PAPER EDITIONS-TOP STORIES |12.13.23 – Wednesday | Cabinet shake up

The government has established a permanent security command for organising security for national and sub-national elections to ensure order, no intimidation and no violence.

Its security apparatus was announced by Interior Minister Sar Sokha while he held a meeting with Prach Chan, Chairman of the National Election Committee and representatives of other relevant institutions at the Interior Ministry on Monday.

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MYANMAR: Myanmar is now world’s largest source of opium

A farmer works at an illegal poppy field in Hopong, Myanmar Shan State, in this photo taken on February 3, 2019. Fields of purple opium poppy stretch across the pastures and peaks of mountainous eastern Myanmar, with many farmers reluctant to give up the profitable cash crop in spite of incentives offered. Myanmar is the second biggest source of opium in the world after Afghanistan, with Shan state its main production hub. (AFP/Ye Aung Thu)

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Myanmar has become the world’s largest source of opium, thanks to domestic instability and a decline in cultivation in Afghanistan, the United Nations said in a report on Tuesday.

The 95 percent decline in opium cultivation in Afghanistan after a drug ban by the Taliban in 2022 has seen global supply shifted to Myanmar, where political, social and economic instability brought about by a 2021 coup drove many to poppy farming, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report said.

Myanmar farmers now earn about 75 percent more from opium poppy farming, as average prices of the flower have reached about $355 per kilogram and the cultivation area has increased by 18 percent year on year, from 40,100 to 47,000 hectares, boosting the potential yield to its highest level since 2001, the UNODC said

Reuters Bangkok,
Thailand
●   Tue, December 12, 2023