Burma's drug barons have long used the inaccessible mountains nestled in the north of the country along the border with China and to the east with Laos and Thailand as the base of their operations. This is the notorious Golden Triangle. Opium poppy has been grown here for more than a hundred years. The farmers there, the poorest of the poor, have relied on it as their sole cash crop.
Most of the traffickers and the poppy growers here are from the various ethnic groups which have inhabited these hills for centuries such as Wa, Kokang, Lahu and Akha. This region along the border with China comes under the control of the Wa who agreed to a ceasefire deal with the Burmese military in 1989 after decades of fighting.
It took the best part of a week to travel some three hundred kilometres by four-wheel drive along the winding road from Pangsan, the capital of the Wa special region, to Namteet. Driving some six hours a day at less than forty kilometres a hour, we wound through the mountains along the border with China. Poppy fields were visible along the steep slopes of the hills through which we drove.
"But this year's harvest is going to be very poor. The drought in this area has devastated the crop. It's the worst poppy season in my lifetime," says a local township leader, Wei I Yung, now fifty years old. Only around twenty percent of the poppy seeds seem to have germinated, according to the local UN workers who monitor the crop across Shan state.
"And even those plants which have survived are a fraction of the size of the poppy plants that were harvested last year," says Jeremy Milsom who has conducted the UN's crop survey in the past two years.
The local villagers fear for their future. The poppy resin that they harvest is their hedge fund against the food shortages and disease in the coming year. And this year their reduced resources will provide little protection for them in the next twelve months.
Already there is a humanitarian crisis looming in the region. In the past year more than a thousand villagers have died of disease and malnutrition, according to senior Wa leaders. Late last year a whole village was wiped out by a malaria epidemic that could easily have been prevented.
On top of everything the Wa leaders have ordered all farmers in their special autonomous region to stop growing poppy altogether after next season's harvest.
"There will be a complete ban on poppy cultivation by the 26th June 2005, World Anti-drugs Day," says Shao Min Liang, the Wa's second-in-command. Even the danger of famine and starvation has not daunted the Wa leaders' determination to keep their promise to end poppy cultivation in areas under their control within the next twelve months.
Over the last five years the Wa have been progressively reducing the area under poppy cultivation. Both the UN and American survey teams have verified this decrease in poppy and opium production in the Wa areas.
That may be good news for the global effort to suppress heroin production, but it leaves these peasants to a very uncertain future. "I just don't know what is going to happen to us," says Na Pha, an eighty-year-old grandmother who hasn't planted poppy this year because of the orders of the local authorities.
Looking out across a fallow field, the substitution crops she was given by the village administration all failed . "All we can do is hope for the best," she says.
RELOCATION POLICY
The Wa are taking draconian measures to implement their plans. Meetings have been held throughout their area. Instructions have come from the top down, following the Chinese model in which the Wa leaders were all trained during the days when they were part of the Burmese Communist Party.
"Villagers have attended several meetings held by the local headman to explain the anti-drug policy over the past two years," says a Catholic nun in one Wa village along the Chinese border.
But countless villagers that I interviewed could not recount the reasons the Wa leaders are banning poppy cultivation, though they do know the consequences of disobeying the Wa administrations orders.
"We will have to stop growing poppy after next season," says Nang Yee Noon.
"If we don't, we'll be carted off to jail," he says.
Apart from issuing edicts, the Wa authorities' strategy to eliminate poppy involves the mass movement of populations within their area of control, ostensibly from infertile highland areas where poppy is one of the few crops that can be grown successfully to lower, more fertile ground where rice cultivation and fruit trees flourish.
The most notable relocation has been four years ago, when some fifty thousand people were moved from the northern Wa areas to the southern command near the border with Thailand.
This became a major issue of controversy between the Burmese regime and the Thai government, forcing the Wa leaders to stop this particular programme. But they have not stopped the mass relocation of farmers within their northern command.
In Namteet, some twenty thousand villagers have been shifted from the highlands _ where all they knew was how to grow poppy _ to the lowlands where new villages have been built for them. They are now growing rice and working in the administration's crop substitution plantations, which include rubber, tea and fruit orchards.
"We had no choice but to move," says Nyi Meng, a Wa farmer who has just been relocated. "We knew that soon we would not be allowed to grow poppy, so we moved. But since then we have hardly been able to eke out a living and many of us have become ill with malaria."
The Wa leaders concede that shifting the farmers and banning poppy cultivation will cause extreme hardship for their people, at least in the short run. "It will take three to five years to recover from the crisis," says Shao Ming Liang.
But the bottom line is that the Wa leaders know that they have to give up poppy cultivation if they are to preserve their political and economic autonomy. Their primary concern is to establish a Wa state within the Union of Burma.
They also know that after a new constitution is drawn up they will face pressure to disband their 20,000-strong army, something they are determined to resist as long as possible.
Burmese Prime Minister Khin Nyunt has told the UN envoy for Burma, Razali Ismail, and European diplomats that the ethnic armies will have to surrender all their weapons once the new constitution has been drafted, even before the referendum that has been promised.
This is something most ethnic leaders will not countenance. The Wa leaders are absolutely clear.
"There is no way we will give up our arms and disband the UWSA (United Wa State Army) before permanent peace and stability is guaranteed throughout the country," Shao Ming Liang told me earlier this year.
The Wa understand that although there has been a measure of peace in their mountainous border region for the last fifteen years since the truce with Rangoon, it's very fragile.
"There is a very good possibility of insecurity and instability after the Wa deadline next year," according to the head of UN anti-narcotics operations in Burma, Jean-Luc Lemahieu.
An increase in poverty and starvation, brought on by the end of the cultivation of poppy next year, mass movements of populations in search of food, and the involvement of criminal gangs with cross-border connections, will heighten uncertainty in the area and increase the danger of renewed violence.
METH NEXT TARGET
The key problem in the Wa areas is that the crop substitution programmes and commercial ventures that have been set up will only provide a fraction of the income needed to replace the farmers' reliance on poppy.
Many of these are joint ventures with Chinese companies, including liquor and cigarette factories, granite and tin mines, tea and rubber plantations.
Their commercial success, though, relies on exporting the products to China, where, say the Wa authorities, they are heavily taxed.
In Namteet, the township chairman, Ai Rong, a nephew of the Wa leader Chairman Bau Yuxiang, is extremely frustrated. Here the authorities have invested heavily in crop substitution programmes, particularly in fruit and vegetables.
Pineapples, lychees and longans are among their exports to China. These are all taxed at twenty percent. "It is too high," Ai Rong bemoans, "it leaves us with very little profit".
The taxes on many other products are as high as 40 percent. In another Wa town along the Chinese border, a tin mine has stopped production because the taxes on the tin produced makes it unprofitable to operate.
Rangoon is as unsympathetic to the Wa's plight as the Chinese, the Wa leaders complain. "We are being squeezed from both sides," Ai Rong says. "The government is squeezing and squeezing us, maybe something will happen if they continue to squeeze us," he warns.
But the international community is unlikely to be moved by the Wa's plight unless their leaders are as rigorous in ending the production of ya ba (metamphetamines) in the areas they control as they have been in ending poppy cultivation.
The Wa leader, Chairman Bau Yuxiang, insists that the Wa authorities are targeting all drug production _ poppy, opium, heroin and ya ba.
Western and Asian anti-narcotics agents remain sceptical. So far there little evidence that the Wa's own war on drugs has had any real impact on the production of methamphetamines in the Golden Triangle.
Until the Wa leaders do something to stamp out the production and trafficking of ya ba, as well as banning poppy cultivation, the Wa's claims to be making their region drug-free will not get the international recognition the Wa leaders so desperately crave.