Colombia: New coca leaf cultivation record in 2021

Coca-leaf production in Colombia soared last year to historic levels, flooding the world with record amounts of the drug at a time when President Gustavo Petro declared that decades of US-led eradication efforts have failed.

Last year, the area planted with coca, the raw material for cocaine manufacture, increased 43% to 204,000 hectares, according to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report released Thursday.

Because newly planted coca bushes take years to reach their full potential, the increase in cocaine production potential was lower, at 14% to 1,400 tons, UNODC said.

The growth of drug production is a headache for Petro, as it fuels violence and instability in rural Colombia.

But it also reinforces his argument that Bogota and Washington’s “war on drugs” waged for decades has failed to reduce consumption.

The details of Petro’s new approach, or Washington’s reaction to it, are not yet entirely clear.

Petro has said the government would target people at the top of the chain rather than the poor farmers who grow the drug.

The president favors substitution programs, whereby farmers receive incentives to grow legal crops rather than forced eradication and aerial herbicide spraying.

In practice, illegal armies working for drug traffickers often sabotage these programs by threatening and killing local people cooperating with them.

Petro’s response is to reach out to the country’s illegal armed groups, including leftist guerrilla groups, to negotiate “total peace.”

Petro’s Justice Minister, Nestor Osuna, said cocaine would remain illegal in Colombia and that authorities will continue trying to stop the drug exports.

Colombia has received more than US$10 billion in US aid since President Bill Clinton oversaw the start of the program known as Plan Colombia in the late 1990s.

The plan helped strengthen Colombia’s armed forces, giving them the upper hand in their fight against Marxist guerrillas.

The amount of land planted with coca decreased by about 70% between 2000 and 2012 but then increased again.

With information from Bloomberg