MONG MAO, Wa Special Region — In Mong Mao, one of seven districts that comprise the Wa Special Region here in northeastern Burma’s Shan State, tea is tops.
The region, bordering China’s Yunnan province, is mostly inhabited by ethnic Wa people under the control of the United Wa State Army (UWSA), Burma’s largest ethnic armed group. It takes about four hours by car to get to Mong Mao from Panghsang, where a dozen ethnic leaders are gathered this week to discuss prospects for a nationwide ceasefire with Burma’s government.
The high altitude and relatively cool temperatures here provide a suitable climate for growing tea, which is primarily exported to Taiwan. On the verdant slopes of Mong Mao’s hills, tea plantations stretch to the horizon. harvested leaves from the plantations are sent to nearby tea-leaf processing plants.
The UWSA offered ethnic leaders and a handful of journalists a tour of one such factory, which processes raw tea leaves picked by about 200 workers, most of them women and girls, at one plantation spread across 700 acres.
But according to UWSA chairman Bao Youxiang, there is more to these agricultural enterprises than job creation and profit: The tea of Mong Mao is an example of successful crop substitution on hills that were once covered in opium poppies, he explained.
Farmers in the area had grown opium poppies for more than 120 years, he said, earning condemnation from the United States and other Western countries, which viewed the UWSA as complicit if not actively involved in cultivation of the crop.
But Bao said this week that his army had worked to successfully eradicate opium production in 2005, with the cooperation of local people.
“Our region no longer grows opium. On June 26, it will be a decade since the end of opium production in our region,” he added.
An inspection by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime last year appears to bear out the claim, with the UNODC “rapid assessment” finding no evidence of opium poppies in the Wa region. A healthy skepticism is warranted, however, toward any claims of noninvolvement in the wider illicit narcotics trade, which is rife in parts of Shan State. A leaked US diplomatic cable described the UWSA in 2010 as “known narcotics traffickers,” citing a US Drug Enforcement Agency assertion that “senior leadership of the UWSA are heavily and directly engaged in narcotics trafficking.”
