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Colombian Farmers Get Broad Incentives To
Forgo Coca Crops
By Juan Forero, Washington Post Foreign
Service
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 underway 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.
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. "The
region where I have my farm is much better,
much calmer. There is no conflict there."
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 then manufactured 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,
sugar cane and other crops, 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. "For me, it was a
startling change in attitude."
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 Bogota. Lale said the reduction in
coca plantings has "little precedent in
Colombia and in the world."
So far, about $90 million has been spent, 15
percent of it from the United States and the
Netherlands. The program was put in place in
late 2007 after Colombian authorities took a
step back to study the results of years of
aerial fumigation of drug crops and programs
designed to wean farmers off growing coca.
They saw that four times as much coca was
being eradicated than in the late 1990s but
that the size of the country's coca crop was
nearly the same because farmers replanted.
Indeed, new U.N. figures show that coca
plantings fell by 18 percent from 2007 to
2008 but that the total amount of coca being
cultivated is still more than in 2006.
"We used to think that success was coming in
and eradicating with all that we had," said
Álvaro Balcázar, an expert on agriculture
who is program manager for the project. "We
found it did not work."
The key, planners said, was to combine the
fight against guerrillas and coca with the
state-building plans.
"We had to find a way to solve the security
problem and the coca problem at the same
time because they feed off each other," said
Sergio Jaramillo, vice minister of defense
and an architect of the project. "It's all
one problem, and it needs a joint solution."
Susan Reichle, the U.S. Agency for
International Development director in
Colombia, said the central goal of deploying
the military and various government agencies
together to bring services is "not something
that's rocket science, but it's a very, very
difficult thing to actually do."
She said the United States helped by rapidly
delivering on small "impact" projects, such
as new soccer fields and renovated schools,
that residents requested at community
meetings after the security situation
improved. But Reichle said it was important
that farmers see it was the Colombian state
that responded.
"This is not about putting the U.S.
government out in front, but creating
confidence in the Colombian government,"
Reichle said.
This area was chosen for symbolic and
practical reasons. It was the heartland for
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
or FARC, a rebel group at war with the
government for 44 years, and was considered
the country's most productive coca-producing
region. Another consideration was that Vista
Hermosa and five other nearby municipalities
had some roads and other infrastructure to
build on.
Farmers here, such as Leonardo Fabio Cabezas,
29, said the turnaround has been startling
from a past long dependent on coca. He
recalled how his father was "a founder of
coca in this region."
"The tradition was coca, coca, coca,"
Cabezas said. "That is what people grew
here."
These days, the farmers in the region said
they no longer think too much about coca but
are instead focused on solving everyday
problems hampering their efforts to grow
legal crops. One major obstacle is that
farmers here are squatters; they do not have
land titles. They say bureaucrats in Bogota
have been slow to grant them despite
promises.
"The banks demand land titles for farmers,
and without titles there is not much in the
way of credit," said Miguel Briceño, the
mayor here.
Riquelme Saza is among the former coca
farmers here who is supportive of the
government's efforts. He said his land is
now worth six times as much as it was three
years ago. He now grows cacao, bananas and
rice on 14 acres along a river framed by
dark purple mountains.
"All this gives confidence to the people,
makes them want to invest," he said as he
trudged into a rice paddy. "Around here,
coca only caused problems, and with all
this, we now live at peace."
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