Bokee Lungkeaw epitomises the success of the Mae Fah Luang development project, which is now being incorporated into the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs' political declaration on narcotic crop cultivation for 2009

Story by SUNISA NARDONE

The Doi Tung café in Chiang Rai.

At the front of the shop a young man climbs up a ladder, stretching from the last rung to arrange rolls of sah mulberry paper handed up to him. Balanced up near the ceiling, his small frame leans into the high shelf, and he works quickly and with ease.

The operation of passing, reaching and re-arranging continues for some time. Staff chat good-naturedly; away from the hot glare of the afternoon sun, the shop hums with quiet activity. At one point the jingle of bells announces the arrival of another customer, and with a final shove of paper, Bokee Lungkeaw skips down the ladder and turns to greet the person.

Bokee is one of the people who work at the Doi Tung Lifestyle shop in Suan-Lum Night Bazaar in Bangkok. His shifts typically run for eight hours, and in his time off he lives with other Northerners in dorms next to the Doi Tung office compound. Every day he walks to work dressed in black trousers and a crisp white shirt, a newly-minted man in a big city, navigating his way through the intricacies of his new life. He is the product of years of sacrifice, and his life intersects with the Mae Fah Luang Foundation in illuminating ways.

The story of the foundation's work in Doi Tung began in 1988, when HRH the Princess Mother, the late mother of the King, initiated the development project there to rehabilitate both the forests and the lives of the people living there. At that time, the region was rife with opium cultivation, and ethnic hill communities were a disenfranchised minority without citizenship or the right to settle anywhere. Illegal logging was rampant, as was slash and burn cultivation, and it was a fertile ground for drug trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, HIV/Aids and other diseases. The situation was dire. Like her son the King, the Princess Mother - or Somdej Yah, as she was affectionately known by Thais - combined a nobility of vision with the integrity of long-term commitment to tackling this problem. She was determined to restore harmony between people and nature, and put an end to opium farming so that the people in the region could begin to live a dignified life.

Bokee Lungkeaw.

Somdej Yah was born a commoner and orphaned at a young age. By the time she was 15, she was one of the youngest nurses at Siriraj Hospital. Two years later she was offered a royal scholarship to the US. She took that opportunity, setting sail for a country halfway around the world. What follows is a small part of her life story; Somdej Yah's life spanned nearly a century during which she married Prince Mahidol, raised her three children in Switzerland, and lived to see both of her sons become kings of Thailand.

Throughout her life, Somdej Yah strove to get access to education. She was a prodigious reader and loved learning, and tried to create the same opportunities for others to go to school. Somdej Yah always recognised that people are born equal, and it is only opportunity and what people make of the chances that they are given that determine how comfortable their life is.

Bokee is one of those people with the good fortune to grow up within Somdej Yah's royal initiative. Born to parents who had emigrated from Burma, he grew up in Doi Tung. His parents worked in reforestation, which was one of Somdej Yah's first projects there. With a sweep of his arm, his father used to say, "Do you see those pine trees? I put them there. And it wasn't easy." Bokee looks around at the forest of Doi Tung with pride; his parents were part of the ethnic minorities who were given work when the Doi Tung Development Project hired them to transform the desolate over-farmed landscape into the lush forest it is today.

Bokee's life traces the arc of the Foundation's work. Over the course of his lifetime, the Mae Fah Luang Foundation created the model called Sustainable Alternative Livelihood Development (Sald), an update of conventional alternative development that combines the aims of substituting the growing of opium, marijuana and other illicit crops with the know-how to achieve sustainable results. This human-centric approach contributed to the elimination of opium within the Thai border of the Golden Triangle region and has been applied, with measurable success, within Yong Kha, Burma, Balkh, Afghanistan and Aceh, Indonesia.

Sald works on three levels. First, the basic health needs of people are addressed, because sick people cannot work. The next priority is the provision of viable livelihood options, starting with those that provide immediate food security. In the longer term, livelihoods encompass more diverse enterprises with value-adding activities that have higher income-generating potential. When people have achieved viable livelihoods, education becomes the main focus in order to end the vicious cycle of poverty and progress up the virtuous cycle of opportunity.

In March, at the annual UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs (UNCND) in Vienna, over 100 delegations from various countries came together to look to creating a drug-free world, an aim with some urgency given Afghanistan's heightened opium production in the past few years. Thailand initiated a resolution encouraging the establishment of international principles for alternative development, and the sharing of best practices and lessons learned in countering illicit narcotic crop cultivation. This was followed up by the foundation's participation at the expert round of the UNCND, where Thailand's input will contribute towards the drafting of a political declaration on narcotic crop cultivation in 2009.

In opening remarks at the UNCND, Dr Antonio Maria Costa, deputy secretary-general of the UN, and executive director of the UN Office of Drug Control, said that Doi Tung proves that alternative development is possible. He said "the Doi Tung Development Project in Thailand, and subsequently in Burma, Afghanistan and now Indonesia, are inspiring. But the idea of shared responsibility needs to be more generously applied and funded, so that the eradication of poverty goes hand-in-hand with the eradication of crops."

Costa touches on a central principle of the foundation - the same principle that was articulated 20 years ago by the Princess Mother. When she saw the destitution in Doi Tung in 1988, she came to an important realisation: The root cause of illegal narcotic crop cultivation, and other related crimes, is poverty and lack of opportunity.

Opium is a crop often grown in areas where there are conflicts because it doesn't require much space to grow, and the dark, tar-like substance that is produced is small in bulk and easily transported by pack animals. Regions like Afghanistan - or in the 1980s, Burma, Thailand and Laos - have poor infrastructure that hinders the efforts of farmers to get their crops to market. By contrast, local drug traffickers often come to the farms directly to buy raw opium.

There has been a flurry of news articles in the recent months covering the fact that in 2007, Afghanistan produced record levels of opium - 193,000 tonnes, or 93 per cent of the world's supply. It was also noted that most farmers don't want to grow opium when given legal alternatives. They do so because of a lack of access to legitimate markets and a need to earn a living to support their families. If provided with appropriate support, the foundation's experience has found that farmers prefer to switch to a licit source of income.

Raising living standards in this way involves long-term trilateral commitment from donors, government and the people sharing their expertise of the model. But the benefit of the model is that it targets poverty, not just narcotic cultivating farmers.

In general, current efforts at eradication, whether by spraying crops or chopping down opium fields, have proven largely ineffective in the past 10 years. In April, 2007, Costa wrote in an article published in the Washington Post that Nato forces in Afghanistan are reluctant to engage in opium eradication, for fear of turning even more farmers into enemies who would side with the drug traffickers and terrorists.

Eradication with no viable alternative penalises the poorest people. Instead, a sustained investment in people transforms lives in a peaceful way. Lifting people out of poverty will not only put more money in people's pockets than opium farming, but also educate and empower people to continue their own development without the need for constant intervention.

This is what is happening in Doi Tung. Bokee's parents were wage-earners in the initial reforestation project, which was part of Doi Tung's "quick hit" - to provide immediate income to local people. This allowed the project to develop the long-term interventions of coffee and macadamia nuts, which have more potential for branding and moving up the value chain.

When Bokee was six he walked for three kilometres with the other children in his village to school, making sure to beat everyone to the classroom. He realised in 4th grade that to continue his education he'd have to concentrate on his studies. His parents always said that he had the opportunity to be educated; whether he took that opportunity was up to him. This determination helped him win one of the Princess Mother's regional scholarships to continue his education through high school. But when he was 16 his father fell seriously ill, and Bokee left school and his scholarship to take a job as a cleaner in the Doi Tung Royal Villa to help support his family.

"It wasn't easy," Bokee says. "My mother was against me leaving school, and cleaning is considered women's work up in Doi Tung." These were the hardest years for him, when he thought his chance to study was over.

Twenty years after Bokee's parents first planted trees in the North, progress is being made towards a sustainable future for Doi Tung residents. His parents are now both gardeners in the Royal Villa grounds, doing less intensive labour in their old age.

Bokee held a series of jobs with the foundation in Bangkok. He now works in the Doi Tung shop in Bangkok which carries scarves, clothes and rugs that have been woven by grandmothers in factories up north. Next door, the Doi Tung cafe sells cappuccinos and lattes with coffee that has been planted, pruned, harvested and roasted by ethnic villagers in the North. These activities provide employment for ethnic communities and a percentage of the profits is reinvested in the community's development. The income from these products can help people realise their potential. It can go towards funding a family's first college graduate, taking their first step in the long journey towards security and opportunity.

After five years living in Bangkok, Bokee began to earn enough money to both support his family and fund his education. His old colleagues in the retail department let him use their computers at the end of the working day to do homework. Over time, Bokee got his high school diploma by going to school at weekends. Bokee says he used to be scared of bookkeeping and talking to customers, especially English-speaking ones, but he has since learned that bookkeeping was good practise for his maths skills, and talking to foreign customers increased his linguistic abilities.

Bokee is currently in his second year at Ramkhamhaeng University, where he is studying political science. When asked what he wants to do with his degree, Bokee says he doesn't like living in Bangkok. His eyes light up at the possibility of moving back to Doi Tung to take the role of one of the people who came into his village and first introduced him and his family to the ideas of sanitation, crop rotation and the importance of education.

"People in ethnic communities might have this knowledge by now," he says, adding that "he can go back and prove that it can be done."

As far as he knows he is the only one of his generation to be pursuing a university degree in Bangkok. Many others educated under the Princess Mother's initiative work in better jobs than their parents did. Some of them work in Bangkok at other organisations. In his view, working at Mae Fah Luang allowed him the opportunity to better himself. His co-workers covered for Bokee when he took exams and had to study. "The people I work with understand that I don't want to be a cleaner all of my life," he said.

When he goes back to Doi Tung, Bokee thinks he'll start by doing simple work, like clearing the road from a land slide, or putting out forest fires. "It's okay," he says, "because it's the beginning of the time when I get to help back there."