A LONG WAY FROM COCA TO COFFEE

LA SIERRA, Colombia - Among the shiny, dark green leaves and red berries of
the coffee trees on Jarol Uribe's farm, an occasional coca bush still pokes
its stubby branches toward the sun. Like many South Americans, Uribe
considers the leaves medicinal. "We just keep it for ourselves," he says.
"It's good for the stomach."

But Uribe, 36, is no longer in the commercial coca business that helped
sustain him and his neighbors in this remote corner of southwestern
Colombia for years. His family, and more than 400 other nearby peasant
farmers, are participating instead in a government-backed crop substitution
project that is helping them grow organic coffee for export to the United
States, Europe and Japan.

By conservative count, small farmers like Uribe with holdings averaging
four to five acres cultivate at least one-third of the estimated 300,000
acres of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, grown in Colombia. Nearly
all of the 19,000 acres of opium poppies used to make heroin are found on
even smaller private plots.

The other two-thirds of the coca, according to U.S. and Colombian
officials, is grown on large plantations, where migrant workers pick and
process the leaves. Under Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion, two-year U.S. aid
package will begin flowing here this month. U.S.-trained and equipped army
battalions will attempt to seize the plantations from the drug traffickers
that operate them and guerrilla and paramilitary forces that guard them.
Colombian police will eradicate the crops with aerial fumigation and
dismantle the laboratories where drugs are processed for export.

But a portion of the aid--$42.5 million--is to be spent trying to persuade
and assist small producers to switch to other, often less profitable, cash
crops. While the military anti-drug offensive has garnered most of the
attention--and criticism--in Washington, senior officials here, from
President Andres Pastrana on down, maintain that it is on small farms such
as Jarol Uribe's that a large part of Colombia's war against both drugs and
the rebels will ultimately be won or lost.

"If the United States would simply like to finish all the coca in the most
cost-effective way--spraying--they would destroy Colombia," said Jaime
Ruiz, Pastrana's point man on the non-military aspects of Plan Colombia.
Fumigation "alienates the peasants," who simply move more deeply into the
jungle, cut down more trees, and plant more coca. More often than not, Ruiz
said, any residual loyalty toward the government is transferred to the drug
traffickers or guerrillas who help them regain their living.

With the new programs, Ruiz said, "we are going to tell these people we're
going to give them something, not just take something away from them. They
have to feel they don't want to grow coca."

Although similar crop substitution efforts have had some success in Bolivia
and elsewhere, no country has attempted such an endeavor on the scale of
Colombia, and under such adverse circumstances. There are neither roads nor
accessible markets in many of the growing areas, and little if any
government presence. Guerrillas or paramilitary groups occupy much of the
territory.

Hundreds of such projects will be needed; only a handful currently exist
and all are small and struggling. Once begun, efforts such as the organic
coffee program in La Sierra take years to show concrete results.

So daunting is the task that the Colombian government has already
significantly scaled back its plans to change the hearts, minds and crops
of the drug-growing peasantry. Initially designed to cover all regions of
the country, the crop substitution program is now targeted for the
foreseeable future only on relatively small areas of the two southern
states of Cauca and Putumayo, and the northern region of Magdalena Medio.

The simple facts of life for the farmers in La Sierra and seven adjoining
administrative regions of Cauca where the project operates illustrate the
challenges. After several years of nurturing their coffee with organic
compost and homemade natural pesticides on the steep mountainsides, farmers
are earning an average 35.6 percent return on the money they invest in
their crop, according to project technicians. For local coca farmers, the
rate is 59 percent; for poppy growers, 45 percent.

A successful coca farmer on an average-size farm can make about $2,500 a
year. Most of the coffee growers haven't yet approached that level.
Although there is a steady stream of recruits to the project, many of the
growers who initially signed up have dropped out, declaring the farming too
difficult and the returns too risky.

"Farmers in these zones get into drug cultivation because the [trafficking]
middlemen pay them to grow it and give them the seeds," said project
director Nelson Melo. "They can harvest four to six months after planting,
and then two or three times a year. It doesn't take much work."

On the peaks above Uribe's farm, neat rows of opium poppies grown by Indian
communities are clearly visible. Government airplanes spray herbicide
there, and the coffee farmers say enough wafts down to adulterate their
coffee plants and sabotage their crop's organic quality. The Colombian
massif looming overhead is the watershed for the many rivers that tumble
through the region, and there are fears of ecological damage.

"They're just spraying a certain area," said coffee farmer Hely Hernandez.
"But the wind, the water spread it everywhere."

No crop substitution or other assistance is currently offered or planned
for the region's high-altitude poppy growers, whose food crops are wiped
out along with the drugs. Cauca Gov. Carlos Negret, an outspoken critic of
Bogota's policies, has complained about the lack of coordination between
the police and military in charge of the spraying, drug interdiction and
fighting the rebels, and the civilians in charge of crop substitution and
other development programs.

Similar complaints have come from the governor and mayors in neighboring
Putumayo, where the largest concentration of spraying and military
operations is planned. In July, they announced their opposition to all
fumigation and refused to cooperate with it.

Large swaths of Cauca are occupied by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, and right-wing
paramilitary forces have begun moving into the state from the north.
Although farmers say the guerrilla columns that frequently pass through La
Sierra seldom bother them, there would be no one to call if they did. Like
nearly a third of Cauca's 41 regions, La Sierra has no police or military
presence.

Asked if growing organic coffee is worth the effort, farmer Jesus Abad
declared it "a good question. . . . Lots of people got rid of their own
food and other crops to grow coca because of the money.

"We were 150 farmers when we started," he said of his group in the coffee
project. "And there are 43 of us left. But our production is going up
little by little, and a lot of them are now seeing what we've accomplished.
It doesn't all happen at once."

For the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is administering
most of the non-military part of the U.S. funding, Plan Colombia marks a
new beginning. Barely a year ago, AID had decided to "graduate" Colombia
from its programs, a euphemism for shutting down operations altogether.

Today, AID has leased vast new office space in Bogota, and plans to
increase its skeleton staff to 50 U.S. government employees and
contractors. In addition to the crop substitution funds, there is money for
assisting people displaced by the war and for helping to rebuild Colombian
democracy.

"For the first time! Social investment from the United States!" Pastrana
marveled in a recent interview.

Not everyone is as happy as the Colombian president. Opposition to U.S.
military aid among human rights and humanitarian organizations that fear it
will widen the war has rubbed off on the development projects, and the
guerrillas have said that anyone who accepts U.S. money will become a
potential military target. As a result, regulations have been waived that
would have required AID's clasped-hands logo to be imprinted on all U.S.
assistance, from bags of food to earth-moving equipment. AID has prohibited
U.S. officials from traveling to project sites outside of major cities.

Colombia and the United States have agreed that Plante, the four-year-old
Colombian government alternative development agency, will determine the
overall direction of the program and provide technical help. Although AID
funds will be administered by international contractors, rather than by any
Colombian government agency, Plante's role makes U.S. officials nervous.

"Plante's performance has been mixed," said one U.S. official, who
questioned its ability to absorb major new funding. State officials such as
Negret, the Cauca governor, accuse Plante of being a pawn of political
powers in Bogota, dispensing aid as regional pork. Some non-governmental
aid agencies here consider it inept at best, and corrupt at worst.

To participate in the program, farmers must sign a document listing all
their coca or poppy acreage--only those with less than eight acres of coca
or 2.7 acres of poppy are eligible--and promise to rid of it. The timing of
the voluntary eradication is flexible, said the Plante director, Maria Inez
Restrepo. "Not everybody is going to do it in 10 months."

With the promise of help comes a threat. If the drug crops remain after the
agreed time, they get sprayed. "It only works if there's a credible risk
that . . . some law enforcement action will take place--either fumigation
or interdiction of their harvest"--that will affect their earnings, an AID
official said.

There have been heated discussions between Plan Colombia's military-police
and civilian sides in both Washington and Bogota over the correct balance
among development, fumigation and drug interdiction.

Over the summer, the military-police side agreed to cut back somewhat to
give development the space and time to work. But time is something aid
workers feel is in short supply. "There is a lot at stake in demonstrating
that the alternative development approach can succeed, and succeed
quickly," the Washington official said. "The problem is, all the jobs are
hard ones. You've got to get farmers to develop a different economy than
they have now. And you've got a year. Hello? Trees don't grow in a year."

Among the biggest unknowns is how the drug traffickers and the guerrillas
will react if the programs pick up speed. "There's been no reaction from
the traffickers so far" to the several, small substitution programs begun
by the United Nations in recent years, said program director Klaus Nyholm.
"If you wanted to be malicious, you could say it's because we haven't had
much effect on them."