THE government’s fight against narcotics won praise in a report released on June 26 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to mark the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking. This year’s edition of the annual World Drug Report by Vienna-based UNODC said efforts by the governments of Myanmar and Laos to reduce opium production in the past few years could pave the way for the complete elimination of opium cultivation in Southeast Asia. The report also praised Myanmar for stepping up its efforts to curb trafficking of the stimulant methamphetamine. It said the acreage used for opium cultivation in the two countries declined by 78 percent from 1998 to 2005. “Sustained progress has been made by the Governments of Myanmar and Laos PDR in addressing the issue of opium cultivation. In 2005, Myanmar achieved a further reduction of the total area under cultivation by 26 percent to 32,800 hectares,” the report said, adding that in the same period Laos slashed opium cultivation by 72 percent to 1800 hectares. “In 2005, both countries only accounted for seven percent of global opium production compared to one-third of global opium production in 1998,” the report said. “If these declines can be sustained, and this appears to be the case, Southeast Asia could disappear from the global illicit opium production map in the not-too-distant future.” “Sustaining these remarkable achievements, however, largely depends on the availability of socioeconomic alternatives for the farmers who have given up a traditional source of their livelihood. This makes the provision of development assistance to these communities both a humanitarian and a strategic necessity.” The government said hundreds of thousands of former opium farmers in the Kokang and Wa special regions in Shan State who had given up opium cultivation in recent years were in need of alternative development assistance. It also acknowledged that Myanmar had stepped up its efforts to stop trafficking of methamphetamine tablets over the past year, citing the seizure of nearly 15 million tablets in Shan State last January. Meanwhile, the government marked the International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking on June 26 by burning drugs it said were worth US$148 million at the Drugs Elimination Museum in Sanchaung township. More than 600 kilograms of opium, nearly 170kg of heroin and about 2.1 million methamphetamine tablets seized in the past year were burned at a ceremony presided over by Secretary-1 of the State Peace and Development Council Lieutenant General Thein Sein. Speaking at the ceremony, Police Chief Brigadier General Khin Yi said Myanmar will increase its cooperation with neighbouring countries to make its anti-narcotics efforts more effective. “The result of increased collaboration is that the movements of drug trafficking syndicates are considerably reduced,” he said. He said the government considered the threat of methamphetamine stimulants to be a major challenge for the country’s law enforcement agencies in the future. “Myanmar is taking this issue seriously and taking effective steps to combat this problem,” Brigadier General Khin Yi said, referring to talks with neighbouring countries to increase the monitoring of chemicals brought into Myanmar to manufacture the narcotics. At a press conference after the ceremony, the joint secretary of the Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control Police Colonel Hkam Awng said the increasing scarcity of narcotics in the market reflected the success of the government’s efforts to eradicate their use. He said this scarcity had also contributed to an increase in price, in the case of opium from K280,000 a kilo in 2001 to K1.1 million this year. In the same period, the price of heroin went up from K6 million to K86 million a kilo, while the price of a methamphetamine tablet has increased nearly fourfold from K700 in 2001.