Myanmar’s Opium Growers Struggle to Get by With Potatoes

Ukan Nang Ati, 48, used to scrape a living growing opium in the isolated countryside behind the village of Kyauk Ka Chan in Myanmar’s mountainous north. Then soldiers swept through Shan State and razed swathes of poppy fields to the ground.

Pointing to a denuded area on a steep slope behind him, the farmer from the Pao tribe said he’s now trying to feed his wife and two children by growing potatoes and tea leaves, even though that earns him a fraction of what he made cultivating the blooms that are processed into opium paste and refined into heroin.