The UNODC on coca-growing in Colombia
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime today released its estimate of how much coca, the plant used to make cocaine, was cultivated in Colombia last year. The report is making headlines in Colombia because, for the first time since 2007, the estimate for 2011 shows an increase in coca-growing — to 64,000 hectares from 62,000 in 2010.
The data would indicate that, twelve years after the beginning of “Plan Colombia,” the country’s rural coca economy has hit a third plateau. This graphic of UNODC coca estimates since 1999 illustrates the point. (Clicking on this or any other image in this post will enlarge it in a new window.)
The first, and highest, plateau was the period before 2002. In that year, the FARC lost control of a zone in southern Colombia from which government security forces had withdrawn to allow failed peace talks to take place. Much coca had been planted in that zone. By that year, the United States had delivered, and was using, a much larger fleet of aerial herbicide spray planes funded by “Plan Colombia” in 2000.
This pushed coca-growing down to a second plateau in the 2003-2008 period. Near the end of this period, coca growers had begun adjusting to the hercibide fumigation strategy, which was only rarely accompanied by a permanent government presence on the ground. Plots were smaller, more scattered, better hidden and quickly replanted after eradication.
Starting in 2006 and peaking in 2008, the Colombian government responded by massively increasing manual eradication: sending teams of people to coca-growing areas to pull up the crops by hand. The increase in manual eradication — which, while dangerous for the eradicators, kills the plant and requires more government presence on the ground — was accompanied by a sharp drop in herbicide fumigation. This caused coca cultivation to drop to a new plateau starting in 2009.
Despite a further drop from 2009 to 2010, the 2011 results make apparent that momentum toward reduced coca-growing has once again stalled. Colombia continues to have vast ungoverned spaces in which farmers have few choices as profitable as coca, and in which the likelihood of running afoul of an absent government is very small. Also, due to the danger of manual eradication missions — guerrillas routinely lay mines and IEDs in coca fields — and cuts to Colombia’s budget, the Colombian government manually eradicated 64 percent less coca in 2011 than it did in 2008.
The UN data show more than half of Colombia’s 2011 coca grown in three departments (provinces) in the country’s southwest: Nariño, Putumayo and Cauca. U.S. officials interviewed by WOLA in May expressed concern about a doubling of coca-growing in Putumayo between 2010 and 2011. This violent, impoverished department along the Ecuador border is where Plan Colombia’s first eradication offensive began, in 2000.
Officials blamed the increase on an agreement between Colombia and Ecuador that prohibits aerial herbicide fumigation within 10 kilometers of the Ecuadorian border. A very likely explanation for Putumayo’s increase, though, is the late 2008 collapse of DMG, a money-laundering pyramid scheme in which a significant portion of Putumayo’s population had invested. During the heyday of this criminal enterprise, participants in DMG were making so much money that they abandoned coca-growing. Its collapse, which wiped out the assets of many Putumayans, probably underlies much of their return to the coca trade.
So, of course, does the power of illegal armed groups in Putumayo, where the FARC guerrillas and Rastrojos neo-paramilitary group operate under a nonaggression pact and cooperate on the cocaine trade.
The new coca numbers make plain, once again, that mass eradication in an absence of good governance will not yield permanent, satisfying results against coca cultivation or any other illegal activity. If growers are left without basic government services — from food security to physical security — fumigating them or pulling up their plants will only achieve short-term progress in a specific territorial area.
One final note: these are the UNODC’s estimates of coca growing in Colombia, based on a joint project with Colombia’s National Police. The U.S. government, with CIA in the lead, maintains a separate — and very different — set of coca cultivation estimates. The U.S. government figure for 2011 is not yet available, but here is what its view of the 1999-2010 period looks like.
The story told here shows fewer discernible “plateaus,” and a more constant — and higher — level of coca cultivation in Colombia.