BOGOTA — Colombia’s coca crop shrank by nearly a fifth last year while cultivation of the bush that is the basis of cocaine rose in the world’s two other coca-producing nations, Peru and Bolivia, the United Nations said today.
The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the 18 percent reduction in Colombia from 2007 owed in part to the manual eradication — as opposed to aerial herbicide spraying — of 96,100 hectares (371 square miles) of the crop.
The agency’s annual survey of the Andes’ coca crop and estimated cocaine production said cultivation in Colombia dropped to 81,000 hectares — the lowest since 2004 — while Bolivia’s crop increased by 6 percent and Peru’s by 4.5 percent.
It put Bolivia’s coca crop last year at 30,500 hectares (117 square miles) and Peru’s at 56,100 hectares (216 square miles) and said crop eradication was down in both countries, by 13 percent and 16 percent respectively.
In last year’s report, it noted a 27 percent increase in coca cultivation in Colombia, the world’s top producer of cocaine.
Estimated cocaine production in Colombia, meanwhile, was down 28 percent last year to 430 metric tons from 2007 — with 20,000 fewer households growing coca, the U.N. agency said.
Colombia analyst Adam Isacson, of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, cautioned about “one element that should keep the champagne corks from popping” in the Andean nation’s government: Peasants who lost their savings in collapsed pyramid schemes began replanting coca on a huge scale in October, he said.
That certainly offset some of the gains reported by the U.N. from use of the herbicide glyphosate on 133,496 hectares (515 square miles) of coca crop last year, Isacson said.
Neither Peru nor Bolivia use herbicides against coca and the United States complains that Bolivia is no longer a serious partner in combatting drugs after expelling U.S. drug agents last year for alleged espionage.
Nevertheless, the U.N. said drug trafficking was seriously disrupted overall in the region, with 200 tons of cocaine seized in Colombia, 22 tons in Bolivia and 12 tons in Peru.
“Peru must guard against a return to the days when terrorists and insurgents, like the Shining Path, profited from drugs and crime,” agency director Mario Costa said in a statement.
Remnants of the Shining Path insurgency, which was nearly eradicated in the mid-1990s, control an area on the eastern slope of the Andes that the U.N. says is now the world’s leading source of cocaine.
Lima-based drug trade analyst Jaime Antezana estimates actual cultivation in Peru grew at least 7 percent.
“Peru still lacks an integral, national strategy that uses all available instruments,” he said. Eradication only takes place in two of Peru’s eight main coca-producing regions.
The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime put Peru’s production capacity last year at 302 tons compared to 113 tons for Bolivia.
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