Crops for illicit use and ecocide

Foreword 

According to the Colombian government, cocaine consumers are unaware of the ecological disaster caused by production of the alkaloid. If they knew that cocaine is perpetrating ecocide in the country that leads on world production of the drug – Colombia – they would stop consuming it. Based on this premise, the government has organised an information campaign called Shared Responsibility, which uses pictures and statistics to tell people about the destruction caused by coca and cocaine production in the country. The campaign, which has the support of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), amongst others, has mainly taken the form of a travelling exhibition that has visited different countries in Europe.

As a heading on its website, the campaign states that “The first source of air pollution in the Colombian jungle is smoke from the burning of trees to grow coca.” This indicates – right from the start and without any supporting analysis whatsoever – who the campaign believes is mainly to blame for the catastrophe: the small farmer who grows coca.

For decades, Colombia has been implementing supply-side strategies that aim to solve the problem of coca and cocaine production. These strategies have been ineffective and counter-productive. They have failed to reduce production, caused humanitarian crises and worsened the armed conflict that has afflicted the country for so long. In response to the failure of policies to reduce the supply, the government has started to insist that consumer countries need to strengthen policies to curb the demand. This is where the Shared Responsibility campaign seeks to play a role. Again without any analysis whatsoever, it focuses on the other scapegoat in this affair: the consumer.

And so the small farmer and the consumer are portrayed as sharing responsibility for ecocide. This ignores the complexity of a problem that is global in scope and involves numerous different players on both the legal and the illegal sides.

Recommendations

• Current drug control policy shares much of the blame for “ecocide” because it has encouraged the movement of crops from place to place. A new drug policy that managed at least to stabilise the areas where these crops are grown would in itself represent a success in the fight against crops for illicit use as far as their ecological repercussions are concerned.

• The fumigation with herbicides that has been practiced for decades in Colombia is another significant factor in environmental destruction. A drug policy that sought to act responsibly towards the environment would cease aerial spraying immediately.

• The government should reach agreements with rural communities to put socio-economic, environmental and ethical conditions in place, not just to demarcate the areas to be used to grow plants for narcotics, but also to avoid total dependence on the illegal economy.

• The small farmer who is dependent on an economy considered illicit lives in a zone of marginality, and this must be reversed. The decriminalisation of small and medium producers would facilitate dialogue with state institutions.

• With a view to environmental harm reduction, the rural communities involved in the production of illicit crops and the manufacture of narcotics should be provided with the information and training they need on the correct use of the herbicides and chemicals that are required in the process of producing the drug, in order to protect their health and the environment. The problem does not lie in coca itself or the growing of the crop. If there were alternative ways to produce coca safely and cleanly, these would be put in practice, thus reducing the impact of coca production on the environment.

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