Colombian Farmers Get Incentives To Forgo
Planting of Coca
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Colombian Farmers Get Incentives To Forgo
Planting of Coca
By
Juan Forero, The Washington Post
Vista Hermosa, Colombia -- Colombia, with $8
billion in U.S. backing since the late
1990s, has tried everything to eradicate the
crop used to make cocaine.
Planes have sprayed the country with
coca-killing herbicides, and authorities
have deployed soldiers and paid laborers to
yank the stringy green bushes out of the
ground. Record amounts of coca have been
eliminated -- only to sprout up anew as coca
farmers move on and plant again.
Now, Colombia's government may have found a
remedy palatable to a Democratic-led U.S.
Congress not only interested in emphasizing
social development over military aid for
this country but also looking for solutions
to consider in Afghanistan, where the
Taliban is entrenched and drug crops are
flourishing.
The plan under way here is an ambitious
state-building effort designed to
incorporate a once-forgotten region into the
legitimate economy by bringing in police and
courts, paving roads, improving schools and
offering farm aid. The idea is to provide
broad incentives for farmers in this town in
the southern state of Meta to stay put and
grow legal crops.
PROMISING RESULTS
Colombian authorities are working to
duplicate the plan in five other
drug-infested regions, and U.S. officials
say it could work in other conflict zones
far from Colombia.
The results here are promising: From 2007 to
2008, coca production fell 75 percent in a
quadrant of the southern state of Meta that
is bigger than Rhode Island, Colombian
authorities say. With most hamlets around
Vista Hermosa pledging to cooperate in
exchange for help, eradication efforts have
accelerated this year and the amount of coca
here is now negligible. Meanwhile, the
amount of land dedicated to the three
leading legal crops grew sixfold from last
year.
''I see a big change in the last couple of
years, 100 percent favorable to us,'' said
Luis Arturo Giraldo, a farmer who used to
grow coca, like most farmers here.
Officials measure success not in how much
coca has been destroyed but in rising land
value and confidence -- unheard of even two
years ago when this area ranked among the
country's top coca-producing regions.
Several farmers said in interviews that
Marxist guerrillas forced peasants to grow
coca, which is turned into cocaine and
shipped to the United States. Right-wing
paramilitary squads then swept in to fight
for control of the crop.
Today, 2,385 farm families are receiving
emergency food aid and technical help from
agronomists as they start to grow rice,
yucca, sugar cane and cacao, officials say.
Those who have worked on the program,
including foreign diplomats familiar with
Colombia's complex and seemingly intractable
conflict, said they have never seen hope
restored so quickly.
''There's much more trust in the future,''
said Marion Kappeyne van de Coppello,
ambassador from the Netherlands, which has
spent $2 million to assist farmers in the
crucial six-month transition period after
they give up coca farming.
GUERRILLAS OUSTED
Under the Integrated Consolidation Plan for
the Macarena, named after a national park
west of here, the military first drove out
guerrillas and other armed groups. In quick
sequence, engineers and work crews,
technicians, prosecutors, social workers and
policy types arrived, working in concert to
transform a lawless backwater into something
resembling a functioning part of Colombia.
All of it is coordinated from a compound,
called the fusion center, on the edge of
Vista Hermosa.
A stream of foreign visitors, many of them
policymakers who work on drug and
conflict-resolution issues, arrived to study
the outcome.
''The results do the talking,'' said Aldo
Lale, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs
and Crime in Bogotá. Lale said the reduction
in coca plantings has ``little precedent in
Colombia and in the world.''
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