"...Opium cultivation in Myanmar has steadily declined since 2000, and two-thirds of poppy crops have disappeared. Compared with the peak in 1996, the number of hectares devoted to opium has been reduced by 80% in 2005, from 163,000 hectares to 32,800 hectares. When adding the weather factor, influencing opium yields on the fields, an 82% decline in the opium production is registered over the same period of time. While the data included in the report is largely positive, certain worrying factors, with a potential to undo this rapid progress, need addressing. Compared to the previous year, opium production has doubled in the southern Shan State despite the acreage showing only a slight increase. This is in part due to additional rains, however, and more disquieting, also due to improved cultivation practices. The latter, in turn, is an indication of more sophisticated criminal activity, transcending poverty, and not dissimilar to the trends witnessed with ATS production: cross-border networking and transfer of new and improved techniques. Even so and taking note of the exception mentioned, general figures overwhelmingly associate opium with marginal economic conditions typical to remote mountainous areas in which most of the opium is grown. Shocking for anybody less familiar to the opium problem in Myanmar, is the low income of farmers in the Shan State. Non-opium growing households in the Shan State earn an average US$364 annually, against only US$292 for an opium farming household, consisting of both parents and two to four children. Half of the households surveyed in the Shan State report food insecurity; a figure that rises to an astounding 90% in concentrated poppy-cultivation areas. With the loss of opium income, these poor farmers and their families not only lose their coping mechanism to deal with endemic poverty and a chronic food shortage; they equally lose access to health services and to schools. They end up very vulnerable to exploitation and misery ? from human right abuses to enforce the opium bans, to internal displacement or human trafficking to survive the bans. For the United Nations, replacing one social evil (narcotics) with another (hunger and poverty) is wrong. Therefore the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime calls on the international community to provide for the basic human needs of those affected. The situation in the Golden Triangle is similar to the one in Afghanistan and the Andeans: some of the poorest people are being affected by the loss of income from drugs as cultivation declines. Thus, the international community must have the wisdom to fight drugs and poverty simultaneously, to eliminate both the causes and the effects of these twin afflictions. In other words, the world will not condone counter-narcotic measures that result in humanitarian disasters. If there is one concrete measure that the Government and its development assistance partners can take now to ensure Myanmar?s future, it is this: food security and income generation programmes must remain in place and be strengthened to support both the farmers? decisions not to plant opium, and enforcement measures to eradicate the opium that is planted against the law..."