UN SAYS COLOMBIAN COCA CULTIVATION DOWN 30 PERCENT

Overall Production Down, Too -- Experts Say Not Really

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reported Monday that
102,000 hectares of coca were being grown in Colombia at the end of
2002, a 30% reduction compared to the 145,000 grown a year earlier.
The reported reduction in Colombia has contributed to the first
overall decline in coca production in the Andean region for more than
a decade, the UN report added.

Drug warriors and the Colombian government hailed the figures as a
victory, but some experts question the numbers, while others point out
that the reported reduction in Colombia has come at a great cost in
terms of displacement of civilian populations and environmental
destruction caused by widespread and increasing aerial fumigation.

"This is a major achievement in the international fight against
illicit drugs and related crime," Antonio Maria Costa, executive
director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said at a celebratory
press conference in Brussels. "The world production of coca has been
persistently above 200,000 hectares: this decline will subtract over
100 tons of cocaine from world markets."

The Colombian government greeted the announcement as "a major
victory." At a joint UN-Colombian government press conference in
Bogota, Colombian Interior Minister Fernando Londono vowed to wipe out
coca in Colombia. "President Uribe's pledge to permanently eradicate
coca from our territory is irrevocable," he said. "It isn't about
dealing with a problem, but ending a nightmare for the Colombian people."

However, a March 6 editorial in the widely read news magazine The
Economist pointed out that hectares under coca production in
neighboring Bolivia and Peru have increased, and that more productive
varieties of coca are in use in both countries -- fundamental factors
ignored by the UN's measuring stick of choice. The editorial, titled
"The Balloon Goes Up," notes a "hollow quality" to the so-called
victory, stating that "the 'drug war' has imposed its own costs." The
pro-market magazine explains the functioning of supply and demand in
the drug trade by pointing out that "one [of those costs] is known as
the 'balloon effect': local squeezes simply move the industry
elsewhere, spreading violence and corruption with it."

And although the UN Office on Drugs and Crime was coy about how the
Colombian reduction was achieved, referring to "government-sponsored
eradication," in key Colombian coca-producing provinces, it is the
Uribe government's wholehearted embrace of aerial fumigation that has
killed the coca crop - along with food crops and farm animals.

Last September, numerous scientists and policy experts attacked
fumigation as dangerous to plant and human life alike and a disastrous
policy approach in practice. "Aerial spraying, whether through drift,
accident or intention, is destroying the food crops of farmers who
have agreed to eradicate drug crops and, even worse, of farmers and
indigenous communities who are innocent of drug production," said Lisa
Haugaard, executive director of the Latin America Working Group
(http://www.lawg.org), attacking US government compliance with its own
reporting and compensation requirements. "The compensation system
required by Congress exists on paper, but not in practice. Of 1,000
claims filed by Colombian farmers for damages, 800 were dismissed
sight unseen, and the only claim determined to be valid has not yet
been paid."

In the same joint statement questioning the fumigation program, Janet
Chernela, chair of the Committee for Human Rights of the American
Anthropological Association, condemned the practice as detrimental to
some 58 indigenous groups living in areas affected by the spraying.
"These nations have lived in their territories for hundreds, and in
some cases, thousands, of years. Displacement caused by herbicidal
spraying and violence seriously threatens the rights of aboriginal
peoples to inhabit lands belonging to them; it also brings about
social and economic disruption affecting every aspect of life."

"The problem of illicit cultivation can't be solved by a military
response," said Dr. Miguel Angel Rubio, a technical advisor to
Putumayo Congressman Guillermo Rivera Flores at a congressional
hearing in Bogota last month. "They can fumigate what they fumigate,
and they can say there is no coca in Putumayo, but we know it is
there, and the plots are also migrating to Amazonas as they are
pressured," he said.

Even the UN's Drug Control Program Colombia head, Klaus Nyholm, said
that fumigation cannot stop illicit cultivation as long as the black
market keeps prices high and farmers face few alternatives. "It has to
be backed up with alternative or rural development programs and it
hasn't been so far. I don't think you can fumigate yourself out of the
problem," he said.

And in a joint statement greeting the report, Member of the European
Parliament and coordinator of Parliamentarians for Antiprohibitionist
Action Marco Cappato (see newsbrief below for more on Cappato) and
Marco Perduca, executive director of the International
Antiprohibitionist League (http://www.antiprohibitionist.org)
questioned both the substance and the recommendations of the report.
"While we commend the UN and the government of Colombia for having
attempted such a survey, we would have welcomed a clarification that
it was carried out on the basis of all the available estimates, and
not real figures, as the Country is facing civil war and substantial
parts of its territory are not necessarily under the full control of
the Government. At the same time, it needs to be emphasized that if
the number of hectares dedicated to the illicit production of coca
leaf might have been diminished, coca growers have been developing
more potent qualities of the substance as well as fast growing
plants," said the anti-prohibitionists.

Rather than continue to generate huge social and economic costs
attempting to suppress the drug trade, policymakers should find
alternatives, they added. "The main challenge that needs to be met by
those who are working to control illicit drugs are an effective
scientific, economic and political evaluation of current policies that
have not been able to reduce the production, consumption and sale of
illicit substances, all over the world, and the initiation of a
process of review of the UN Conventions on Drugs. The United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime should be instrumental in opening this type
of debate at the upcoming Vienna 'review' conference."

In the meantime, as the spraying continues apace in Colombia, coca
follows the path of least resistance. To adjacent provinces, to
adjacent countries, and back to old homes in Peru and Bolivia, coca is
once again on the move.

Visit http://www.unodc.org/odccp/press_release_2003-03-17_1.html and
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/colombia/report_2003-03-01_1.pdf for the UN's
report and press release.