June 4, 2000

The Plight of the Peasant Coca Grower

by Garry Leech

Over the last five years, the United States has focused on the eradication of the coca leaf as its primary drug war strategy in Colombia. Each of those years has seen an increase in aid over the previous year in order to carry out the coca eradication policy. The result has been a doubling of coca production in Colombia, clearly illustrating the futility of this strategy.

In order to overcome this failure, the Clinton Administration has asked the U.S. Congress for $1.6 billion in aid, mostly to arm the Colombian security forces with weapons, training and helicopters in order to launch an offensive into southern Colombia to wage war with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and seize control of coca growing territory. Once the territory currently under guerrilla control has been occupied by the Colombian military, the livelihood of the peasant coca grower can be more effectively eradicated.

The Clinton Administration has failed to focus on why so many peasants are growing coca in the first place and how they are expected to feed themselves and their families in the aftermath of the planned military offensive. In North America and western Europe, farmers annually receive subsidies from the government to supplement the income they get from low market prices for their goods. Without these subsidies, many farmers in North America and Europe would go out of business. However, corporate-driven globalization and the austerity measures often imposed on developing nations by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) do not allow the same agricultural subsidization policies to be applied in developing countries.

Such subsidization policies would make agriculture in developing nations domestically competitive with multinational corporations, therefore undermining the globalization policies that are so advantageous to North America and Europe.

In December 1999, partly due to the country's worst economic performance in more than half a century, Colombia agreed to a $2.7 billion loan from the IMF. As has been the case with many of Colombia's Latin American neighbors, the government was forced to agree to the implementation of austerity measures as part of the loan agreement. As a result, government spending cutbacks means the subsidization of farmers is not a viable option in the battle to alleviate rural poverty.

Such policies will only increase the number of campesinos turning to coca cultivation as a means of supporting themselves and their families, especially when the market price for legal crops remains steadfastly below subsistence levels. A May 1 article in the weekly news publication Latinamerica Press illustrates this dilemma by pointing out that coca growers in the Upper Huallaga Valley of central Peru receive $2.74 per kilogram of coca leaves. The going market price for legal crops grown in the region is markedly lower: $1.05 for coffee, $0.77 for cacao and $0.11 for cassava. For the peasant farmer, the choice of what crop to cultivate is not a moral one, it is based on economics. Most campesinos would willingly grow legal crops if it provided subsistence for them and their families.

A further threat to the livelihood of the peasant farmer is posed by members of the U.S. Congress who are pushing for more effective coca eradication methods to be included in the aid package. One such measure is the use of a mycoherbicide, Fusarium oxysporum, that has yet to be effectively tested for health and environmental safety.

The state of Florida recently cancelled plans to test Fusarium oxysporum for its own drug eradication efforts due to concerns about its effects on human health and food crops. The use of such a mycoherbicide could not only endanger the health of coca growing peasants in Colombia, but may make it impossible for them to grow legal crops if the soil becomes poisoned as a result of coca eradication.

Exactly how Colombian peasant coca growers are supposed to survive after their coca crops have been eradicated is a subject rarely discussed by the White House and the State Department. In reality there are only four options: Move deeper into the jungle and plant new coca crops; join guerrilla or paramilitary forces; flee to the poverty-ridden slums of Colombia's economically depressed cities; or receive subsidies substantial enough to allow the farmer to make a living wage by growing legal crops, as is the case in North America and western Europe.

The first three options have been the only ones available to most of Colombia's peasant coca growing population, and with 80 percent of the Clinton Administration's aid package geared toward the Colombian military it is more than likely they will remain the only options in the future.

The U.S. and Colombian governments have conceded the fact that the planned military offensive in southern Colombia will likely result in increased population displacement in a country that is already struggling to cope with 1.9 million displaced persons. Surely redirecting more than a billion dollars of military aid into agricultural subsidies and infrastructure improvements that allow rural farmers to get their legal crops to market in a timely fashion would be far more productive than the death, deforestation and displacement that will result from increased military activity.

Most Colombians are against increased military aid, they would prefer the aid be directed toward the social and economic ills of the country. However, Washington is once again oblivious to the needs of the people, especially the peasant farmer, as it continues to arm the Colombian military in a futile attempt to achieve peace through more war.

This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).

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