Today's issue, which was discussed in brief yesterday in a meeting in the World Bank with indigenous communities from the Putumayo region of the Colombian Amazon, is the Colombian Government's fumigations of the coca crop (carried out with strong US backing).
This is a highly thorny subject in Colombia, and one which I feel slightly anxious but duty-bound in addressing.
From the day I first read about the fumigations of coca, as a student at Oxford, I have been opposed to, and worried by, this phenomenon.
For those who don't know the story: over the past decades, Colombia has sprayed the coca crop with chemicals including glysophate as part of its strategy to reduce the country's drug production. I say part of the strategy: because the Government also employs people voluntarily to uproot the coca crop by hand. (Over fifty people have died in recent years doing just that, due to landmines and to being attacked by illegal armed groups).
The more one knows about the issue, the more morally complicated and ethically challenging it becomes.
Here are a few isolated observations which I hope are valid:
1. There are many hundreds - probably thousands - of stories of 'innocent' farmers and rural communities whose crops are sprayed by mistake by the chemicals, resulting in the losses of crops, health problems for the families and a huge amount of frustration and rage on the part of the affected people.
2. Many times, the good work of the state, of NGOs, and of international cooperation, providing farmers with alternative crops to coca, has been inadvertently ruined by the spraying.
3. Coca itself - the raw material for cocaine - is a product which the indigenous communities of Colombia venerate and consume as part of their cultural tradition and way of life.
4. Demand remains high for cocaine, and so - while the figures have definitely gone down in Colombia - overall global demand has been displaced to some degree elsewhere, both in the Andes, Central America and, most cruelly of all at the moment, in Mexico.
5. The Colombian conflict has been fuelled to a significant degree by the drugs trade, and narco-trafficking.
6. Many 'campesinos' and poor communities in Colombia grow coca either because there is no alternative, or because they are forced to do it by illegal armed groups, or because they earn much more money from it than they could ever hope to earn from the alternatives. Coca has been a 'bonanza' in many areas, just as other crops and raw materials (gold, coffee, emeralds, silver, etc.) have created their own bonanzas in other times.
7. The coca crop itself does definitely lead to significant deforestation; and the fabrication of cocaine alongside the riverbanks has led to much pollution of toxic chemicals into Colombia's rivers.
8. Fumigation in areas planted with coca near national parks has led those who grow coca to transfer the plantations to often exceptionally biodiverse areas within national parks. Colombian legislation in principle prevents parks from being sprayed; but one reads that the Americans are pressuring Colombia to enable spraying in the parks in order to continue to spray.
9. To some degree, strong industrial interests within the US have pushed for spraying, however controversial, to continue; while the chemicals are banned in the US, they are not banned here; and the spraying requires a whole support network of planes, pilots and infrastructure in order to be carried out.
10. In the absence of global legislation, and in a broadly prohibitionist atmosphere in the US and indeed in Colombia, it is difficult to foresee the Government(s) reducing their spraying to zero.
11. In the absence of spraying, coca production would be likely to undergo an increase, especially in some areas where state presence is weak, the conflict continues and where significant extensions of land for coca are available for use.
12. The alternative to spraying - manual erradication - is also ethically problematic, as the numbers of deaths over recent years attest.
13. A recent book published in Colombia documents in extensive detail the achievements + (multiple) flaws of the Global War on Drugs in recent decades.
14. Avaaz - the global petition side - today launched a new campaign to collect signatures to influence the drugs debate in a progressive way, and calling for decriminalisation.
15. Many experts in Colombia believe the country is uniquely well-placed to call for a global discussion on the successes and failures of the War on Drugs, and around legalisation/decriminalisation.
16. Various ex-Presidents of Colombia, strongly prohibitionist in office, become in favour of reform on leaving office. President Cesar Gaviria (1990 - 1994) is a case in point.
17. President Santos, in an interview in Semana 6 months ago, said he would be open to the debate but not to promote it unilaterally; it is contingent on legislative and political progress on the issue in other countries.
To conclude: I am in favour of legalisation and believe spraying should end. But is it legitimate for me to call for either or both of these things? Thoughts please...!
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