Tapping into rubber: China’s opium replacement program and rubber production in Laos

Abstract

Despite centuries of state-directed eradication efforts, opium cultivation persists in northern Laos and Myanmar. The most recent of these efforts is China’s Opium Replacement Program (ORP). Like other illicit crop substitution programmes, the ORP seeks to provide opium cultivators with licit livelihood alternatives. Unlike other programmes, it does so by supporting Chinese agribusiness investors in the region – predominantly rubber companies – instead of targeting opium producers directly. Rubber is not, however, economically or ecologically speaking, an optimal replacement for opium. Rubber and opium have contrasting production cycles and market characteristics, and are grown at different altitudes by different types of producers (large corporations and smallholders, respectively). Due to this apparent mismatch, critics have dismissed the ORP’s opium eradication aims, viewing it as a pretext for land grabs. I argue instead that rubber makes sense as an opium replacement crop based on Chinese and Lao state views that opium is a symptom of weak state control and underdevelopment in the borderlands and rubber a tried and true modernising crop. I thus offer that the ORP attempts replacement by displacement – not necessarily by physically replacing opium fields with rubber plantations, but rather by drawing land and labour into rubber, away from opium.

Keywords:

• Chinese investment
• rubber
• plantations
• Laos
• development cooperation
• opium
• illicit crop substitution

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to the BICAS Small Grants programme, and for support from my colleagues at CDE, particularly Vong Nanthavong, Cornelia Hett, Michael Epprecht and Oliver Schoenweger. I also thank Mike Dwyer, Miles Kenney-Lazar, Ian Baird, Keith Barney, You-Tien Hsing, my advisor Nancy Peluso and the wonderful Land Lab for their comments and reviews. Furthermore, Laura Schoenberger, Peter Vandergeest and the participants of the paper workshop for this collection contributed critical and extremely generative feedback on this work. Finally, I thank Eric Gutierrez for providing valuable insights into the politics of illicit crop substitutions, and I am especially indebted to Ms. YanMei, a former colleague at the World Agroforestry Centre in Kunming, who was an instrumental contributor to the data collection and initial development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A commonly used longer name for the Opium Replacement Program is 境外鸦片替代种植项目or ‘Borderlands Opium Replacement Crop Program’. Another translation for 替代 (tidai), the Mandarin Chinese word for replace, is substitute; thus, some scholars translate the programme name accordingly. Either way, 替代 means to exchange or replace one thing with another.

2 I use the adjective ‘Lao’ instead of ‘Laotian’ to indicate political affiliation with the Lao People's Democratic Republic (and not to other characteristics such as ethnicity). See Evans’ (2002, xiii) ‘Note on “Lao” or “Laos”’ for further explanation.

3 Interviews were conducted in confidentiality; thus, names of interviewees are withheld. All interviews cited are unpublished and were carried out by the author.

4 These figures are based on their contracts with the Lao government. Many area estimates reported in China exceed those reported in Laos, likely because the companies and the supporting Chinese state institutions gain positive publicity for announcing high areas of land under ‘alternative development’.

5 Some companies have more than one project; data compiled from www.xinlaowo.com (“云南省在老挝投资企业名录”), a Chinese language website on investing in Laos; cross-checked with public information from multiple online sources citing Yunnan Department of Commerce project approval information.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the BRICS Initiative for Critical Agrarian Studies Grant.

Notes on contributors

Juliet N. Lu

Juliet Lu is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, with a focus on political ecology. She has seven years of experience conducting research in China and Laos, and her research interests revolve around Chinese land investments and development cooperation initiatives in Southeast Asia.