“Community participation” is one of the most hallowed concepts in rural reconstruction and development. It is regarded as the golden standard of people’s ownership and agency. Without community participation, development solutions become imposed from above and fail to be sustainable.
What happens, then, when community participation revolves around the involvement of poor and marginalized people in illicit and illegal activities? When poor Filipinos engage in illegal logging, illegal fishing, or smuggling across maritime borders, are they principals, accomplices, or victims of a crime? When hostages taken by kidnappers are kept in a remote village for months, are the local households who cooked food and cared for the hostages community participants and willing collaborators who are exercising their agency in a crime?
This phenomenon is by no means confined to the Philippines. As I discovered in my research, it happens too in many countries worldwide. Interestingly, there appear to be patterns of similarities and differences when the shadow economies of Mindanao are compared to illicit crop growing in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Bolivia. Philippine Rural and Reconstruction Movement (PRRM) President Edicio dela Torre acknowledged this adverse form of community participation and then asked if its direction could be changed and how.
One approach to tackling this question is to unpack, deconstruct, and restate the problems across the commodity chain and avoid a one-size-fits-all analysis. A commodity chain comprises the steps when an agricultural commodity or a natural resource — whether licit or illicit — transforms from production to consumption. The problems at each step or link in the chain can then be restated while the balance of interests and the balance of harms are reconsidered. New ways of approaching rural reconstruction can then be developed.
In the case of illicit crops, the first step in the commodity chain is cultivation. The problem at this step, as conventionally stated, is their growing. However, what needs to be asked is why poor peasants choose to grow illicit crops despite the risks it brings into their lives. Analysis of their contexts shows that the more fundamental problem is their economic marginalization and exclusion, thus they resort to illicit crops as their kapit-sa-patalim (translated as “holding on to a knife,” the equivalent to the saying “living on the razor’s edge”) strategy. The focus, therefore, should be on resolving their conditions of marginalization and exclusion to change the direction of their community participation.
The second step is the processing of the harvests. Criminologists typically state the problem as the existence of makeshift and jungle labs that transform opium gum into a morphine base, then heroin, and coca leaves into a coca base and then cocaine. The easy availability of precursor chemicals is flagged as a key part of the problem. A theme that has been ignored, however, is underemployment in rural areas.
The processing of illicit crops is very labor-intensive. When harvesting opium gum, for example, a peasant farmer needs to hire additional part-time farm workers. Processing coca leaves into coca paste is back-breaking work that household labor cannot supply. So why not restate the problem, and raise the issue of rural underemployment as well in addressing this second step? The existence of seasonal, migratory, and part-time rural workers may be the critical explanation why illicit crop growing emerges in some but not in other places.
Once the product is processed, the third step comes – cross-border smuggling and trafficking. It requires a longer elaboration, but the short version is that drug traffickers and other criminals, including corrupt public officials, also rely on the tools (company registration, asset registers, bank accounts) as well the enablers (lawyers, bankers, and accountants) for tax evasion and avoidance. Cracking down on tax avoidance schemes by introducing reforms, such as public registers of company beneficial ownership, will be critical in fighting cross-border drug trafficking.
When the product reaches its target markets for wholesale distribution, authorities often rely on price theory to predict trends in the drug market. Thus, tougher law enforcement means drug supplies will be removed from the market, forcing a consequent rise in prices and a decrease in demand. But this theory has been beset by a puzzling empirical anomaly: historically, the prices of heroin and cocaine have been declining despite intensified law enforcement globally. In addition, drug traffickers typically do not raise prices when faced with stronger law enforcement: they would rather switch smuggling routes, change delivery schedules, pay more bribes, or adjust purity — while keeping prices fixed. Hence, what needs to be considered is that drug lords prefer predictability to price changes.
The fifth step in the chain — retail distribution — is typically attributed to street-level criminality. An alternative analysis is to consider smart economics and a range of regulation options over prohibition.
There is much to learn from the experience of the alcohol ban in the US at the beginning of the 20th century. Prohibition created mafias and gangsters like Al Capone; regulation moved the control of alcohol from criminals to legitimate businesses that could be monitored.
Another example is the aftermath of the Opium Wars in China from 1839 to the 1860s. China, which officially banned opium, lost two wars to the British armada, which enforced the interests of British traders and investment houses — the world’s first drug cartels — in selling Indian-grown opium in China. But India soon lost out when Chinese farmers and merchants started growing and trading opium themselves, and not only made the product cheaper but also of better quality. In other words, import substitution, not military force, defeated the British-India opium trade.
The final step in the chain is consumption. Although China’s smart economics won the competition by the 1900s, it created widespread addiction and abuse throughout the region, including the Philippines.
After decades of prohibition, countless laws, and many wars on drugs, the problems remain. An alternative approach championed by harm reduction proponents is to manage addiction and abuse as a public health rather than a criminal crisis. Criminally charging drug users will barely reduce demand; they need to be offered public health solutions instead.
Groups like NoBox Philippines advocate strongly for the de-stigmatization of people whose lives include drugs. NoBox’s Maria Inez Feria suggests that instead of viewing them solely as passive recipients, subjects to be studied, problems to be solved, or “criminals” to be dealt with, development practitioners should see and engage with them as individuals with rights and dignity, and as potential partners in finding solutions. In other words, this is an area where community participation is essential.
Other groups, like the Addictus Research and Intervention Center, led by Jun Estacio of UP Manila, provide advice on longer-term harm reduction solutions, including ensuring sustainable after-care treatment following rehabilitation programs.
During the PRRM forum, I cited an example of why attitudes and public policy on drug use should change — the story of Manny Pacquiao, who rose from street-level drug user to world boxing champion.
Eric D. U. Gutierrez PhD is now an independent consultant who lives in Germany with his family. He is a registered Filipino voter at the Philippine consulate in Frankfurt.