of the drug trafficking cartel of the armed United Wa State Army, whose leaders top the list of those wanted by the U.S. government for the narcotics trade.

At the moment, 3,000 people who depended on opium production for their livelihood are benefiting from the initial phase of this new venture, Disnadda says. Schools have been built for the children and health care is on offer, he adds.

"Offering them an alternative income is as important, and there are opportunities in crops like soya bean, maize, cassava and cotton," says Disnadda. "But this requires time, through short and long term objectives."

He says such thinking and more lie at the heart of Thailand's Doi Tung project, which was the brainchild of Princess Srinagarindra, the mother of the country's monarch King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The project was launched in 1987 across 150 square kilometres of mountain terrain, which was covered with forests and had large tracts of poppy fields. Among its key aims was to offer members of ethnic communities involved in opium production a range of economic alternatives in order to get them — and keep them — away from drug production as a livelihood.

Scepticism greeted the project at its inception. "The fact that the government is spending 300 million baht (7.1 million dollars) for the benefit of some 8,000 hill tribesmen at Doi Tung has not met with universal approval," stated a report on the project that appeared in the 'Bangkok Post' newspaper in February 1988.

Such doubts, however, have been put to rest by an impressive record achieved in the years since.

By attracting the opium-dependent communities into alternative development programmes such as crop substitution, weaving and ceramics, the Doi Tung project has seen the last of the poppy fields in the area under its wing.

Today, those who visit the Doi Tung area encounter fields of coffee trees, hothouses bursting with orchids and buildings where three generations of women — grandmothers, mothers, daughters — are involved in a production line making clothes.

According to the United Nations, this project, which benefits some 10,700 people, is an extension of a vision introduced to Thailand by the country's monarch in the late 1960s — to promote crop substitution in the poppy fields.

"The Doi Tung project is a good model, due to the strong leadership and vision given by the country's royal family," Sandro Calvani, who heads the East Asia office of the United Nations Drug Control Programme, said in an interview. "Also the entire country cooperated to get rid of narcotics and tax money was used."

Official numbers reflect this view. Currently, the few lasting pockets of opium producers in Thailand offer only two tonnes of the drug annually to the world market, as opposed to the 152 metric tonnes that were flowing out of the country in the early 1970s.

But Calvani says the circumstances in Afghanistan are different and that may hinder the Doi Tung model from achieving the same rate of success it secured at home. "The lack of strong and clear leadership is missing and so are the elements needed for the participatory approach that was evident in Thailand," he added.

Disnadda, however, is more sanguine, having already described to the visiting Afghans the scale of leadership and participation needed to give 'Doi Tung Three' in their country a chance of breathing hope and economic security into the lives of Afghans in the opium trade. — Marwaan Macan-Markar (END/Copyright IPS)