JUMP IN COCA CULTIVATION IN COLOMBIA SHOCKS U.N.

Bogota, Colombia -- Colombian peasants devoted 27 percent more land to
growing coca last year, the United Nations reported Wednesday, calling
the increase "a surprise and a shock" given intense efforts to
eradicate cocaine's raw ingredient.

Estimated cocaine production, however, increased only slightly in
Colombia and other Andean nations - to about 994 metric tons in 2007
from 984 metric tons the year before, according to the U.N. - as
cultivation shifted to smaller, less-productive plots in more remote
locations.

The net increase in coca farmland came despite record U.S.-backed
eradication efforts that disrupted the growing cycle, said Gen. Oscar
Naranjo, the chief of Colombia's police.

"These young crops, the new ones, are less productive, both in the
number of leaves and in terms of the potency of the leaf," Naranjo
said, and coca farmers in remote locations can't get chemicals needed
to process the leaves as easily.

Still, coca farmers are aggressively tearing down forests to make way
for crops and laboratories, and the young plants will eventually
produce much more coca if eradication efforts don't keep up.

"The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and shock:
a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is
trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of
cultivation," said Antonio Maria Costa, director of the U.N. Office on
Drugs and Crime.

In all, 382 square miles of coca cultivation were found in Colombia
last year, up from 301 square miles in 2006, according to the U.N.
Drugs and Crime Office's annual survey. Total cultivation in Colombia,
Peru and Bolivia - the world's three principal sources of coca - grew
16 percent to 181,600 hectares, or 701 square miles.

Costa noted in his statement that "just like in Afghanistan, where
most opium is grown in provinces with a heavy Taliban presence, in
Colombia most coca is grown in areas controlled by
insurgents."

Farmers are quickly replanting and minimizing the damage from aerial
spraying by planting herbicide-resistant hybrids and coating plants
with cane juice, said Bruce Bagley, an international studies professor
at the University of Miami.

"Areas that have been sprayed have then been brought back into
production," Bagley said. "It's time for aerial spraying to give way
to other programs."

Washington has spent more than $5 billion to help Colombia combat its
long-running insurgency and the world's largest cocaine industry.
About 80 percent goes to the military and 20 percent to social efforts
to wean farmers off coca.