May 2005

From: Lisa Haugaard
Latin America Working Group

Rethinking Plan Colombia
Shift resources to alternative development; turn attention back home

In 2004, the production of cocaine in Colombia was not reduced by a single acre, despite the most massive aerial spraying campaign ever. See the attached press release from the Office of National Drug Control Policy showing this failure to reduce cocaine production.

The International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Bureau, in its effort to portray success, has been reduced to talking about reductions in “potential production,” despite the fact that diminishing the number of hectares planted is its own chosen measure of success.

From 1999, the year before the start of Plan Colombia, to 2004, according to U.S. government statistics, coca planting in Colombia was reduced from 122,500 hectares to 114,000 hectares – only a 7% reduction. While this includes a spike in production from 2000-01 and a drop from 2002-03, after which progress stalled completely in 2004, this is not a successful result for such a massive investment.

More seriously in terms of the ostensible goals of Plan Colombia, the flow of drugs into the United States does not appear to be affected. U.S. prices of cocaine and heroin continue to decline. Cocaine and heroin use among high-school students was actually higher in 2004 than in 2001. 1 Yet administration officials keep promising us that we’re about to see a change: “We expect to see in the next 6 to 9 months significant disruptions in the purity and availability of cocaine throughout the world…” claimed ONDCP director John Walters in July 2003.

This lack of progress indicates the persistence of drug production if the two driving factors are not addressed: demand for illicit drugs, especially from the United States; and the desperation of small farmers seeking to feed their families and under pressure from armed groups and traffickers. In Colombia, farmers whose crops are sprayed but who receive no transitional assistance are replanting crops in the same area or moving to neighboring areas to establish new crops; and traffickers are enticing or forcing farmers to plant in areas where there previously was no production. According to John Walters, head of ONDCP, “Responding in 2004, coca growers re-planted and reconstituted their crops faster than we have seen them do in the past.” 2

This lack of success is more disturbing because aerial spraying is an inhumane tool that affects rural communities already suffering from the conflict. Food crops are generally interspersed with illicit crops, and spraying destroys families’ food supplies. Recent and planned spraying is moving further into Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities which have already suffered greatly from human rights violations by all parties to the conflict.

Farmers, however desperate, should not grow illicit crops, and the United States can help: alternative development, and broader rural development programs, are a more humane and ultimately more effective response. According to USAID, 55,000 farmers have been helped to switch to legal crops—an accomplishment worthy of greater recognition.3 Yet most small farmers whose crops are sprayed do not receive any assistance from the United States or the Colombian government to help them transition to legal crops. USAID supported 55,071 hectares of licit crops in Colombia from 9/30/01-9/30/04, while during 2001-04 the United States sprayed 476,318 hectares – or 8 times the number of hectares sprayed as hectares planted with legal crops. 4

Yet the President’s budget contains no increase proposed for alternative development programs (124.7 million for all alternative development, human rights and other AID programs), and the administration is promising to step up increased aerial eradication. According to John Walters, “We must increased the pressure by increasing aerial eradication to the maximum.” 5

The choice is in Congress’s hands: do we expand an aerial eradication program that has proven not only unusually inhumane but also costly and ineffective – or do we increase our emphasis on alternative development in the Andes, and treatment and prevention at home?

National Institute on Drug Abuse, Monitoring the Future: National Survey Results on Drug Use, 1975-2004, Volume I, Secondary Students (December 2004).

John P. Walters, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy, “The Andes: Institutionalizing Success,” Testimony before the House Committee on International Relations, May 12, 2005, p. 7.

Adolfo A. Franco, Assistant Administrator, Agency for International Development, “Plan Colombia: Accomplishments,” Testimony before the House Committee on International Relations, May 12, 2005, p. 2.

USAID/Colombia, Progress Report for 4th quarter FY2004, and U.S. State Department, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (March 2005).

John P. Walters, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy, “The Andes: Institutionalizing Success,” Testimony before the House Committee on International Relations, May 12, 2005, p. 7.