Les bulbes à opium du Myanmar : cultures de drogue ou bouée de sauvetage pour fermiers pauvres ?

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Les bulbes à opium du Myanmar : cultures de drogue ou bouée de sauvetage pour fermiers pauvres ?

28 juin 2016

Les programmes de développement rural visant à amener les fermiers à se passer de leurs cultures illicites doivent composer avec le manque de routes, d’eau et d’électricité dans des régions éloignées affectées par des milices. Pour en savoir plus, en anglais, veuillez lire les informations ci-dessous.

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By Paul Vrieze - The Guardian

U Bo sits on the floor of his bamboo hut and puts away a plastic tray covered with a small heap of what looks like sticky, brown tar. This is the day’s opium harvest, which he and his family scraped off the bulbs of their two-acre field of poppies.

His farm, at the foot of a lush mountain, in eastern Myanmar’s Shan state, includes another two acres of rice. Opium will provide his family of seven in Pe Kin village with much-needed cash – his 6kg of opium could fetch about $1,800 (£1,250) – while the paddy provides food.

“We grow poppies because other [cash] crops don’t grow well here. Corn is not good with the poor soil and weather,” says U Bo, 57, a farmer from the Kayan ethnic group.

“I spend most of the money [from opium] on sending my children to school, the rest I use to plant fruit trees,” he says. The opium is sold through a network of secret traders.

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