Development intervention and transnational narcotics control in northern Myanmar

Geoforum 68 (2016) 10–20

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Development intervention and transnational narcotics control in northern Myanmar Xiaobo Su Department of Geography, University of Oregon, United States

a r t i c l e

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a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 25 May 2015 Received in revised form 4 November 2015 Accepted 13 November 2015 Available online 27 November 2015

1. Introduction The real point about opium in the Wa States and Kokang is that opium is the only thing produced which will pay for transport to a market where it can be sold. To suppress opium in Kokang and the Wa States without replacing it by a crop relatively valuable to its bulk, would be to reduce the people to the level of mere subsistence on what they could produce for food and wear themselves to force them to migrate. (John Calgue, former Federated Shan State commissioner, 1937, quoted in Renard, 1996). John Calgue’s analysis of narcotics control in northern Myanmar opens this article for two reasons. First, it reinforces a simple but often overlooked idea that narcotics control ultimately builds upon poppy farmers’ improved livelihood. Illicit drugs do not disappear even under severe suppression, which highlights the significance of socioeconomic development in the source areas. Second, narcotics control in northern Myanmar requires extraterritorial forces to launch development intervention and assist ex-poppy farmers in improving their livelihood, partly because the Burmese government cannot provide social welfare for ex-poppy farmers, and partly because these farmers cannot generate protection on their own. In the past four decades, two widely popular development intervention approaches have been implemented in drug production areas in the Global South. One is a community-based approach advocated mainly by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID); the other is a business-oriented model of opium substitution supported by transnational agricultural corporations (Farthing and Kohl, 2005; Su, 2015; Weimer, 2011). As a once crucial source area, the Wa region in northern Myanmar has become an experimental field for extraterritorial organizations to implement both development intervention approaches since the mid 1990s. Despite these efforts, the judgment made by Calgue eighty E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.11.012 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

years ago remains valid today, and raises questions about narcotics control in the Wa region in particular, and in the Global South in general. What can ex-poppy farmers bring to licit markets to trade for a better livelihood? How do extraterritorial organizations use different approaches to conduct development intervention in the Wa region? What factors limit these approaches to achieve the goal of narcotics control? Addressing these questions, this paper explores the practices of development intervention, both community-based and marketdriven, for narcotics control and improved livelihood in the Wa region. My overarching goal is not to evaluate the two intervention strategies in terms of effects, which has been done by the UNODC and third parties. Rather, I examine how these extraterritorial organizations implement specific development-oriented programs, and discuss major factors accounting for the gap between initial goals and final outcomes, in order to exemplify the limitations of development intervention in the Wa region. My analysis adds flesh to the geography of development in a specific terrain: narcotics control. This paper has two objectives. First, it examines the projects of development intervention conducted by international organizations, in both discursive and practical forms, in the Wa region. Studying these forms will add substance to transnational narcotics control, showing that a matrix of political and economic forces is at work structuring the relationship between ex-poppy farmers, the Burmese state, local ruling forces, and these extraterritorial organizations. This paper mainly focuses on the UNODC and its predecessor, United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP). Second, I analyze collaboration between Chinese companies and the Wa authorities in opium substitution projects in the Wa region. The region shares a border with three Chinese prefectures in Yunnan province: Pu’er, Banna, and Lincang. The crossborder collaboration entails two primary components: a package of agricultural support to overcome food shortage in the Wa region, and a transnational agribusiness network to integrate economic crops produced in the Wa region into the Chinese market.

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An analysis of community-based and market-based approaches can unpack a complicated set of relations centered upon the power geometry that determines who can influence development projects and how to implement these projects. Regarding development intervention for narcotics control, scholars highlight the advantages of a community-based approach, such as income generation, food security, natural resource management, and good governance. Influenced by poststructuralist thinkers such as Escobar (1995), these scholars criticize the market logic as an external force against indigenous people, arguing that the market causes numerous social and ecological problems (Cohen, 2009; Woods, 2011). These scholars support creating a buffer zone to separate indigenous farmers from the market and prioritize good governance over other agendas, resonating with Escobar’s (1995: 226) call for alternative development via ‘‘identity strengthening,” ‘‘the defense of cultural difference,” and ‘‘opposition to modernizing development.” In this paper, I caution against essentializing any mode of development intervention and place development in a broad context, or more specifically with what Tania Li (2014) calls participation in the market economy to improve livelihood and manage dispossession, in order to investigate the specific intervention practices shaping Wa farmers when they undertake a transformation from drug plantation to economic crops. As Li (2007: 4) maintains in the case of Lauje, Indonesia, many highlanders need to ‘‘sell their labor but can’t find a buyer for it” so that the use of their land demands new knowledge and a new politics for livelihood improvement. They urgently need support through the distribution of land, access to jobs and the market, and protection through social welfare. Wa ex-poppy farmers face a similarly perilous, or even worse, condition. The experiments of development intervention in the Wa region show how to mitigate the formidable obstacles concerning social protection, land, and jobs. For Li (2010), understanding capitalism and indigeneity, with poor people in mind, allows analysts to exemplify the political economy of development. Contemporary advocates seeking to protect indigenous people from market-driven development cannot reverse the dispossessory effects of capitalism. Rather, they try to erect a wall that separates indigenous people from the market. Indeed, many indigenous people participate in landrelated market transactions, believing that ‘‘capitalist agriculture will produce good returns, money to educate children, and other benefits” (Li, 2010: 399). The emphasis on ‘‘market” and ‘‘good returns” is critical, showing how what Li (2007) calls ‘‘the will to improve” works in the Global South. As Sen (1999: 7) argues, the key challenges to livelihood improvement include ‘‘the need for the freeing of labor from explicit or implicit bondage that denies access to the open labor market.” To be sure, I do not claim that community-based development proves unimportant nor that a market-based approach is the only mode of intervention. As I will discuss shortly in the case of the Wa region, both approaches have limitations. In other words, development intervention is not a singular form of engagement between extraterritorial organizations and local populations, but an assemblage of forces that conflict and compromise with each other. The endurable improvement of ex-poppy farmers’ livelihood at the local scale, rather than any ideological value, helps to explain how to deploy development intervention for narcotics control in the Global South. Data for this paper was collected primarily through examination of project progress reports published by the UNODC and its regional offices, white papers on drug control from the Chinese state, policy reports from border governments on the Chinese side, and news reports from the Wa News Agency. In July and August 2014, I visited Banna and interviewed several key persons who are familiar with narcotics control in the Wa region. My respondents included a former procurator who handled more than 100

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cases of drug trafficking, a social activist who had wide connections with armed forces in the Wa region, an official in charge of the opium substitution program in Banna, a retired police chief, and an independent Chinese journalist who had regularly visited the Wa region from 2000 to 2010 in order to document narcotics control. Ideally I could enter into the Wa region to include ex-poppy farmers in my analysis, but the political condition prevented my access during my 2014 visit, partly because outsiders have been barred from the Wa region for security concerns and partly because military conflicts between the Burmese armies and ethnic military groups in Kokang and Kachin have intensified the border control between Yunnan and Myanmar. My reliance on secondary data and interviews with informants familiar with the Wa region is akin to the analysis that researchers use for understanding illicit drug-related issues. 2. Conceptualizing development intervention in the context of narcotics control Much of the literature on international narcotics control has focused on the antidrug intervention of Western countries in the Global South (Gootenberg, 2008; Levi and van Duyne, 2005). For over three decades, the U.S. government has mobilized source control via military operation to control illicit drugs in South America and Asia. Rather than offering more economic opportunities to source areas, the U.S. government has promoted military intervention to capture and kill drug traffickers. The effect of the U.S. military intervention against illicit drugs, according to Kuzmarov (2009: 12), is explicit. In both Latin America and Southeast Asia, U.S. drug-control policies have contributed to political destabilization, escalating cycles of violence and burgeoning anti-American sentiment. They have further yielded protracted health and environmental damage through crop defoliation, as well as the loss of innocent life, and provided billions of dollars in technical and military aid to repressive regions implicated in systematic human rights abuses. Similarly, antidrug military operations launched by U.S. state agencies in Colombia had become a counterinsurgency operation to prune rebel forces, generating ‘‘the disintegration of Colombian society” (Buzan and Waever, 2003: 329; see also Villar and Cottle, 2014). Unsurprisingly, U.S. military intervention has made very limited progress in narcotics control, as shown in the case of Afghanistan (Robinson and Scherlen, 2014), Colombia (Tate, 2015), and Mexico (Bewley-Taylor, 1999). For the U.S., as Walther (2012) suggests, a good place to start is to reduce Department of Defense counterdrug dollars and to eliminate expensive crop eradication programs. In other words, transnational narcotics control demands less military intervention in drug-producing countries and more development intervention. My understanding of development intervention departs from studies of alternative development that are overtly poststructuralist, focusing on ‘‘autonomy in the decision-making of territorially organized communities, local self-reliance (but not autarchy), direct (participatory) democracy, and experiential social learning” (Friedmann, 1992: vii). Friedmann (1992: 33) argues that alternative development must be regarded as ‘‘a process that seeks the empowerment of households and their individual members through their involvement in socially and politically relevant actions.” Nevertheless, this viewpoint is criticized on troublesome conceptual and empirical grounds. As Bebbington (2000: 496) argues, By finding so little that is recoverable within the practice of development, by failing to address in any detail the economic

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dimensions of alternatives, and above all, by not exploring the diversity of development processes and outcomes, they [poststructural positions] fail to develop the empirical basis of a possible counternarrative. While undoubtedly important, such poststructural positions often ignore the complex interplay between extraterritorial forces and local context, particularly in how the geometry of political and economic powers shapes developmental practices. The studies of Li (2007, 2014) about the will to improve Indonesia’s indigenous frontier are particularly informative for conceptualizing development intervention in my analysis. Li’s work describes various programs of development intervention in Indonesia over two centuries, and analyzes how these calculated programs have shaped landscapes, livelihoods, and identities across indigenous frontiers. She argues that the will to improve from external organizations (Dutch colonizers, the Asian Development Bank, international NGOs, and so on) is both benevolent and stubborn, showing how the position of those individuals involved in devising and implementing interventions is structured by ‘‘the enterprise of which they form a part” (2007: 6). Occupying the position of what Cowen and Shenton (1996) call ‘‘trusteeship,” these organizations believe that they know how others should live and can develop recipients’ capacities. The imposition of scientific knowledge and calculated projects is integral to development intervention, yet particular practices merge not into a singular intention, but into ‘‘a heterogeneous assemblage” that combines local factors and extra-local knowledge (Li, 2007: 6). For Li (2007), development intervention programs have their limitations because external trustees always look for ways to reassert ‘‘the authority of their own calculations” instead of indigenous livelihood improvement when a program fails to achieve its goal. For vast numbers of people in highland Indonesia, the will to improve falls short of the promise to make their life better, yet these development interventions deeply shape the conditions of their lives. While I concur with much of Li’s argument, I contend that drug production areas in Asia are thrust into the uneven orbit of global capitalism, while desperately torn by poverty, violent conflicts, and military intervention. Different from typical underdeveloped regions, source areas face serious challenges far beyond poverty. In these areas, farmers constitute the most vulnerable groups to transnational drug trade, and have limited capacity to protect themselves. An extremely impoverished farming structure shaped by constant fear of hunger, poor infrastructure, and geographical isolation leads many farmers to grow illicit crops as a survival strategy and become part of narcocapitalism. In addition, development intervention and social protection have rarely reached poppy farmers, showing how narcocapitalism has trapped poppy farmers in an abyss of exclusion from developmental practices, and has created conditions favorable to intervention which comes not from the nation-states in the drug production countries, but from extraterritorial organizations. Tying development intervention to extraterritorial organizations for narcotics control calls for some fresh theoretical tenets. First, we should neither see ‘‘the economic” and ‘‘the social” as two disparate categories, nor should we seek a universal model of development intervention. Rather, we must recognize pragmatic forms of development intervention that aim to improve livelihood in various localities (Li, 2014). In the context of narcotics control, development intervention is designed to generate new opportunities for socioeconomic development through which households can achieve an acceptable standard of living, without the need for drug crop cultivation (Mansfield, 1999). Farrell (1998: 415) explains that development intervention entails a form of ‘‘the conditional exchange of development assistance incentives for reductions in illicit cultivation, with the application of law enforcement

where appropriate.” In other words, development intervention embodies a functional way of improving livelihood, an alternative to drug production, in a way that any licit development practice rarely has. Specifically, development intervention takes three steps: infrastructure development, provision of alternative agricultural sources of income, and provision of alternative nonagricultural sources of income (Farrell, 1998). In many cases, infrastructure improvement and social stability have become a sufficient condition for development, while a reasonable alternative source of income is highly necessary in order to reduce illicit cultivation. Second, development intervention should free ex-poppy farmers from explicit or implicit bondage that has tied them with the drug market. These farmers constituted an essential part of the global drug market, though located at the lowest end of the commodity chain. Their labor in harvesting opium poppies brings them meager cash for daily necessities, while most profit enters into the pockets of those controlling refinement, routes, or final markets. A tie with the drug trade, however, denies farmers access to the licit market where they can sell economic crops at a decent price. The question of market competitiveness is at the forefront of the discussion on the feasibility of development intervention, because if the economic crops produced by rural farmers cannot be sold in the licit market and bring a return, these crops will lose economic viability and development intervention will not be sustainable (Farrell, 1998). For instance, USAID’s Office of Inspector General pointed out in a 2010 evaluation report that the gains in reducing poppy in some targeted southern and western provinces in Afghanistan may not be sustainable. A major obstacle identified by the Office is that access to markets for cereal crops (such as wheat) is not guaranteed, nor are commodity prices stable. The report notes: [T]e farmers could not take the harvest to market because of deteriorating security, and the value of wheat was depressed by unexpectedly higher production throughout Afghanistan, leaving many farmers unhappy and unable to sell their harvest. According to the contractor, one road leading out of Farah contained many checkpoints, which required bribes. The farmers would not use the road because they would have to pay more in bribes than their crops were worth. USAID Office of Inspector General, 2010: 9. The challenge for many poppy farmers is not that they are exploited in the market, but that they are denied convenient access to licit markets for trade and income. As a result they have no confidence in economic crops to resolve financial insecurity. Sen (1999: 7) emphasizes that ‘‘the freedom to participate in economic interchange has a basic role in social living.” While Sen talks about poverty reduction in general, I argue that the market can similarly play an important role in improving ex-poppy farmers’ livelihood in the long run. Finally, development intervention is coproduced by local and extraterritorial factors. As Bebbington (2000: 514, original emphasis) notes, this coproduction comes from ‘‘the intersections of institutional practices and popular practices, and of different practices within those institutions and popular sectors.” Livelihood improvement builds upon poppy farmers’ engagements with a range of development strategies that are extraterritorially promulgated, but locally operated. The well-established inquiry within political economy—particularly theories of dependence, uneven development, and neoliberal capitalism—pays more attention to the universal logic of capital accumulation than to local forms of culture and economy (Pieterse, 2001). Meanwhile, the turn to localism, as advocated by poststructural critics, runs the risk of excluding ‘‘politics, interest, institutionalized authority and

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legitimacy” that underpin the will to livelihood improvement (Watts, 2000: 171). Such one-sided optics fail to grasp the coproduction of development that draws on a mixture of practical knowledge, calculation practices, various authorities, human capacities, and so on (Li, 2007). Therefore, Bebbington (2000: 512, emphasis added) argues that ‘‘in the context of a globalized economy, understanding the coproduction of economic possibilities through the joint actions of people, their networks, and external intervention thus becomes critical to any attempt to build counternarratives against neoliberal formulations of crisis: counternarratives that recognize, however, the importance of the economic as well as the cultural and political dimensions of alternatives.” Drawing on the work of Li (2007, 2014) and Bebbington (2000), I emphasize that the practices of development intervention open up new opportunities and challenges in socioeconomic spheres. An empirical analysis of these practices might start with the conjunctions of extraterritorial organizations and local populations, which have been identified by writers such as Louis (2015) and Biddulph (2011). Furthermore, development research might address the limitations of these practices in terms of livelihood improvement: ‘‘more viable livelihoods will not be romanced into existence, but must instead be built up from already existing, and however imperfect strategies” (Bebbington, 2000: 515). A conceptual framework, built upon pragmatic intervention, access to the market, and the coproduction of development, lays the foundation for my empirical analysis in this paper. First I will present the research context.

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autonomous military units substantially expanded the drug business to maintain their military forces and sustain their existence. Due to their deep involvement in the drug trade, Bao Youxiang and seven other senior Wa leaders were indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice on drug trafficking charges. Meanwhile, the UWSA built an alliance with the Burmese armies to fight against Khun Sa and his Shan United Army. Dubbed the Opium King, Khun Sa occupied the whole Thai-Myanmar border and monopolized the drug trade from Myanmar to Thailand. In 1996, Khun Sa surrendered to the Burmese government and his territory was soon taken by the UWSA, giving rise to the so-called southern Wa region, although this territorial control has never been formally acknowledged by the Burmese central government. The business vacuum left in the Thai–Burma border was quickly filled by the production of methamphetamine to serve the market in Thailand. As one respondent described, After occupying the area controlled by Khun Sa in 1996, the Wa authorities did not prioritize economic development, poverty reduction, or narcotics control, but rather continued the strategy of fighting against Khun Sa’s remaining military forces. This strategy departed from the Wa authorities’ general principle. Without handling its own problems of poverty and illicit drugs, the Wa authorities invested huge manpower and financial resources to the task of chasing the Khun Sa Group, which can easily raise doubt from outside organizations. Meanwhile, the Wa region became the new target of narcotics control and its own problem of drugs received more attention after the collapse of the Khun Sa Group.

3. The Wa region in context The Wa region, the so-called Second Special Region of the Shan State, formally came into being when the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) collapsed in 1989. Established in 1939, the CPB remained an important force fighting for independence from Great Britain and against Japanese occupation (Charney, 2009). When Burma declared independence in 1948, the CPB started to rebel against the Burmese state. In 1966, the CPB rapidly expanded its revolutionary base in northern Myanmar and consolidated its military force of 30 thousand soldiers. Various ethnic military groups joined the CPB in the 1960s, including a group of Wa ethnic guerrillas led by Chao Ngi Lai and Bao Youxiang who later became military leaders of the CPB’s 12th Brigade. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping launched the economic reform in China and shifted from ideological struggle to economic development. Henceforth, Deng cut financial aid and political support to the CPB (Steinberg and Fan, 2012). To survive in harsh economic and military conditions, the CPB launched the drug business and became a significant drug-military gang in northern Myanmar in the late 1980s. For various reasons, the CPB eventually collapsed in April 1989, and degenerated into several autonomous military units. On April 17, 1989, Chao Ngi Lao and Bao Youxiang declared their separation from the CPB and established the United Wa State Party and its armed forces—the United Wa State Army (UWSA), one of the strongest ethnic military groups in northern Myanmar. The Party and the Army constitute the core of the Wa authorities, and Bao, UWSA’s commander-in-chief, has remained the supreme leader in the Wa region since 1989. In 1990, the Burmese central government signed a cease-fire agreement with the UWSA, which allowed the UWSA to assert territorial control over the northern part of today’s Wa region. The CPB’s collapse did not mean the end of drug business in northern Myanmar, but rather heralded a new age of illicit drug plantation and trafficking. Celebrating the triumph against the CPB, the Burmese government acquiesced and even allowed these newly autonomous units into the drug trade, as a reward for their departure from the CPB (McCoy, 2003; Meehan, 2011). The newly

Under enormous pressure from national states in Myanmar and China and international organizations, the Wa leaders realized that illicit drugs could cause them substantial trouble. In 1996, Bao Youxiang publicly declared that the Wa region would become opium-free by the end of June 2005. In an interview with two Time magazine journalists, Bao expressed his disgust at illicit drugs: ‘‘I detest them! You think drugs have been harmful to others? Let me tell you: they have been a much greater disaster for the Wa! Our people are stuck in such poverty they haven’t even got clothes to put on their own backs.”1 To affirm his resolution to ban opium, Bao even promised to chop his head off if poppies were found in the Wa region in 2005. To explain this determination, one respondent who has relatives working in the Wa authorities, noted: ‘‘He (Bao Youxiang) is regarded as a drug lord. If he does not ban opium, no one in this piece of land can make it. Only those drug lords who actually control the Wa region can do it.” To implement the opium plantation ban, the Wa authorities established a drug control committee in 1996. Three years later, the Wa authorities decided to forcefully relocate around 100 thousand villagers from the northern region to the newly-claimed southern region (Fig. 1). The rationale behind this grand-scale relocation was, according to Bao Youxiang, that ‘‘people in the north can break their backs for a year to grow enough rice to last them just six months. . . . But those who have moved south can work for one year and harvest enough rice to eat for two years.” Eventually, around 70 thousands villagers migrated from the northern region to the southern. Since 1996, opium poppy cultivation has decreased substantially. Remote sensing data shows no opium poppy cultivation in the 2006 and 2007 growing seasons in the Wa region (Tian et al., 2011). The most recent survey conducted in February 2014 by the UNODC (2014) indicated no evidence of opium poppy cultivation in the Wa region either. Many ex-opium farmers struggled to find alternative sources of income to feed their families and meet their basic human needs. 1

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2056076,00.html.

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Fig. 1. The Wa region. Panghsang is the capital city of the Wa region.

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Yuzhong, who visited the southern Wa region in 2003, felt very sad about those ex-poppy farmers2: I asked Wa officials about how to solve ex-poppy farmers’ livelihood. Where are new economic sources? The officials cannot answer. They say: ‘‘Soldiers and cadres receive the same stipends, merely 20–30 yuan per month. We cannot even handle our own livelihood. How can we help ex-poppy farmers?” [The Wa region has] so many ex-poppy farmers. More than 200 thousand! They have been suffering so much from poverty and starvation. Their life is very miserable. This misery is illustrated by Xiao Mingliang, the UWSA deputy commander, in his address on the 10th anniversary of the opium ban in the Wa region, noting that per capita income in the Wa region in 2014 was 630 yuan (US$98), illiteracy rate 90%, and child mortality 30%.3 Wa ex-poppy farmers barely overcome food shortages, and lag far behind by any standard of development. To farmers once depending on the opium economy in the Wa region, however, narcotics control is a matter of life and death, if alternative crops are not introduced to replace opium poppy to sustain their life. To handle the challenge, as the UNODC Myanmar Country office (2006: 4) argues, ‘‘sound income-generating alternative measures are needed in order to sustain the reduction of opium poppy cultivation and production.” It makes sense to place the Wa region in a broad sociopolitical context. Most remarkable over the last six decades in this region is the exclusion from investment and infrastructure improvement, and inclusion into the global drug trade. For around 600 thousand farmers, 75% of whom are ethnic Wa, living in a region spanning 27 thousand km2 and trying to survive under impoverished conditions, the drug trade proved to be ‘‘the most viable way to make a living” (Chin, 2009: 224). Because farmers have long experienced the vicissitudes of drug plantation and economic plight, the history of illicit drugs prefigures an enduring existence of narcocapitalism that extends beyond the region’s boundary. Since the mid 1990s, features that defined the Wa region—backwardness, drug business, and vulnerable communities—have now positioned it at the new frontier of transnational narcotics control by extraterritorial organizations.

ture, education, alternative crops and income generation activities, and poppy cultivation monitoring and evaluation. At the very beginning, the project area constituted three townships in the southern Wa region: Ho Tao, Mong Phen, and Mong Pawk. The Wa Project’s prospects received much publicity from the UNDCP and the Burmese government. Furthermore, Wa leaders also endorsed the agreement and made a commitment to phase out the opium industry. A UNDCP official based in Myanmar felt positive about the project, noting that ‘‘I believe they (the Wa leaders) genuinely want to see development come to their area through legitimate alternatives.”5 Milsom (2005, 84–85), one UNDCP representative, explains UNDCP’s approach in the Wa area: It employs a community-based integrated approach to assist the region with a primary focus at this stage of addressing the most basic needs of the farmers and helping them reach an income level where they can feed themselves. Its programs have provision for emergency assistance, the basic needs of farmers, and longer term income generation and development activities to develop and sustain the region with the hope of preventing a reversion to poppy cultivation in the future. This statement shows the UNODC’s will to improve Wa expoppy farmers’ livelihood through what Li (2007: 6) calls ‘‘an explicit, calculated program of intervention.” To maximize the project’s impact, the UNDCP built a partnership with international NGOs and other UN agencies such as the UN Development Programme. In general, the project established three outcomes in the target areas: a substantial increase in food production, a substantial reduction of opium poppy cultivation, and a better understanding of a community-based alternative development approach. To achieve these outcomes, the project includes four components: livelihood, health, education, and monitoring and surveying opium cultivation. A report published by the UNODC summarized that the development project worked with 7800 households living in over 1300 km2 in the southern Wa region to generate substantial social and health gains: [A]ll children under age three have been vaccinated, thus reducing infant mortality; and leprosy has been eliminated in an area that had had rates four times higher than elsewhere in Myanmar. The project brought electricity to one township, built 10 primary and 2 middle schools (Wa illiteracy rates are high), brought potable water to 2 townships and 16 hamlets and built 15 km of roads. (UNODC, 2005: 7)

4. Community-based development and narcotics control Although the United Nations and its various agencies started to work with the Burmese government on narcotics control and HIV/ AIDS projects in the 1970s and 1980s, a closer collaboration took place only in the mid 1990s, when Myanmar’s internal situation was stabilized. In 1993, the governments of China, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand and the UNDCP signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in order to collaborate on narcotics control. In 1998, with a specific focus on the Wa region, the UNDCP worked with the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control in Myanmar to launch a tenyear project titled RASC25—Drug Control and Development in the Wa Region of the Shan State (hereafter, the Wa Project). Later on, the Kokang region was included to foster the Kokang and Wa Initiative, but the major focus was still on the Wa region. With a total budget of US$15.93 million, the Wa Project was designed to ‘‘reduce the supply of and demand for opium and other drugs in the Southern Wa area using a sustainable, community based approach for reduction and eventual elimination of the opium-based economy.”4 It included 27 outputs and activities in seven spheres: community development, public health, drugs and AIDS awareness, infrastruc2 Born in Banna, Yuzhong was affiliated with state-owned Banna Television Station in the 1980s and became an independent photographer in 1992. 3 http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_9084449c0102vyae.html. 4 http://www.unodc.org/southeastasiaandpacific/en/Projects/1998_01/drug_control.html.

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It turns out, however, that UNODC and the Wa authorities have different understandings of development. While the Wa leaders hoped to use money to build roads and electricity infrastructure, the UNODC was concerned with how to foster a sustainable, community-based approach to reducing and even eliminating the supply of opium in the Wa area. As Chin (2009: 194) observes, UNODC was more interested in ‘‘community development and awareness,” and was never intended to directly allocate money to ex-poppy farmers or the Wa leaders. This observation was verified by a Wa project evaluation team: ‘‘[T]he [Wa] Authority neither understood community development, recognized the need for many [Wa] Project strategies or supported grassroots participatory work. Many in the Authority felt they only needed infrastructure inputs with which they could develop the Region alone” (Renard et al., 2003: 1). More recently, Renard (2013) explains that the Wa Project focused on farmers, while Wa officials hoped for infrastructure improvement and may have hoped that they would have some control over the project budget. 5

http://www.un.org/ga/20special/featur/crop.htm.

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The misunderstanding was so explicit that it evolved into visible tension. In 2000, the Wa Project staff built a communitybased treatment camp in a small village called Hah Da, where 19% of the villagers were using opium and all villagers were illiterate. Group activities in the camp alerted the Wa troops in nearby Mong Hpen. In June 2000, local Wa officials discouraged farmers in the village from collaborating with the project and subsequently, the Wa army unit from Mong Hpen raided the camp and detained all the patients and UNODC staff, though these detainees were soon released (Renard, 2013). In November 2000, the project staff was prohibited from entering the village (Bouan, 2001). Such a misunderstanding indicates that the whole project team underestimated the important role of the Wa authorities. To overcome the breach, the Wa Project manager decided to support major infrastructure and incorporate two main catchments (Nam Naw and Nam Lwe) in the lowland area in the second phase starting in 2001, so that the Wa authorities’ concern with location choice could be addressed (Bouan, 2001). While the Wa Project lasted for ten years, it did not fulfill the expected goals. In an internal evaluation report, Renard et al. (2003: 9) admit that the project has not succeeded, although it contributed to the Wa region’s ‘‘development and food security, introducing the concept of participatory work at all levels.” While Renard et al. (2003) attribute the limited success to the unfriendly sociopolitical conditions in the Wa region and the lack of community development experts, more factors should be considered if we want to understand the limitations of community-based development intervention. First, the initial prospect was too ambitious to implement on the ground. For instance, during Phase 1, the project kicked off many activities simultaneously, without carefully planning how these activities could benefit rural farmers (Bouan, 2001). Second, international donors pulled back their support of the project and felt reluctant to put new money in the Wa region, as the project did not generate immediate outcomes in narcotics control. Funding for the project in 2001 was reduced from a planned US$3.4 million for 2001 to US$0.6 million (Bouan, 2001). Pressured by this financial shortage, the UNDCP team redesigned the project, shifting its primary focus from an alternative programme to a drug control programme, indicating that the project would not be the engine of macro development in the Wa region, but rather would help some farmers to generate alternative income. Third, the political economy of the Wa Project played an important role in shaping its fate. While Renard (2013: 144) judged Wa officials for not having ‘‘their people’s best interests in mind,” the Wa authorities opted to receive direct financial support for projects that they thought were more important. Furthermore, the Wa Project was signed between the Burmese central government and the UNDCP, without directly involving the Wa authorities in the decision-making process. This arrangement placed the Wa Project team in a delicate power geometry. A deal with the UNDCP testified to the Burmese central government’s legitimate (and nominal) sovereignty over the Wa region, and would add to the government’s credibility if the project succeeded. As South (2009) asserts, international organizations have generally assumed that armed ethnic groups in northern Myanmar have little political legitimacy. This assumption overlooked the fact that the Wa authorities essentially control the Wa region and enjoy varying degrees of legitimacy. Coproduction of development is explicit in the case of the Wa Project. As the Burmese central government and the UNDCP excluded the Wa authorities from decision-making on development projects and ignored their interests, it was not surprising that the implementation of the Wa Project encountered difficulty and misunderstanding. Some scholars already question the community-oriented approach to narcotics control. Writing about development projects

spearheaded by international agencies such as the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA) and the UNODC in northern Myanmar, South (2009) points out that their attempts to promote economic crops such as buckwheat have been largely unsuccessful, mostly due to a lack of sustainable markets. South (2009: 148) argues that: The international response has, therefore, been largely restricted to the provision of emergency food aid, which has cushioned the shock of income loss and provided ex-poppy farmers [in northern Myanmar] with short-term food security, but failed to move from a relief phase, to develop sustainable alternative livelihoods. In the Bolivian Chapare, community-based development projects supported and promoted by USAID generate limited development impact and intensify conflicts locally and nationally (Farthing and Kohl, 2005). In northern Myanmar, Gibson and Haseman (2003) contend that the UNDCP’s approach cannot be sustained in the long run, especially if funding dries up and further expansion into large areas of the Shan State is suspended. Since 2009, the UNODC has left the Wa region for Taunggyi District in southern Shan State, investing US$2.64 million (project number: N/A) and US$1.86 million (project number: XSPK26) respectively in order to increase food security and promote licit crop production in ten villages. In celebrating social equity and community development, the community-based development intervention sets multiple social goals, but pays less attention to the structural constraints imposed on Wa farmers who have struggled for a living for decades. The Wa Project’s limited success exposed ‘‘the limits of the current repertoire of ‘alternatives’ promoted by social movements (local, community-based, food-first, small-scale)” (Li, 2014: 4). Furthermore, the Wa Project features what Friedmann (1992: 93) calls integrated rural development aiming to provide ‘‘a package of coordinated responses—from health service to agricultural extension to credit and technology dissemination.” This sort of development intervention requires a complex bureaucracy to administer projects, and places emphasis on the coordination of spending and delivering social services to chosen villages outside the regular welfare system, if it exists, provided by national or local authorities. Additionally, the donation-implementation relation indicates that project teams faced tremendous pressure to show tangible results in a short period. Hence, Friedmann (1992: 94) emphasizes that the best cases of integrated development become a ‘‘showcase for the regime in power, but many projects fail to produce the expected results.” The analysis of UNODC’s practices verifies the argument made by Li and Friedmann, showing the limitations of community-based development intervention. The Wa Project is complemented by another approach, a market-based development intervention launched by extraterritorial organizations in China, a topic I will examine now. 5. Market-based development and cross-border trade Drug trafficking from northern Myanmar to Yunnan has boomed since the mid-1990s. The Wa region became a significant source area through which drug lords could target China. The reason for this boom, according to Chin (2009), is twofold. First, a growing domestic drug-consumption market has emerged in China, which generates a black hole for heroin from northern Myanmar. China’s National Narcotics Control Commission (2013) reported 2.09 million officially registered drug addicts in China at the end of 2012, and 60.6% of drug addicts used opiate. The second reason is that drug traffickers, most of whom are ethnic Chinese, prefer the Chinese route to the Thai route, because of geographical

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proximity between drug production areas and Yunnan, better road conditions, and familiarity with the local language and customs (Su, 2015). According to China’s National Narcotics Control Commission (2013), drug trafficking from northern Myanmar into China is currently perceived by the Chinese state as a serious challenge to national security, because around 60–70% of the drugs consumed in China are estimated to come from this area. To handle the drug trade, the Chinese state endeavored to deploy opium substitution to boost socioeconomic development in the Wa region and other parts of northern Myanmar. In the late 1990s, Yunnan provincial government implemented the Green Drug Prevention Plan in order to replace opium poppies with economic crops in major opium planting areas in Myanmar.6 Initially, the prevention plan was activated by local officials in Chinese border cities who had good personal relationships with Wa ruling leaders, to facilitate entry of Chinese agricultural companies into the Wa region. Staying in the front line of development intervention, these state-owned or private agricultural companies collaborated with Wa ruling elites to hire Wa farmers to plant economic crops such as rubber, tea, rice, and sugar cane. During my fieldwork in Banna, respondents reiterated two cases of pioneering enterprises doing development projects in the Wa region in the 1990s and 2000s.7 The following two vignettes synthesize information from interviews, unpublished documents, and the enterprises’ websites. Lvbao Company is one of the biggest Chinese companies venturing into the Wa region. A private company registered in Menliang County, Lvbao invited, in 1998, a hybrid-rice expert to selectively breed suitable rice seeds with high yield for the northern Wa region. With the support from the Wa Agricultural Department, Lvbao invested 300 thousand yuan to establish an agriculturaltechnical promotion station to train Wa farmers and local technicians. Through the station, Wa farmers purchased rice seeds from state-owned Menliang County Seed Company and planted around 6.67 km2 in the first stage. The introduction of higher-yielding varieties of rice seed, plantation techniques, and irrigation has successfully increased the production of rice and reduced food deficits in the northern Wa region. The success laid the foundation for Lvbao Company to work with the Wa authorities on other agricultural projects. In subsequent years, Lvbao invested in plantation projects in orange, rubber, long’an, and other economic crops. Most of the economic crops were eventually exported into Mengliang County without being charged a tariff, clearing the final hurdle for alternative development. Banna Seed Company, affiliated with Banna Bureau of Agriculture, has played an active role in agricultural production in the Wa region. Due to the strict ban on opium poppy plantation, food shortages permeated the southern Wa region in the early 2000s. In Wa Hong District in 2001, for instance, rice production could supply only up to three months of food. In 2001, the southern Wa authorities asked the antidrug committee in Banna Prefecture for agricultural support. Then both sides reached an agreement that the Banna government would help the southern Wa region to plant Chinese hybrid rice, with the goal of resolving the rice shortage in three years. Banna Seed Company was assigned to undertake this task with financial and security support from ruling elites on both sides. In 2001, five experts from the seed company reached the southern Wa region and stayed in Wa Hong District. Their initial project was to teach Wa villagers, step by step, how to plant and manage hybrid paddy rice in a 0.36 km2 area of newly-cultivated

6

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200406/27/eng20040627_147671.html. One respondent, a retired police chief in Banna who had worked on drug control before, shared with me unpublished documents about the two enterprises and their investment data in the Wa region. Another respondent, whose relatives work for the Wa authorities, knew the Wa region very well and also told me stories about these two enterprises. 7

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experimental land. In 2002, this small piece of experimental land yielded a good harvest, encouraging more farmers to cultivate new land for hybrid paddy rice. In the following three years, the seed company helped the southern Wa region to yield 14.43 million kg of paddy rice, substantially reducing food shortage among Wa migrants. Meanwhile, the experts from the seed company held six workshops to teach 300 Wa technicians how to plant and manage paddy rice. These two cases demonstrate that development intervention is coproduced via local authorities on both sides—Chinese agricultural companies, and Wa ex-poppy farmers—with a specific goal of handling food shortage. While statistical data about rice production in the southern Wa region is difficult to obtain, it seems that most Wa ex-poppy farmers achieved some degree of endurable livelihood improvement. Yuzhong described what he saw in the southern Wa region in 2006: The migrants’ living condition was completely changed after they moved to the southern region. Those who came earlier started to harvest rice and fruits. They planted vegetables and melons around their houses. What a good harvest! As long as they worked hard, they would not suffer from hunger any more. In 2006, three years after they moved here, some of them even started to sell surplus rice. That never happened in the northern Wa region before. Here Yuzhong depicts a promising future for the southern Wa region. This optimism revolves around the fact that, for the first time, many ex-poppy farmers need not worry about their next meals. This accomplishment in handling food shortage in the Wa region was soon captured by the central government in Beijing. With a goal of eradicating opium plantation in northern Myanmar, the Chinese state encouraged Chinese agricultural enterprises to participate in the program and enhance transnational agribusiness between Yunnan and its foreign neighbors. In 2006, the State Council boosted the substitution program by creating special funds in the Ministry of Finance to provide as subsidies and tax waivers to Chinese agricultural enterprises. Annual funding for the program was increased to 250 million yuan in China’s twelfth five-year plan for 2011–2015, up from 50 million yuan previously. The funding was transferred to Yunnan provincial government and allocated by Yunnan Department of Commerce. The political and financial support made by the Chinese state generated immediate results, as many Yunnan-based companies ventured into the Wa region and other areas in northern Myanmar for agricultural investment. The strong demand for rubber, thanks to China’s booming automobile industry after 2003, has enticed many enterprises to invest in rubber plantation in the Wa region and employ ex-poppy farmers to maintain rubber trees. Table 1 shows some major agricultural investment made by Yunnan-based companies in the Wa region. Two thirds of the companies started to invest in the Wa region after 2002, and 77% of them focused on rubber. While it is hard to accurately calculate how much land these companies control for economic crops, 88.89% of the companies planted more than 5000 mu (3.33 km2) of land in the Wa region; the largest size of land reached 43.33 km2 for rubber. The results appear to confirm that rubber is now a main economic crop constituting Yunnan-based companies’ investment in the Wa region. This point is consistent with scholars’ observation of China’s agricultural investment in northern Myanmar (Woods, 2011). In essence, Chinese companies’ agricultural investment in the Wa region is a form of market-driven development intervention, with strong support from local authorities on both sides, in order to bring investment and technologies to ex-poppy farmers. The economic crops then

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Table 1 Profile of Chinese agricultural companies in the Wa region. Sources: Calculated from various reports made by departments of commerce in cities such as Gengma, Kunming, Pu’er, and Lincang. These reports were sporadically released in different years for the purpose of allocating quotas to individual enterprises that participate in the opium substitution program. The table does not aim to provide a complete list of Chinese agricultural investment in the Wa region, but offers a sense of how the investment has been operated over the last two decades. Companies

Crops

Starting year

Plantation area in the survey year (mu)

Expected total yield (ton)

Survey year

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 9 10 11 12 13 14

Cassave Tea Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Longan Eucalyptus Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Tea Rubber Sugar cane Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber Rubber

2006 1998 2004 1996 1994 N/A 2005 1998 2004 2004 2008 2005 2007 1999 2006 2006 2007 1998 2005 2006 1992 1993 1998 2002 2005 2008 2006 2002 2006

40,000 300 35,000 5000 15,326 18,000 65,000 3000 5739 8536 27,620 8500 4000 34,400 9606 5565 48,770 25,959 54,464 6500 64,555 19,400 18,075 56,090 7421 26,480 13,520 20,082 6041

4000 72 900 1800 2529 N/A 3000 9000 N/A 600 300 980 280 650 60 500 10,000 1500 200 130 5000 1040 1500 400 500 100 700 800 270

2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2008 2009 2009 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013 2013

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

are exported to Yunnan for further processing, which fosters transnational agribusiness networks between Yunnan and its foreign neighbors. The market-based approach spells out how the Chinese state delegates responsibility for policy implementation to agricultural companies. But through careful strategic calculation and political control, the Chinese state retains the power to influence the overall institutional shape of transnational narcotics control. Nevertheless, a market-based approach has limitations. While the approach aims to motivate ex-poppy farmers to plant cash crops, these famers’ subsistence security has been threatened by ‘‘the imposition of the concession, the dispossession of the villagers from their best land, the inability to negotiate for fair wages, the delay in payment, and the destruction of their crops” (McAllister, 2015: 827). Similarly, Woods (2011) points out that rubber concessions trigger the confiscation of upland swidden lands from subsistence farmers, allowing Chinese investors and their Wa partners to benefit from the rubber business. Many villagers are forcefully dislocated, ‘‘fleeing from bulldozers making way for industrial agricultural concessions rather than from fire and bullets as during the earlier war period” (Woods, 2011: 766). Although acknowledging that the arrival of Chinese entrepreneurs contributed considerably to the modernization of the Wa region since 1990, Chin (2009: 233) expresses resentment by stating that ‘‘these Chinese entrepreneurs also brought a culture of lawlessness with them [in the Wa region] and turned these areas into centers of vice where drugs, gambling, and prostitution flourished.” Additionally, since July 2014, the Wa state has stopped approving plantation projects related to rubber,

tea, and eucalyptus because of these crops’ negative ecological influences. So, how can we think about development in the Wa region? What appears certain is that the transnational agribusiness promoted by the Chinese state has contributed to a rubber boom and related social and ecological transformation in the Wa region. The global rubber market started to cool in 2011, as its price on the Singapore Commodity Exchange has plummeted from 280.90 US cents per pound in February 2011 to 82.03 US cents per pound in March 2015. This dramatic price drop brought huge risks to investors and farmers in the Wa region. During my fieldwork in 2014 in Banna, my respondents expressed anxiety over the rubber price and specified that some investors stopped extracting rubber liquor from mature rubber trees in Banna and the Wa region. A recent report from the Wa News Agency shows that rubber factories in the Wa region have no quota to sell foam rubber to the Chinese market and face serious financial distress to pay employees and rubber farmers.8 As a result, many Wa farmers have gotten stuck in an even riskier position as they face mounting challenges to secure income from the rubber industry which was supposed to generate jobs and revenues. Vellinga (1998) describes similar tendencies in the northern Andean countries, and asserts that their economic and social trajectories have been shaped by a variant of ‘‘produc tion-speculation” capitalism, first around mineral extraction and now increasingly besieged by commercialized coca production and cocaine trafficking. In Bolivia, the cash-crop approach, introduced by the USAID to plant banana and other crops, has failed to ‘‘create an alternative for coca cultivation” and made peasants ‘‘feel defrauded” (Vellinga, 1998: 18). When market and sovereignty get entangled, prospects for a cash-crop approach seem bleak. While Fox and Castella (2013) cite the successful experiences in Banna and northeast Thailand to support smallholder rubber production as a viable and effective proposition in lifting farmers out of poverty in mainland Southeast Asia, these two authors obviously omit the fact that inaccessibility to transnational markets places independent smallholder rubber producers in a very vulnerable position. To these producers, the border is the biggest obstacle to improving their livelihood, showing how ‘‘the nexus of accumulation and sovereignty is reconstituted around formally differentiated and bounded zones” (Sidaway, 2007: 352). This analysis brings us back to Li’s (2010: 400) emphasis on ‘‘the effects of a global price regime that devastated farmbased livelihoods.” China’s agricultural investment in the Wa region facilitates ex-poppy famers’ access to the market, but ties them to a turbulent global commodity market that implicates them in financial insecurity and false promises. While Li (2007: 281) contends that indigenous highlanders in Indonesia are prepared to embrace the market ‘‘as long as the conditions are fair,” my analysis shows that fair conditions in the market cannot be easily fostered to improve ex-poppy farmers’ livelihood. Furthermore, what Li seeks to describe is more a shared space of community development than a variegated network of transnational agribusiness. Whether ex-poppy farmers like it or not, the market-based approach ultimately serves as the basis of a powerful politicoeconomic taxonomy that thrusts them deeply into the global market and effectively reinforces their vulnerability in relation to external investors and local ruling elites. Transnational 8 Source from: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_9084449c01016c69.html. Rubber produced in the Wa region mainly relies on the Chinese market, as Wa products are not allowed to sell in Myanmar’s domestic market. Meanwhile, China Customs charges a 38.5% tariff on Wa rubber if it is not included in the opium substitution program. Every year, Yunnan-based companies need to report their plantation plan to Yunnan Department of Commerce and receive a quota from the department so that their Burmese branch can export tariff-free crops, including rubber, into China. Independent Wa rubber farmers and factories face huge challenges to acquire a quota issued by Yunnan Department of Commerce.

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agribusiness networks between the Wa region and Yunnan are hence embroiled in brutal amalgams of market-oriented productive forces, on the basis of localized sociopolitical relations, to facilitate capital accumulation. Still, the desired goal of endurable improvement in livelihood likely will not materialize through a market-based logic. Returning to Li’s (2010: 400) argument that we cannot tame capitalism by ‘‘building walls or wishing it away” in order to protect indigenous people, this section demonstrates how agribusiness generates dispossession, violence, hope, and struggle in the Wa region. The will to improve, as Li (2007) terms it, is a strategy of development intervention from outside which gets entangled with the nexus of accumulation and sovereignty. The flowering of the seeds of capitalism via economic crops can bring both hope and trouble to the Wa region.

6. Conclusion This paper has shown how the enactment of development intervention is played out in the Wa region, a once notorious area of drug plantation and production in northern Myanmar. Beneath the interventions in the Wa region is the articulation of a politics of coproduction among extraterritorial organizations (the UNODC and Chinese companies), ex-poppy farmers, the Wa authorities, and the Burmese central government. Development intervention projects in the Wa region reflect the unequal power relations favoring extraterritorial organizations and Wa ruling elites, and therefore reinforce ex-poppy farmers’ vulnerability, though their endurable improvement of livelihood is actually the ultimate goal of narcotics control. This finding justifies Li’s (2007: 278) argument that external trustees’ development intervention depends on and reinforces ‘‘a hierarchy that separates trustees from the people whose capacities need to be enhanced.” Importantly, the practices of development intervention are built upon and reflect social and political relations that are embedded in specific geographic contexts. The coproduction of development indicates a need to examine the embedded power dynamics and economic relations that underpin development intervention. It is time to divert some attention away from the exclusive focus on either a universal mode of market economy or a localized defense of community ties, and turn toward what Gibson and Haseman (2003: 3) call ‘‘readily available transportation and markets” through which ex-poppy farmers may achieve long-term livelihood improvement. This paper has analyzed two different approaches to development intervention in the Wa region. The UNODC’s communitybased approach highlights community building, healthcare, and human security in selected villages, while the Chinese state deploys a market-logic approach to encourage Chinese enterprises to work with ex-poppy farmers to plant economic crops such as rubber and rice. In terms of scale, the former approach is confined within a few villages, as it requires many staff members to conduct community-based service work. The latter approach can sweep the whole Wa region to such an extent that many farmers become engulfed in rubber plantation or other economic crops. The UNODC’s limited success in the Wa region differentiates between community development and improvement of farmers’ long-term livelihood. Meanwhile, the economic and ecological impacts brought by the massive plantation of rubber and other economic crops shows how a market logic, when running wild in the Wa region, subsumes Wa ex-poppy farmers into a capitalist system and generates the danger of accumulation by dispossession. While development intervention is designed to replace military intervention and act as a beacon of hope to ex-poppy farmers implicated in poverty and hunger, it degenerates into conditions in which Western organizations exemplify a ‘‘feel-good” trusteeship over

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the Wa people and Chinese enterprises ferociously pursue commercial profit in collaboration with Wa ruling elites and local Chinese governments. Both approaches have their limitations, and both have provoked socioeconomic changes in the Wa region, for good or bad. Neither approach is ideal, and the limitations of each reflect ‘‘the combined effect of people’s initiatives and [external] development intervention” (Bebbington, 2000: 512). To reconcile apparent contradictions between these two approaches, the UNODC’s community-based approach can be combined with China’s market logic to offer a more feasible scheme to address the lack of social services and inaccessibility to markets. Specifically, this scheme is inserted into the global market but socially anchored in the source areas, in order to enable ex-poppy farmers to ‘‘join the March of progress” promised in the market and to protect them from ‘‘the polarizing effect of the capitalist relations” (Li, 2014: 2). It is, above all, a development intervention scheme through which ex-poppy farmers can build confidence in economic crops and make a reasonable return on their hard work. This scheme takes me back to the point that practical engagement with extraterritorial organizations is not just a matter of reasserting the doctrine of development. The key issue, instead, is the need to confront questions of livelihood improvement—not as unfolding an ‘‘immanent and unintentional” process of implementation in drug production areas (Cowen and Shenton, 1996: 50), but as an urgent call for more intentional intervention programs with benevolent intents to help ex-poppy farmers to stay away from illicit plantation and achieve a better life. Focusing on the real practices of development, and on the limitations of development intervention, can help us to understand how ‘‘people have created livelihood opportunities that foster accumulation, as well as the obstacles to such accumulation” in a world of profound insecurity and inequality (Bebbington, 2000: 515). References Bebbington, A., 2000. Reencountering development: livelihood transitions and place transformations in the Andes. Ann. Assoc. Am. Geogr. 90 (3), 495–520. Bewley-Taylor, D.R., 1999. United States and International Drug Control, 1909–1997. Pinter, London and New York. Biddulph, R., 2011. Tenure Security Interventions in Cambodia: Testing Bebbington’s approach to development geography. Geogr. Ann.: Ser. B, Human Geogr. 93 (3), 223–236. Bouan, X., 2001. Wa alternative development project. Paper presented at the Regional Seminar on Alternative Development for Illicit Crop Eradication Policies, Strategies and Actions, Taunggyi, Myanmar. Buzan, B., Waever, O., 2003. Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Security. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Charney, M.W., 2009. A History of Modern Burma. Cambridge University Press Cambridge, Cambridge. Chin, K.-L., 2009. The Golden Triangle: Inside Southeast Asia’s Drug Trade. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Cohen, P.T., 2009. The post-opium scenario and rubber in northern Laos: Alternative Western and Chinese models of development. Int. J. Drug Pol. 20 (5), 424–430. Cowen, M., Shenton, R.W., 1996. Doctrines of Development. Routledge, London. Escobar, A., 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J.. Farrell, G., 1998. A global empirical review of drug crop eradication and United Nations’ crop substitution and alternative development strategies. J. Drug Issues 28 (2), 395–436. Farthing, L., Kohl, B., 2005. Conflicting agendas: the politics of development aid in drug-producing areas. Dev. Policy Rev. 23 (2), 183–198. Fox, J., Castella, J.-C., 2013. Expansion of rubber (Hevea brasiliensis) in Mainland Southeast Asia: what are the prospects for smallholders? J. Peasant Stud. 40 (1), 155–170. Friedmann, J., 1992. Empowerment: The Politics of Alternative Development. Blackwell, New York. Gibson, R.M., Haseman, J.B., 2003. Prospects for controlling narcotics production and trafficking in Myanmar. Contemp. Southeast Asia 25 (1), 1–19. Gootenberg, P., 2008. Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill. Kuzmarov, J., 2009. The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs. Univ of Massachusetts Press, Amherst and Boston. Levi, M., van Duyne, P.C., 2005. Drugs and Money: Managing the Drug Trade and Crime Money in Europe. Routledge, London.

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