OPIUM FARMS SHRINK 80% OVER DECADE

Acreage Cut To Fewer Than 1,000 Hectares

The area planted in opium in Thailand fell to below 1,000 hectares last
year for the first time since records were begun more than 25 years ago.

A US report said opium farming had fallen by 80% in the last 10 years.

Unfavourable weather and government anti-drug efforts combined to cut the
opium crop throughout the Golden Triangle last year but the Thai crop fell
38%, the highest of any country.

"Already marginal production in Thailand further plummeted," said the
annual US State Department report on narcotics. The country now has "less
than a fraction of 1% of Southeast Asian potential (opiate) production".

OPium was planted on just 835 hectares, mostly in the North, the report
said-about 5,200 rai. By contrast, Burma had 89,500 hectares under opium
and Laos still had 21,800 hectares of poppies.

Thai opium production peaked in 1989 at 4,075 hectares, or more than 25,000
rai, according to historical data. Since then Thailand has been effectively
removed from the list of heroin-producing countries. Crop substitution was
the most successful programme in its elimination, including providing the
means for farmers to transport new crops to market.

Last year was a bad growing year for opium-or a good year from a drug
suppression point of view.

Burma's opium crop dropped to around 1,090 tonnes of opium on 89,500
hectares. It was the smallest acreage in Burma since the country's rulers
began to exploit poppy cultivation in 1988.

The US report said the drop in Burmese poppy acreage last year was mostly
because of the weather. The State Department report, released in early
March each year, gave no credit to anti-drug efforts by Burma.

The report said Thailand remains a major drug transit point, as a
significant amount of heroin passes through the country on its way to the
US. The country was also singled out as one of 48 major money-laundering
centres, including the United States.

As in recent years, Thailand won praise from Washington for its dedication
to international anti-drug efforts. It also won sympathy for its problems
with methamphetamine abuse.

"The epidemic of methamphetamine abuse rapidly accelerated (in 1999),
especially among the young," said the report. Thailand has a serious need
"for cost effective, community-based models of addiction treatment and
additional abuse-prevention training for both public and private sector
health professionals."

The US report also:

- - Praised Thai crop substitution as "one of the most effective illicit
narcotic crop control programmes in the world";

- - Said that money laundering was the main Achilles heel of drug traffickers
and Thailand finally had instituted world-class measures to combat it;

- - Said that methamphetamine cases had gone from 1.8% to 67.3% of
drug-related court cases in 10 years;

- - Claimed that anti-drug units were largely "clean".