- Colombia’s PNIS program, launched after the 2016 peace deal to offer coca growers alternative livelihoods in exchange for eradicating their crops, is failing to achieve its goals due to design, implementation and security issues.
- Many coca leaf growers and pickers who voluntarily committed to the program said that despite eradicating their crops, they haven’t received the agreed technical or financial support from the government.
- As a result, some have found themselves in a worse socioeconomic situation than before, and many have had to turn to illegal mining to survive.
- Coca production has actually increased in Colombia since the start of the program, as has deforestation in and around areas with PNIS agreements, leading some experts to conclude the program has done more harm than good.
For Indigenous communities in Colombia’s Amazonian and Andean forests, coca is sacred. Many ancestral traditions, such as healing and shamanic practices, include the use and cultivation of the plant. But ever since the mid-1980s, when the global demand for cocaine peaked, the coca leaf became associated with other phenomena: environmental degradation, poverty and violence.
According to experts and coca leaf growers and pickers, known as cocaleros, government efforts to control these issues have been inefficient. Coca production and deforestation continue to skyrocket in the country.
As part of the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group, which set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement, the government developed the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops. Known as the PNIS, it sought to get farmers to voluntarily give up growing coca in favor of legal alternatives, as part of efforts to help coca-growing communities overcome conditions of poverty and marginalization.
“We joined the substitution program to eradicate coca and because here you need money to invest in a project,” a farmer from the municipality of Tumaco, not named for security reasons, told the land research network Observatorio de Tierras.
Like many others, the farmer said he trusted in the promises of the program and signed an agreement with the PNIS, “but they didn’t come here with food aid, they didn’t come here with anything,” he said. “We need help, my children are in school and I don’t have money.”
The most recent assessment of the PNIS program by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that despite its stated goals, coca production has actually increased since the start of the program. Between December 2021 and December 2022, the area under coca cultivation in Colombia increased by 13%, from about 204,000 to 230,000 hectares (504,000 to 568,000 acres).
“The peace agreement stated that the entire PNIS process was going to last two years and that in those two years, all support would be given to [the beneficiaries] for productive projects,” Guillermo García Miranda, regional coordinator for the UNODC’s Alternative Development Programme, told Mongabay. But seven years later, few of those promises have been met.
“There have been many frustrations from the communities about the delaying of the entire delivery of the agreement,” he said.
Colombia’s Ministry of Justice and the Directorate for the Substitution of Illicit Crops, the agency in charge of implementing the PNIS, did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment by the time this story was published.
Failed promises
Before the PNIS, the Colombian government had embarked on a regime of forced eradication of coca crops, tearing the plants out of the ground or using aircraft to spray herbicides over 1.4 million hectares (3.5 million acres) of the country. But this strategy was met with fierce opposition from civil rights groups and communities, who raised concerns about health and environmental damage due to chemical exposure and the impacts on the growers’ livelihoods. It also failed to curtail the growth of coca farming, which increased from an estimated low of 48,000 hectares (119,000 acres) in 2012 to 154,000 hectares (381,000 acres) in 2019.
“The issue of [herbicide spraying] did a lot of damage here,” an Indigenous leader from Tumaco, also unnamed for security concerns, told Observatorio Tierras. “There was a time when people were left without a single banana plant, without cocoa, without coconut, without yucca, without anything because the issue of [spraying] ends everything.”
This is why, according to Diana Ximena Machuca Perez, a political scientist at the National University of Colombia, the PNIS can’t be written off as a total failure in comparison to previous government attempts. In principle, the program represented a positive change in the country’s antidrug policy, she told Mongabay, shifting the goal away from forced eradication to offering growers an alternative livelihood.
But in that regard, she said, “I think the state has failed the coca communities. The state has not accomplished its commitments and this was a real frustration to watch,” she told Mongabay.
Under the PNIS, the state promised to provide families involved in the program with financial assistance, known as “immediate food assistance,” consisting of monthly cash payments for 12 months. It also committed to providing “comprehensive technical assistance” to families to revitalize local economies, promote food security, and assist in the implementation of alternative livelihood projects such as raising cattle, farming fish and growing cacao, as well as other forms of financial and technical assistance.
However, the program’s design failed to account for several factors. For instance, among the beneficiaries were peasants living in environmentally sensitive areas who, when it came to applying for assistance for projects such as cattle ranching, were rejected because such activities are prohibited in protected areas. This was only recognized later, once families had already voluntarily eradicated their coca crops.
Another issue in the design was the expectation that the coca growers would eradicate their crops completely rather than take a more gradual approach to substitution, Machuca said. As a result, when the government failed to provide the financial assistance it had promised, many people were left without any form of income and security, and so returned to growing coca.
According to an agreement document signed by the Amazonian Institute for Scientific Research (Sinchi) and Colombia’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, some PNIS participants from the country’s Caquetá department shifted to alluvial gold mining to make a living — an activity associated with high rates of deforestation and pollution.
After the peace agreement, the FARC demobilized. This led to a drop in coca prices, which were previously regulated by the guerrilla group, García told Mongabay. Today, due to the absence of state control, some areas have been occupied by other guerrillas and criminal organizations vying to take control of the supply chain that the FARC left behind, but the price of coca hasn’t bounced back.
A leader of a youth organization in the municipality of San José de Fragua in Caquetá, not named for his own safety, told Mongabay Latam that his territory had experienced a rise in illegal mining due to the drop in cocaine prices. “They are paying 80,000 pesos [about $20] per day, and as the price of coca has been decreasing and people need money, they have dedicated themselves to this,” he said.
In areas where illegal armed groups are present, the program has resulted in a 481% increase in killings of community leaders who support the program.
Environmental damage
A recent evaluation of the PNIS program by Colombia’s National Planning Department (DNP) and the University of the Andes’ Center for Drug and Security Studies (CESED) found that in areas where the program was implemented, deforestation actually increased by 15.4-22.7%. It also increased directly outside these areas by 19.3-28%.
According to María Alejandra Velez Lesme, an economics professor at the University of the Andes and a co-author of the evaluation, one of the program’s main limitations was that for the first few years, the PNIS didn’t include any environmental considerations in its design, despite 50% of coca crops being located within environmentally sensitive areas such as protected areas, forest reserve zones and ethnic territories.
In a recent study that assessed coca-related deforestation in Colombia’s Amazonía and Catatumbo regions, the UNODC found that between 2005 and 2014, only 6% of forest loss was directly caused by the planting of illicit coca crops. However, 42% of total deforestation in these regions was found to be associated with coca cultivation.
According to the researchers, this is because coca crops tend to be grown in remote, forested areas, and the expansion of the illicit plants promotes rural development, such as the construction of roads and other infrastructure.
Researchers have also warned that it’s not just the cultivation of coca that damages forests, but the production of cocaine too. To make coca paste, producers use large amounts of chemicals such as acetone, gasoline and sulfuric acid, which are then discharged into rivers and soil. It takes more than 300 liters of gasoline to produce a kilogram of cocaine, according to the UNODC, or about 36 gallons per pound. Other research has also found that coca farmers frequently use harmful fertilizers and herbicides that leach into rivers and destroy local habitats and ecosystems. However, the scale of this impact in Colombia is still poorly researched.
“Not only are the coca crops increasing deforestation or environmental harms, but also the policy interventions to reduce those coca crops also have an important impact,” Velez told Mongabay. “Coca crops are not the most important driver of deforestation in the country. However, it does have an indirect effect, as it activates the whole economy in the region and generates other drivers of deforestation.”
Banner image: A farmer walks with his cattle past agricultural farms. Image by Neil Palmer (CIAT) via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
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Citation:
Marín, L. L. (2022). The killing of social leaders: An unintended effect of Colombia’s illicit crop substitution program. International Journal of Drug Policy, 101: 103550. doi:10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103550
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