U.S. SEES ALTERNATIVE-CROP PLAN FOR COLOMBIA ROOTED IN FAILURE

CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials
have become more pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.- sponsored
program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops
will have any lasting success against the drug industry.

The program is the most socially oriented element of a $1.3 billion
anti-drug aid package approved almost two years ago by Congress with the
goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005.

Although only a small fraction of an aid package tilted heavily toward
military assistance, the alternative-development program has long been seen
as the most politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy
frequently criticized as a war plan targeting the country's Marxist insurgency.

But a number of U.S. officials are rethinking the program less than a year
after it began here in southern Colombia's coca fields.

Security concerns, unfavorable economics and a history of mistrust between
the Colombian government and coca farmers, who produce 90 percent of the
cocaine arriving in the United States, have complicated the program in ways
that U.S. officials now believe could be insurmountable.

In light of two recent critical reviews, U.S. officials have decided to
shift the program's focus from helping individual farmers to creating
public-works jobs in coca-growing regions, tailor development projects by
community and begin new development efforts in areas less fraught by civil
war than this one 350 miles south of the capital, Bogota.

Even so, U.S. officials acknowledge, funding for the current $42.5 million
program is in doubt.

Here in the province of Putumayo, the heart of Colombia's coca trade, only
a few of farmers who agreed to uproot their coca plants by the end of July
have done so.

That resistance, rooted mostly in failed government promises in this remote
patch of pasture and jungle, was reflected in a recent U.S. Embassy study
that found that few of the 37,000 small-scale farmers who signed up for
government aid last year in return for abandoning coca crops intend to comply.

Recently released figures compiled by the CIA showed that coca cultivation
actually jumped 25 percent in 2001 to 419,000 acres.

Congressional auditors also recently concluded that the program was failing
mostly because of a lack of security in coca-growing regions heavily
contested by the two largest irregular armies in Colombia's nearly
four-decade civil war.