generalspeaking

Monday, August 05, 2019

Redesigning Poppy Fields for Fruit Tree Crops

"The cultivation of poppy was so that your kids could go to school, so you could buy clothes, so you could get something extra."
"Because of that, the poppy became a magic plant: It permitted you to breathe economically. The fact that it was an illegal crop didn't matter."
Abel Barrera, director, Tlachinaollan, La Montana human rights group

"I don't know what happened and suddenly the price fell."
"We could no longer buy a lot of things: corn, all the necessities."
Ricardo, 19, San Miguel Amoltepec Vicjo, Montana region, Guerrero state, Mexico

"We're taking care of this situation."
"Many are being taken care of and they will all be taken care of."
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico

A Guerrero community police member stands guard at an illegal poppy field in Heliodoro Castillo, Guerrero state, Mexico, on March 25, 2018. PEDRO PARDO/AFP/Getty Images

"We ask that they give us everything we need—the equipment, the seeds, the temporary employment—to support us to produce the crop [fruit trees]."
"Otherwise, we don’t even have enough here to eat."
Community Commissioner, Ruperto Pacheco, La Sierra

Farmers in a poor region of southwest Mexico were able to earn money growing poppies, bleeding the milk latex from the pods that developed after the beautiful blossoms bloomed and profiting from the raw material for opium consumed mostly in the United States. The farmers were focused on poppy as a paying crop, not on poppy as a drug that was illegal, shattered lives and profited drug cartels, keeping police agencies busy trying to stop a trade that was unstoppable, as seemed the gang murders and targeting of police, lawyers, journalists who opposed the trade.

It was a living, however illicit, as the raw material for opium. And then suddenly it was no longer a means by which a family could depend on making a living. At the peak of the 2017 market, farmers were able to sell their opium resin for up to $1,300 per kilogram. Then there was the mysterious slide in its saleability when the same product in the same amount brought in a mere $110 per kilogram and suddenly that living evaporated. A 90 percent drop in earnings meant farms collapsing and families separating with young men seeking employment elsewhere, across the border into the U.S.

The bread and butter economy for about 50,000 people regionally coincided with the steady importation from China of the laboratory-produced opioid synthetic fentanyl, and opium use declined accordingly, for there was no need for opium gum when cheap and plentiful fentanyl was available. An already impoverished society became even more needy. And since the war on drugs continued as the U.S. pressured Mexico, Army helicopters continued to destroy a thousand hectares of poppy crops.
The Fentanyl Epidemic’s Other Victim: Mexican Poppy Farmers

The Fentanyl Epidemic’s Other Victim: Mexican Poppy Farmers

In La Sierra, community leaders representing nine areas petitioned the national Senate for funding in the planting of a thousand hectares of fruit trees regionally, to help kickstart the process of raising legal, sustainable produce so farmers could continue to till the land, grow crops, provide for their families. Nothing is ever simple, and abandoning poppy growing for other passably lucrative crops would take time, patience and funding the farmers didn't have. The soil had to be repaired, farm plots redesigned for trees to grow alongside beans and corn for family use. And then the wait for the trees to mature.

Farmers near the village of San Miguel Amoltepec Viejo clearing a field of dead poppy flowers so it can be planted with corn.

Credit Brett Gundlock for The New York Times

Income from poppy resin allowed farm families to remain together, putting an end to migration so parents had the comfort of having their children grow up on the farm, making for a strong community. With the evaporating of income from opium poppy nothing was left to secure the family unit, leading to another, large-scale migration from the region, some of the migrants heading to more prosperous regions than the Montana area to find work in agricultural fields and factories in Mexico.

Others kept on moving, heading to the United States, to agricultural communities in California where previous migrants from Guerrero had put down roots in Mexican enclaves. Despite their president's acknowledgement of the crisis for Guerrero poppy farmers, none of the promised financial aid and crop substitution programs heralded by President Obrador has yet materialized.