The violence that accompanies forced eradication of coca leaf in Colombia is devastating and costly. Aerial spraying of glyphosate, and the fighting between the army and armed groups that try to protect the illegal drug trade, is disastrous for everyone living in the same community as coca leaf farmers. And there is no evidence that this financially and politically expensive option even works. Cocaine production continues to soar in Colombia, despite efforts to reduce the amounts of coca leaf crops and the land area used to grow them. In 2020 cocaine output rose by 8% in Colombia despite the land area with coca leaf crops shrinking by 7%.1
Policymakers who insist the most obvious solution to illegal drug trade is to reduce the supply of coca leaf crops, should therefore consider intensifying a non-punitive approach.
Colombia spends about COP $1.3 billion (that is US $270 million) each year trying to incentivise farmers to voluntarily swap their illegal drug crops for legal alternatives. Calculating these costs is complex because there are different estimates for the price of glyphosate, its effectiveness, and some official figures include the security costs attached to eradication efforts.2 Nevertheless, this seems like a very modest sum when we compare it to the COP $8 billion spent on efforts to eradicate these illegal crops by force.
The case for increasing investment in Alternative Development programmes would be more convincing if their success rate were more impressive and undisputed. Less than half of the efforts in Colombia to encourage farmers to give up their coca leaf crops peacefully, are effective. For example, between 2006 and 2015 about a third of the land used to produce coca leaf, received some form of investment to encourage farmers to switch to legal forms of agriculture. Of this, only about 40% remained clear of coca leaf three years later. Even so, some of this land was also subject to forced eradication programmes, therefore it is hard to discern if positive incentives are the reason why coca leaf was not replanted within this three-year window.
Another reason why Alternative Development is not favoured over the war on drugs, is that working out how best to motivate farmers to willingly replace their illegal drug crops is not a straightforward endeavour. Short-term subsidies through specific projects may appeal locally, but without investment in infrastructure, market access and public services, they do not yield enduring results. Some argue that injecting money into poor communities without tackling broader development issues can be even more problematic. It can create perverse incentives for farmers who seek to qualify for subsidies. It can sour the state’s relationship with farmers who are deemed ineligible for subsidies, and potentially drive them to grow coca leaf instead. And few farmers are prepared to forego the immediate high returns that coca leaf crops provide, while they wait for any long-term land investments to provide a realistic way out of the illegal trade.
Admittedly, policymakers have come a long way since the nascence of Alternative Development in the 1960s, when cash was paid out to opium poppy farmers in Thailand. At best, this approach was effective in gradually shifting opium production elsewhere, in this case to Myanmar. In Colombia, there have been various attempts to introduce more advanced designs of Alternative Development programmes than simple cash transfers. Perhaps the most famous are the Programa Familias Guardabosques (which ran until 2013) and Proyectos Productivos (which ran until 2016). These were well regarded, as they combined conditional cash transfer programmes with investment in infrastructure and capacity-building projects. But given the soaring levels of coca leaf production nationwide, the success of these programmes could be regarded as fleeting, and largely ineffective in the long term.
So, policymakers continue their quest to find the best way to support coca leaf farmers to build viable and lasting livelihoods in legal agriculture. One relatively novel approach to Alternative Development is giving land titles to illegal drug crop farmers. The mechanism by which land titles are supposed to prevent farmers from growing coca leaf in the future, is still undetermined. Nevertheless, it is a policy that has been used in Afghanistan, Peru, and Bolivia, and now in Colombia. Between 2015 and 2018, Colombia spent US $4.7 million sending teams of lawyers and topographers out to coca leaf growing communities in Antioquia, Cauca, Putumayo, and Nariño, to measure farmers’ land plots, and update or issue their land registration paperwork. This Formalizar para Sustitutir programme resulted in the formal transfer land ownership to 1,300 to 7000 families in that period. In some places it was land classified as baldio i.e., state-owned land in remote wastelands, which was privatised. In other places, it was already privately owned land that had been fragmented and changed ownership informally, and gradually fallen out of sync with the land registry.
The evidence for land titling dissuading farmers from growing coca leaf in Colombia, is inconclusive. One study by Muñoz-Mora, Tobón, and d’Anjou in 2018, found a negative relationship between land titles and area of coca leaf production in Colombia. But these results are based on a sample of 192 municipalities (second level administrative subdivisions of a Colombian department), which is about 17% of the total number of municipalities nationwide (1,123), and where the rule of law and state presence was stronger because they were subject to Plan Colombia policies during that period and were therefore more exposed to surveillance and law enforcement. A correlation between informal property rights and illegal drug production in these municipalities is not very informative when about 65% of rural land in Colombia is informally owned.3 And over 40% of small rural producers, who account for 70% of legal agricultural produce in Colombia, do not hold land titles.4 So, it is possible that the importance of land titling in the success of legal agriculture is overestimated by this study.
The focus of my research was to further understand, from the perspective of former coca leaf farmers, what role land titling plays, if any, in helping them switch to legal alternatives to coca leaf. Next, I shall describe how I first devised a hypothesis of the mechanism by which land titles could support Alternative Development, and then conducted extensive fieldwork research to test this hypothesis. After presenting my findings I will conclude with some implications for Alternative Development policy.