Rubber fields forever for Wa?

“We have been able to employ 70% of our people,” he estimated. “We still need to find ways to help the remaining 30%.”
 
The Wa leaders, according to Tom Krammer’s The United Wa State Party: Narco-Army or Ethnic Nationalist Party? (2007) put the total Wa population in Burma at 600,000.
 
“The real percentage of the unemployed could be as high as 50%,” according to a Panghsang resident. “Layoffs are evident wherever we go throughout the Wa territory.”

 

Rubber is abundantly planted in the following areas:
·         Namteuk (Namtit)              initiated by Ai Roong, nephew to Bao Youxiang, Wa supreme leader, already producing rubber
·         Panghsang                         initiated by the top leadership
·         Mongmai (Mongmau)         initiated by Hongpang Co.
·         Wiang Kao                        initiated by Zhongxinbao
·         Mongpawk                        initiated by Wei Hsaitang
·         Mongphen                         initiated by local administrators
·         Mongyawn                        initiated by Hongpang Co.
 
Rubber factories however have only been set up in Namteuk, on the Kokang-Wa-China triangle, and Panghsang.
 
Most of the rubber projects are said to be supported by the Ximao (in Yunnan)-based Nong Chang Company.
 
The employee-cum-tenant is given Y 5 per mu (one-sixth of an acre) per month. Each family can tend to at least 50 mu (30 plants per mu) thus earning about Y250 ($31.3). “Besides the employee has a share to the proceeds after its harvest, according to mutual agreement,” said a local rubber planter. “Some gets as high as 40%. For myself, it’ll be 50:50 after deducting the investment.”
 
Each mu is expected to produce 8-10 kg of rubber juice, priced at Y5-13 ($.6-1.6) per kg.
 
Not all are happy about the arrangement.
 
“Part of the plantation used to be my land,” said a tenant, “but it was confiscated by the company.”
 
Some have also turned to petty peddling of drugs to make up for the loss of income from poppy cultivation. One of the police officers in Panghsang told S.H.A.N., “We caught and jailed about 400 offenders during the last year and 300 of them were either using or retailing drugs.”
 
A mother of 2 small children coming to Panghsang following the 2005 opium ban grudgingly agreed. “My husband is in jail for selling drugs,” she said. “But he is just small fish. Jails are for small fish and not for the big fish who hire the likes of him to do the job for them.”
 
She also told SHAN she is not thinking of going back to Motlay, her home village, unless there is a return to poppy cultivation. “What I earn at the rubber plantations is less than what I got from the opium fields,” she said, “but more than what I shall get from growing hillside rice.”
 
Support from the international aid agencies filled up only a tenth of their needs, Wa officials told S.H.A.N.
 
This has led to one of the biggest “voluntary” migrations in Wa history. “Our village tract, Pang Hperng, has 5 villages and everyone of them grew poppies,” said a 54-year old villager who had since 2005 arrived in Panghsang to make a living by digging and transporting sand to construction sites. “But following the ban, all young men had gone to the four winds and many girls became Chinese wives.”
 
According to Unsettling Moves: The Wa forced resettlement program in Eastern Shan State, (2002), a report by Lahu National Development Organization (LNDO), Panghsang had resettled some 126,000 along the Thai-Burma border.