IN Myanmar's new war on drugs, meet the weapon of mass destruction: the weed-whacker.

Its two-stroke engine spins a metal blade, which is more commonly deployed to tame the suburban gardens of wealthy Westerners. But today, in a remote valley in impoverished Shan State, Myanmar police armed with weed-whackers are advancing through fields of thigh-high poppies, leaving a carpet of stems in their wake.

When the police are finished, their uniforms are flecked with a sticky brown sap harvested from these flowers for centuries: opium. Myanmar produced an estimated 610 tonnes in 2011, making it the world's second-biggest opium supplier after Afghanistan, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The area under poppy cultivation has doubled in the past five years.

Now, emerging from half a century of military dictatorship, Myanmar says it wants to buck that trend.

Since taking power a year ago, the nominally civilian government of President Thein Sein has launched a series of political and economic reforms. It has also dramatically accelerated a campaign to eradicate opium poppies and shed Myanmar's pariah status as one of the world's top drug producers.

Wiped out by 2014

"Every year the international community spends millions of dollars (on anti-narcotics initiatives) in countries like Afghanistan and Colombia, and the outcome is not satisfactory," Sit Aye, senior legal advisor to President Thein Sein, said in an interview.

"Here, with international assistance, we guarantee to wipe out the opium problem by 2014."

It is an ambitious goal. Police, soldiers and villagers armed with sticks and weed-whackers have destroyed 21,256 hectares (52,525 acres) of poppy fields since September, more than triple the area eradicated during the previous growing season, according to Myanmar's Central Committee for Drug Abuse Control (CCDAC). This has potentially prevented almost 30 tonnes of heroin, opium's most notorious derivative, from hitting the world market, according to calculations based on UNODC statistics.

But opium had been harvested from some poppies before they were destroyed, Reuters found. And while more poppy is being destroyed, more is also being grown: the total area under cultivation will likely rise by about 10 per cent between 2011 and 2012, the UNODC estimated. This suggests that, with or without foreign assistance, Myanmar's three-year target is unrealistic.

Most opium produced in Myanmar comes from Shan State, a rugged and lawless region bordering China, Thailand and Laos. It is part of the Golden Triangle, which is probably named after the gold once used to buy opium. Here, and in neighbouring Kachin State, poppies thrive not just on cooler weather and higher altitudes, but on poverty and conflict.

For half a century, Myanmar has been torn apart by fighting between government forces and various ethnic rebel groups ranged along its borders, where people have endured the worst human rights abuses.

Alternate crops

Chopping down opium poppies is the easy part. Helping former poppy-growing families develop alternative crops and livelihoods are complicated and costly.

In Afghanistan, on the other side of the Himalayas, opium production is so vast and sophisticated that it resembles a legitimate agribusiness in some areas. But in Myanmar, poppies are produced mainly by subsistence farmers who depend upon the cash opium generates to buy food.

About 256,000 households are involved in opium poppy cultivation, the UNODC estimates. The opium yield from an acre (a third of a hectare) of Myanmar poppy is worth about US$1,000 (around $1,259). That's a life-saving sum of money in Myanmar, where a third of its 60 million people live on a dollar a day.

Poppy proliferation

The weed-whackers destroy not just fully grown poppy plants, but also a hard-to-spot second stage of seedlings which some farmers plant between them. "This year's opium crop will be greatly reduced because of these tools," said Police Colonel Win Naing, Shan State's chief of police.

UNODC officials agreed, but cautioned that eradication wasn't the only factor influencing the season's total production.

One was bad weather. In many parts of Shan State, heavy rain had washed away poppy seeds or damaged young plants. This alone might have halved the yield before eradication began.

International acceptance

Neighbouring Thailand was proof that alternative development worked, the UN's Eligh said, although it took more than 30 years and a billion dollars to halt large-scale poppy-growing there. Thailand still produces about five tonnes of opium every year, despite dispatching troops on regular poppy-eradication missions. This fact alone suggests that Myanmar's bid to eradicate opium in just three years is fanciful.

But the target of 2014 was chosen for a reason: that year, for the first time, Myanmar will mark its growing acceptance by the international community by chairing the Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN), a position it was denied six years ago amid Western uproar over its human rights record.

One potentially embarrassing UNODC survey map showed dense poppy cultivation only a few hours' drive from Myanmar's capital Naypyitaw, where ASEAN and world leaders will gather in 2014.

ASEAN has declared that its 10 member states will be "drug free" by 2015, an equally fanciful target considering the region's soaring use of methamphetamine.

Better known in its pill form as ya ba, it is also manufactured in huge quantities in Shan State. When asked whether poppies or pills were the bigger law-enforcement challenge, Pol Col Tin Maung Maung of the CCDAC replied, "Both are a great problem for us." Reuters