Plan Colombia and Beyond

The State Department’s annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, released today, includes some seriously bad news about drug production in the Andes.

While data for Colombia are still forthcoming, the report shows a sharp increase in the production of coca, the plant used to make cocaine, elsewhere in the Andes last year.

• Bolivia: “Overall coca cultivation increased 8 percent from 2004 to 2005, to 26,500 hectares.”
• Peru: “The USG estimates there are 38,000 hectares of coca cultivation in Peru, including 4,000 hectares in new areas.” This represents a stunning 38 percent increase from 2004 to 2005. The combined one-year increase in Peru and Bolivia was 12,400 hectares, or 24 percent.
• Ecuador: “Ecuadorian security forces located and destroyed about 36,160 cultivated coca plants in small, scattered sites in 2005. While not commercially significant, the extent of cultivation was about double that of 2004. Together with the discovery of a small, partially harvested opium poppy plantation, they suggest that growers are testing the feasibility of drug crop cultivation in Ecuador.”

Colombia’s coca-cultivation estimate for 2005 has not yet been made public, and probably will not be for a few more weeks. If it ends up revealing that eradication failed to reduce coca cultivation in Colombia last year – as was the case in 2004 – then official U.S. statistics will show a 7.5 percent increase in coca cultivation throughout the Andean region.

Such a result would be a stark admission of failure, since Washington has spent more than $6 billion on counter-narcotics in the Andes since “Plan Colombia” began in 2000.

If Colombia is found to have registered some coca reduction in 2005, the 12,400-hectare increase in Bolivia and Peru will almost certainly prove to be big enough to wipe it out. Official data are unlikely to show Colombian coca cultivation dropping by that much. To do so would mean a one-year reduction of 11 percent, after a slight net gain in 2004.

The new data show that the “balloon effect” is alive and well in the Andes. (The term refers to squeezing one part of a balloon, only to see it bulge out elsewhere, the way that drug crops respond to forced eradication.) Andean cocaine supplies are likely to be sustaining current levels, or even increasing.

The strategy, once again, is not working. But not only is the Bush administration contemplating no changes, it is also planning a deep cut in counter-drug aid to Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru in 2007. The president’s 2007 foreign-aid request to Congress contemplates a two-year overall cut of 21.4 percent in these three countries’ “drug war” aid through the State Department’s Andean Counterdrug Initiative account. Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru will see a 17.5% cut in military aid and a 25.8% cut in economic aid (see table).

While drug-crop cultivation increases rapidly, U.S. aid – whether to help destitute rural producers, to interdict drug flows, or even just to eradicate crops – is dropping precipitously.

Andean Counterdrug Initiative (the principal anti-drug aid program for the Andes)
(Thousands of dollars)

Coca cultivation in the Andes
(Hectares)

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