U.S. ABANDONS COLOMBIA PLAN ON SUBSTITUTE CROPS

There Is More Bad News From The Front Lines Of The Drug War

U.S. officials have abandoned an alternative development plan that was
supposed to be a key element in halting the cultivation of drug crops in
southern Colombia.

The action comes as Washington is considering broadening its military
support for Colombia, which is likely to intensify the war in the poorest
drug-producing regions.

According to a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the
plan failed to wean local farmers away from cultivating the lucrative coca
plant used to make cocaine.

The study, which has not been publicly released, also blames poor soil
quality and a lack of security in the remote area of Putumayo, which is a
battleground for guerrillas and paramilitary groups.

Originally the idea was to encourage peasant farmers to stop growing coca
using a carrot-and-stick policy. Money and technical help were made
available to farmers who agreed voluntarily to plant legal crops. Those who
didn't were threatened with eradication of their coca fields by aerial
spraying.

Although the decision to halt the alternative development program withdraws
a major plank from the overall counter-drug policy, officials say they plan
to forge ahead anyway with the spraying.

This has critics alarmed.

"They are going back to a strategy that has not worked in the past," said
Adam Isacson, refering to the all-stick-and-no-carrot policy in the mid to
late 1980s in the Guaviare region of Colombia. Although coca was
successfully wiped out from this area, production simply moved elsewhere.

"Even if they are successful in Putumayo, what's to stop that happening
again," says Isacson. "There's lots of room to go."

Isacson points out that the entire coca production in South America only
occupies about 544,000 acres, which is about three-quarters the size of
Rhode Island. But southeastern Colombia alone -- where most of the coca is
grown -- is 100-million acres, or roughly the size of Texas, New Mexico and
Oklahoma combined.

Experts have long compared the way drug production shifts to the effect on
a balloon when you squash it an one end and expands elsewhere.

But U.S. officials believe they can outpace the "balloon effect" by massive
spraying on a scale never before witnessed. This year the target is to
spray 370,500 acres, going up to almost 500,000 next year. The philosophy
appears to be the more farmers are sprayed, the more likely they will give up.

But critics say Washington may be giving up too soon on the less
destructive approach of alternative development. They note that
counter-drug officials never liked the idea of voluntary eradication pacts
with farmers, believing it to be too soft and slow an approach.

The USAID office in Colombia was understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with
the job it was given, critics charge. U.S. program managers also relied too
heavily on Colombian officials with little or no knowledge of the area,
which had been long ignored by the central government. Local development
groups and municipal officials were bypassed by Bogota's notoriously
elitist federal bureaucracy.

Isacson and others argue that the program could have been made to work had
it been given more time and greater resources. Peasants were given a
deadline of July 27 this year to destroy their coca crops or risk being
sprayed. Despite signing pacts with 35,000 farmers, Putumayo department
officials say only 8,200 farmers ever received the aid they were promised.

That was partly due to a U.S. government insistence that farmers destroy
all their coca crops before receiving any U.S. aid. That led to resentment
among farmers who asked what they were supposed to live on during the time
it took to grow new crops.

A report last month by the General Accounting Office, the auditing branch
of Congress, found that USAID spent barely 10 percent of its $52- million
budget for Putumayo. That was only a tiny portion of the $1.3- billion
budgeted for the overall strategy, known as Plan Colombia, which focused
mainly on military training for counter-narcotics operations and the aerial
spraying of crops.

The GAO report also noted that the program was hampered by a lack of
security in the region.

Given these obstacles, critics argue it is perhaps premature to declare the
plan a failure. With the July deadline approaching, peasants will now be
left to fend for themselves as best they can.

That will likely result in food shortages as well as greater environmental
damage, as farmers are pushed deeper into the rain forest to grow their
illegal crops.

It is also likely to create greater mistrust of the government, a factor
guerrilla recruiters can be expected to exploit.

U.S. officials say they won't be abandoning the needs of the region
altogether. Instead, they say they are turning their efforts to large
infrastructure projects, such as bridges and roads, to provide jobs and
improve access for farmers to local markets. Other smaller projects will
include new schools, health clinics, and provision of running water and
electricity.

These are all things badly needed by Putumayo's peasant communities. But
after so many broken government promises, it may take a lot more than that
to break southern Colombia's dependence on coca farming.