The experience of a village— which in the interest of anonymity I’ll call Village A— is typical. This is a Tedim Chin village of twenty-six households, of whom a minority might be involved in opium cultivation in the surrounding hills. Village A sits upon a picturesque ridgeline overlooking surrounding hilltops, at the end of a cliff-hugging dirt track an hour off the Chikha—Tonzang road. The village was founded eighty-five years before, when the ancestors of today’s residents abandoned their land further east, near modern-day Tonzang town, after they’d exhausted the soil there. While the ridge Village A occupies provides beautiful views, its position, like so many other Chin villages, was chosen as a defensive one. That position of safety is now one of isolation; the households here contain 160 residents, most either very old or very young. This is a residual population, with a majority of residents, working age men in particular, living and working in Kalay or further afield; some are in India and Malaysia, with select members of this diaspora only returning for occasional familial, religious, and cultural obligations. There is no phone signal here, no secondary school, no permanent health clinic, and no shops; there is, however, a small primary school and a mobile health clinic that arrives every few weeks from Chikha. The village teens live with relatives or board in Chikha town, where the nearest secondary school is. Village A’s people grow corn and raise livestock for their own needs, but those so inclined also grow poppy for cash. In 2009, Khonumthung reported 500 hectares under cultivation in the area, although interviewees here describe cultivation decades earlier. The 2019 price of one kilogram of dried opium here is 15 lakh kyat: enough for a year’s needs. But the trade here is not merely subsistence: it has organizers, and some of those villagers now resident in Kalay, people imply, have nice cars and big houses. Still other purchasers are Burmese and Indian, and the end destination for the product is India. The purchasers come to Village A directly. Village A’s farmers here are encouraged by unmentioned persons to cultivate poppy, but they don’t report being coerced. Those in agreement are provided tools and seed on a contract farming model, but tellingly, with less exploitation than what is found in contract farming of licit crops. In other parts of Myanmar, and Thailand as well, contract farming often results in indentured servitude in all but name, and yet oblivious groups continue to “sell” it as the future of farming. The global professional services firm KPMG, for example, shows a remarkable lack of understanding of the nearly systematic abuse that occurs in the contract farming model.^[1] The opium poppy crop produced in Village A is also taxed locally by local elites, described as “strong people.” In recent years, government actors have arrived in Village A to eradicate the opium crops on the hills near the village, but they have not made arrests. In a surprisingly progressive manner, those unmentioned persons who supplied the inputs for poppy cultivation did not consider the growers liable for the loss. In Afghanistan, on the other hand, landless sharecropper families would become enslaved for just such an outcome, and the implicit involvement of the Americans in such eradication actions undoubtedly lent support—and landless, indebted recruits—to the Taliban.^[2] In Village A, as elsewhere, the alternative livelihood policy is simplistic, based on sentiment rather than action, and talk of untested quick fixes abound. Government extension agents and others have visited Village A and promised to return with Arabica seedlings and expertise, but they have not. Sandalwood trees have also been suggested. This is clownish, and reminds me of the way saffron was bandied about as a miracle cure for poppy cultivation in northwestern Afghanistan, where I worked in 2005-2006. That crop proved too nuanced and too labor-intensive for all but a small number of successful farmers; here, Arabica might prove more durable. But a paradox remains. These villages were founded in a time before they were integrated, or sought to be integrated, in cash-based markets. Their positions of isolation were selected on the basis of defense and this is inimical to roads being built to them, or services provided to them, in an affordable manner. The track connecting Village A to the rest of the world, and which connects opium growers to opium buyers, requires near-constant maintenance—maintenance undertaken by the Tatmadaw, which has a ubiquitous presence along the track. This is not to imply they are buyers; if they were, I wouldn’t have been allowed within miles of them. This is a border area, and therefore sensitive, and soldiers function as free labor. I came across a group of them at the foot of the road to Village A, on a training exercise, unloading light mortars and wooden crates of shells from a truck. Another group further up the track lay smoking and reading newspapers in the morning light, their rifles laying at their sides, alongside grass cutters. Village A is lucky; so are nearby Village B’s 11 households, with the Tatmadaw maintaining their track as well. Like Village A, they grow rice and corn, and raise goats and pigs; others grow oranges and monkey leaf and taro. They tried and failed at potatoes. Coffee grows wild in the surrounding hills but none knew what to do with it until three enterprising families planted new coffee in an organized manner. Two years remain before the first harvest, and this is another lesson for those who speak of alternative livelihoods: farmers aren’t stupid. They seek out and embrace new products and technology, but the key to their absorption of new products and new technologies is not their ambition and intelligence so much as it is tenure over their land. With tenure, crops like coffee, which take years before the first harvest arrives, can be cultivated. But without tenure, short-term crops such as opium are the logical choice, and the safe one, in an area where opium cultivation is encouraged and laws aren’t enforced. While the Tatmadaw might maintain the tracks to these villages, a track is not a road. These are red earth trails that disintegrate with every monsoon season. Villagers here would trade an opium crop for a road, hands down, but one will never be built because of the small population and the high cost. This means that all but the hardiest crops, like opium or coffee, will be too damaged to sell by the time they arrive at market. The future of these villages isn’t sandalwood or coffee, so much as it is subsistence and continued marginalization or relocation. This is one “blind spot” of many that people involved in alternative development projects often have. When they speak of alternate crop introduction, they describe it in terms of market linkages, but they don’t take into account the necessarily remote locations of communities involved in opium. Without a road, it’s not about market linkages, but food security and nutritional diversification. These are good, but they do not replace the value of the ultimate cash crop. And that’s the secret, revealed in Thailand over decades: what ultimately stopped farmers from growing opium wasn’t alternate crops. It was the coercion that could occur at the hands of the state once the state’s security actors were disentangled from the drug trade across decades. The late king Bhumibol Adulyadej insisted that alternative development programs start long before eradication and arrests began. Those programs ran for a decade and a half before wholesale eradication started in 1984. And while the alternative development program had some success in some areas, opium was still cultivated and sold. In 1984, Thailand’s hectares under cultivation approached an all-time high, and with the king’s reluctant approval, the army began a scorched earth campaign across cultivation areas in the northwest. A hill tribe friend who was a child in 1985 still has nightmares about it. Cultivation plummeted and communities took to alternate crops when it became clear that the Leviathan had two ways of doing things, one less sanguine than the other.