Director-General/Executive Director
Excellency Privy Councillor Kampanat Ruddit,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Distinguished participants,
I am honoured to be with you today to discuss the successes of alternative development in Thailand and beyond, and to reflect on the path ahead.
It is a pleasure to be here in this historic, cultural, and beautiful city of Chiang Mai, and it was a special honour to attend last night’s event presided by his Majesty the King and her Majesty the Queen. Their presence is a strong sign of continued and much needed political support.
I was very keen to be here with all of you to highlight the power of alternative development at this critical time.
Across the globe, organized crime is thriving on instability, and drug economies are at the heart of it.
Synthetic drugs have given rise to new production and trafficking models, as well as new health risks.
But plant-based drugs have also persisted and expanded, fueling violence where they operate, environmental degradation where they cultivate, and drug dependence around the world.
This conference is the perfect occasion to highlight how we can push back.
Alternative livelihoods present a vision for long-term security and sustainable development, to uproot the illicit economies of today in Southeast Asia and beyond, a vision built around human development and human rights.
The seeds for this vision were planted by His Majesty King Rama the ninth more than 5 decades ago. His Majesty King Rama the tenth carried this legacy forward.
And the Royal Project spearheaded the implementation of this vision on the ground into a comprehensive local development project, as shared in detail by His Excellency the Privy Councillor.
The results were remarkable, going from 100,000 hectares of opium poppy to under 100 hectares in 50 years, changing the nature of the economy in those lands.
It is a success story that we continue to learn from at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, including in our close collaboration with the Mae Fah Luang Foundation and the Royal Project Foundation, and I hope that together we can build a global alliance of AD.
This success story sustains our hopes to replace illicit crops with dignified livelihoods everywhere.
Excellencies,
Alternative development has been a paradigm shift in drug policy.
It changed the narrative surrounding farming families, asserting that they are not adversaries in our efforts against the world drug problem, but partners.
Everywhere, the evidence shows that farmers resort to illicit crops out of desperation and not greed.
In Myanmar and elsewhere, farmers resort to illicit cultivation for the little extra cash and the ease of handling it.
The reasons most often cited by farmers for engaging in illicit cultivation are food security, ensuring basic needs, and affording education for their families.
At its heart, alternative development is about working against vulnerability, fragility, and desperation. So, it is about addressing root causes.
Distinguished participants,
After many years of progress, alternative development has become a mainstay of international drug policy.
At the UN General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016, Member States affirmed their commitment to alternative development.
And at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna, they have adopted many important international resolutions on alternative development, with Thailand playing a strong leading role.
In practice and on the ground, alternative development is now considered a central part of effective strategies to tackle illicit crop cultivation.
But today, driven by increased demand and despite the years of hard work, illicit cultivation persists, as reflected in the findings of UNODC’s cultivation surveys.
In Colombia, Coca cultivation grew by 10% in 2023, and the country now has 253,000 hectares of coca crops.
Cocaine production also increased in Colombia for the 10th consecutive year, rising by more than 50% over 2022.
In Myanmar, opium poppy cultivation increased by 18% in 2023 to reach 47,100 hectares, a third successive year of increase, and this year it appears to have remained at this high level.
Myanmar is now the primary source of opium in the world, replacing Afghanistan, where cultivation has plummeted in the past two years.
But even in Afghanistan, cultivation only declined in 2023, after the implementation of an opium ban, plummeting by 95%.
And while the ban continued to hold in 2024, the area under cultivation crept back up by 19%, suggesting that the devastating impact on farmers’ income threatens the long-term prospects of the initial results.
Most of the opium poppy fields in Afghanistan have been replaced by wheat crops, but this produces a per-hectare income more than ten times lower, and needs higher quantities of water for irrigation.
Distinguished participants,
The challenges we see today with illicit cultivation do not reflect a failure of alternative development policies.
They reflect the urgent need to revisit these policies, taking into consideration the context, adding elements of sustainability, efficiency, market responsiveness, access to markets, and economies of scale.
There is no doubt that alternative development has worked for the hundreds of thousands of families who have been lifted out of poverty and out of illicit economies and we are proud of the support provided to them to find dignified incomes away from illicit crops.
In 2023 alone, our support reached 100,000 families in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Colombia, Laos, Myanmar, Peru and Thailand, and we are proud of every family.
But to push back meaningfully against the scale of illicit cultivation today, we have to take AD projects to the next level.
Alternative development works. But it needs to be scaled up massively.
The level of funding available for this work is still very short of what we need in order to assist the hundreds of thousands of families involved in illicit crops cultivation globally.
And if it is not stepped up, the farmers will remain trapped, the drug economies will continue to grow, and the harms to health and security will be felt around the globe.
It is time to invest far more seriously and differently in ambitious, comprehensive, and sustainable alternative development.
And I must emphasize here that AD is a shared global responsibility, not just out of international solidarity, but because the chain of impact and causality stretches across regions and countries, north and south, rich and poor.
After all, the illicit economies that drive cultivation are underpinned by the growing demand for cocaine and for heroin, and the overwhelming bulk of the profits in the illicit drug trade are not made by the farmers.
They are made in destination countries and pocketed by traffickers, which fuels organized crime in different parts of the world.
Excellencies,
To ensure sustainability and impact, we must recognize that alternative development is a journey, and on that journey, we have learned some very important lessons.
First and foremost, we have learned that effective alternative development is about so much more than replacing illicit crops with licit ones.
It is about building an effective value chain.
In UNODC’s AD projects, we give farmers technical assistance on modern agricultural practices. We support crop diversification to minimize dependence on one crop or market. And we offer training on post-harvest management and processing.
But we also go beyond farm activities and deliver vocational training to diversify income for small and landless farmers.
We provide support on entrepreneurship and business skills.
And we connect farmers with international markets, such as through our partnership with French and Belgian coffee roasters, which helped export more than 300 tonnes of coffee to Europe in 2023, from thousands of farming households across 4 countries.
Working with the private sector is key, for innovation, for quality and for access to markets.
Further to that, we promote investment in infrastructure such as irrigation canals, roads to connect farmers with the market, transportation facilities, post-harvest processing centres and cold storage.
And we help set up agricultural cooperatives, so the farmers can organize and own the process and the incomes. In this, involving local governments is key.
I am particularly proud of our work here in Southeast Asia, and specifically in Huapan and Pongsaly Provinces of Lao PDR and Shan State in Myanmar, the two main remaining opium cultivation areas in the region.
We have reached thousands of farmers in both countries over the past five years, helping set up effective cooperatives and establish industries for coffee and tea that compete with the opium economy.
The cooperatives are involved not only in the cultivation of their crops, but also in the processing and sale of produce, increasing their share of the value chain.
In those examples, we have been guided by Thailand’s example of sustainability and transformational interventions.
UNODC’s analysis of AD projects shows that our beneficiaries care more about future than present needs, proving that long-term investment secures buy-in from farming communities.
Side-by-side with those lessons, we have learned that alternative development is at its most impactful and sustainable when it converges with broader development efforts along with investments in health, education and infrastructure.
AD projects can be engines for the Sustainable Development Goals, especially when addressing development needs at the local levels, and here are some examples:
They can boost food security, such as UNODC’s efforts in Colombia to help 700 families cultivate sacha inchi, an Amazonian seed used in nutritional supplements for the most vulnerable.
They can promote climate-smart solutions, such as our work in Afghanistan on low-water irrigation systems, indoor cultivation methods, and drought tolerant crops.
And crucially, they can empower women in rural communities by providing female-headed households with economic and technical assistance to access incomes that would otherwise be out of reach.
And providing women with incomes also helps protect them from violence, helping them become more independent and resilient, and protects their children and provides them with better chances to access education.
But the types of interventions that target women must go beyond limited skills for limited income.
They must enable them to take part in commercial agricultural production and decision making.
In Putumayo, Colombia, for example, the number of men and women beneficiaries of our project is practically equal.
And in Afghanistan, 35% of the households we reached over the past four years are headed by women.
At UNODC, we have an unwavering commitment to inclusion everywhere we work. This includes youth for whom we need to provide hope and opportunities.
Excellencies,
As we look to leverage alternative development to power the SDGs, we must think big, because the problems are big.
We must envision AD in a broader sense, not just as a solution to illicit drug cultivation, but as an alternative to illicit economies at large.
The logic and lessons of alternative development can be brought to bear against challenges like conflict-affected communities, organized crime, and synthetic drugs.
In places like Afghanistan and Myanmar, alternative development should be integrated into urgent humanitarian and emergency responses, particularly as insecurity and illicit economies are co-dependent.
And in countries and areas without illicit drug cultivation, AD can be extremely relevant in building resilience.
I saw this myself two and a half years ago, right here in the province of Chiang Mai, when I visited the village of Huay San and witnessed AD principles being applied beyond illicit cultivation, to create jobs and opportunities as part of the Roi Jai Rak Project, and I was very impressed.
Countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria are already engaging with UNODC to explore how alternative livelihoods can benefit populations along drug trafficking routes, in urban areas, and in communities vulnerable to crime and drug use.
And this year, the Arab League commissioned a study from UNODC on the relevance of alternative development in the Arab context, a good attempt at South-South cooperation.
I am keen on exploring how we can expand the benefits of alternative development here in the region as well, and to expand partnerships with civil society, particularly as synthetic drugs continue to spread.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Illicit economies have proven that they are persistent. They cost lives, bleed communities, perpetuate exploitation, hamper development and create a vicious cycle of violence.
To break that cycle, we must scale up alternative livelihoods and sustain them.
In our work with farming families at UNODC, we have been encouraged to find out that, despite the higher incomes from illicit crops, farmers were generally very keen on learning licit farming activities.
People want to make the right choices.
But we must ensure that every one of them has a choice to make. And starving is not a choice.
Giving everyone a choice means investing in human development, equality, and sustainability.
It means empowering communities to lift themselves up, while working in harmony with nature.
And I would like to end by reiterating my admiration and great respect for the Thai experience in alternative development, which benefitted from the highest political support and was based on research and science, a sustained investment for many years, and constant efforts for transformation and innovation, including embracing A.I. and carbon credit markets and contributing to global efforts of climate mitigation and adaptation, offering the world a lot to learn from.
Thank you.
