[photopress:logistics1_1_2.jpg,full,alignright]Route 3 in Laos used to be a horse trail along an opium smuggling route. Now it is part of a network of roads linking China to remote areas of Southeast Asia.
The newly refurbished Route 3 is an ordinary strip of two-lane road you might find winding through the backwoods of Vermont or sunflower fields in the French provinces. But it is more than that.
It is a major — within the context of the area road — which allows trade between Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam.
It has been a sort of trade trail before — as a former opium smuggling route. Now it the final link of the ‘north-south economic corridor’, a 1,150-mile network of roads linking the southern Chinese city of Kunming to Bangkok.
The network (and not all sections of it are paved because natural disasters have intervened), is a major logistical milestone for China and its southern neighbors.
It brings closer integration and allows China to trade with one of Asia’s least developed and most pristine regions which has natural resources to offer for manufactured goods.
With trade across these borders increasing by double digits every year, China has helped construct a series of roads inside the territory of its southern neighbors.
The Chinese government is paying half the cost of a bridge over the Mekong River between Laos and Thailand, due for completion in 2011.
Taken together, these roads are breaking the isolation of the thinly inhabited upper reaches of Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam. The roads run through the heart of the Golden Triangle, the region that once produced 70% of the world’s opium crop and hopefully this will now give way to a more profitable trade. (Opium does not seriously become profitable until it has been processed. It has been demonstrated that coffee is a more profitable crop — for the grower.)
Overall, even before the completion of the road, trade between China and the upland Southeast Asian countries Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam had risen impressively, to $53 billion in 2007 from just over $1 billion a decade ago.
The road is not truly completed yet but it is as near as to be certain it will be completed and used as intended. The full story up to March HERE although it has progressed since then.
Source: New York Times