Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, broke a new record in 2022 for the production of white powder, as well as coca crops, the UN announced on Monday.
According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Undoc), coca leaf cultivation increased by almost 13% in 2022, reaching a record 230,000 hectares.
In 2021, the country had 204,000 hectares of coca plantations, already an increase of 43% compared to 2020.
Although we see a slowdown in growth in 2022, this figure is nevertheless the highest recorded by the UN since it began monitoring cocaine production in 2001.
Drug production also increased significantly in 2022, mainly for the United States and Europe. It went from 1,400 tonnes of cocaine to 1,738 tonnes.
This upward trend has been consolidated since 2014, despite the muscular method favored to fight against drug trafficking.
65% of coca crops are concentrated in the departments of Narino and Putumayo (south), both bordering Ecuador, and in the department of North Santander (north-east), bordering Venezuela.
The rest of the country “presented relatively stable behavior, with an increase of 3% in the area cultivated with coca,” the report said.
Of the 1,122 municipalities in Colombia, coca leaf cultivation is present in 185 of them, adds Undoc.
Nearly half of drug crops (49%) are found in indigenous reserves (10%), forest reserves (15%), in Afro-Colombian regions (19%) or in natural parks (5% ).
Thus, Colombia remains by far the largest grower of coca leaves in the world, ahead of Peru and Bolivia. The United States, which historically financed the war on drugs, is the primary consumer of Colombian cocaine.
These new alarming figures, with a trend which is unlikely to be reversed in 2023, are published while left-wing President Gustavo Petro (elected in the summer of 2022) continues to denounce the “failure” of the war on drugs and policies of total repression implemented by his conservative and liberal predecessors.
This weekend, during a Latin American summit in Cali (southwest) devoted to the subject, Mr. Petro repeated the same observation, in unison with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. Colombia and Mexico are “the biggest victims” of this war, said the two heads of state.
“The policy called the war on drugs has failed. It serves no purpose,” said Mr. Petro, stressing that repression only contributes to enriching the mafias and aggravating violence, without attacking the fundamental problems that are consumption in rich countries and poverty in Latin America from which drug traffickers benefit.
During this summit, which brought together representatives of around twenty countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, Mr. Lopez Obrador also called for “addressing the causes” for which young people join drug trafficking cartels, such as unemployment, low pay and poor access to education.
In the wake of this observation, Colombia is preparing to adopt in the coming days a new policy against drug trafficking, aimed at both dismantling and reducing the influence of criminal organizations, with the maximum number of seizures. And to “at the same time stimulate the transformation of territories by promoting legal and alternative economies in favor of the weakest part of the production chain”, namely small farmers.
This policy was developed in consultation with “2,700 social leaders and 274 community organizations affected by this scourge”, who will thus be “for the first time the protagonists of a state policy”, according to the government.
“We give priority to the fight against the big players (in drug trafficking) and not against the poor peasants, whose only means of subsistence is the cultivation of coca, since the State has not given them the possibility of surviving in growing legal products,” explained Colombian Defense Minister Ivan Velasquez.
12/09/2023 00:09:40 – Bogotá (AFP) – © 2023 AFP