Pubdate: Wed, 11 Oct 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Author: Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer

A LONG WAY FROM COCA TO COFFEE

LA SIERRA, Colombia - Among the shiny, dark green leaves and red berries of 
the coffee trees on Jarol Uribe's farm, an occasional coca bush still pokes 
its stubby branches toward the sun. Like many South Americans, Uribe 
considers the leaves medicinal. "We just keep it for ourselves," he says. 
"It's good for the stomach."

But Uribe, 36, is no longer in the commercial coca business that helped 
sustain him and his neighbors in this remote corner of southwestern 
Colombia for years. His family, and more than 400 other nearby peasant 
farmers, are participating instead in a government-backed crop substitution 
project that is helping them grow organic coffee for export to the United 
States, Europe and Japan.

By conservative count, small farmers like Uribe with holdings averaging 
four to five acres cultivate at least one-third of the estimated 300,000 
acres of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, grown in Colombia. Nearly 
all of the 19,000 acres of opium poppies used to make heroin are found on 
even smaller private plots.

The other two-thirds of the coca, according to U.S. and Colombian 
officials, is grown on large plantations, where migrant workers pick and 
process the leaves. Under Plan Colombia, a $1.3 billion, two-year U.S. aid 
package will begin flowing here this month. U.S.-trained and equipped army 
battalions will attempt to seize the plantations from the drug traffickers 
that operate them and guerrilla and paramilitary forces that guard them. 
Colombian police will eradicate the crops with aerial fumigation and 
dismantle the laboratories where drugs are processed for export.

But a portion of the aid--$42.5 million--is to be spent trying to persuade 
and assist small producers to switch to other, often less profitable, cash 
crops. While the military anti-drug offensive has garnered most of the 
attention--and criticism--in Washington, senior officials here, from 
President Andres Pastrana on down, maintain that it is on small farms such 
as Jarol Uribe's that a large part of Colombia's war against both drugs and 
the rebels will ultimately be won or lost.

"If the United States would simply like to finish all the coca in the most 
cost-effective way--spraying--they would destroy Colombia," said Jaime 
Ruiz, Pastrana's point man on the non-military aspects of Plan Colombia. 
Fumigation "alienates the peasants," who simply move more deeply into the 
jungle, cut down more trees, and plant more coca. More often than not, Ruiz 
said, any residual loyalty toward the government is transferred to the drug 
traffickers or guerrillas who help them regain their living.

With the new programs, Ruiz said, "we are going to tell these people we're 
going to give them something, not just take something away from them. They 
have to feel they don't want to grow coca."

Although similar crop substitution efforts have had some success in Bolivia 
and elsewhere, no country has attempted such an endeavor on the scale of 
Colombia, and under such adverse circumstances. There are neither roads nor 
accessible markets in many of the growing areas, and little if any 
government presence. Guerrillas or paramilitary groups occupy much of the 
territory.

Hundreds of such projects will be needed; only a handful currently exist 
and all are small and struggling. Once begun, efforts such as the organic 
coffee program in La Sierra take years to show concrete results.

So daunting is the task that the Colombian government has already 
significantly scaled back its plans to change the hearts, minds and crops 
of the drug-growing peasantry. Initially designed to cover all regions of 
the country, the crop substitution program is now targeted for the 
foreseeable future only on relatively small areas of the two southern 
states of Cauca and Putumayo, and the northern region of Magdalena Medio.

The simple facts of life for the farmers in La Sierra and seven adjoining 
administrative regions of Cauca where the project operates illustrate the 
challenges. After several years of nurturing their coffee with organic 
compost and homemade natural pesticides on the steep mountainsides, farmers 
are earning an average 35.6 percent return on the money they invest in 
their crop, according to project technicians. For local coca farmers, the 
rate is 59 percent; for poppy growers, 45 percent.

A successful coca farmer on an average-size farm can make about $2,500 a 
year. Most of the coffee growers haven't yet approached that level. 
Although there is a steady stream of recruits to the project, many of the 
growers who initially signed up have dropped out, declaring the farming too 
difficult and the returns too risky.

"Farmers in these zones get into drug cultivation because the [trafficking] 
middlemen pay them to grow it and give them the seeds," said project 
director Nelson Melo. "They can harvest four to six months after planting, 
and then two or three times a year. It doesn't take much work."

On the peaks above Uribe's farm, neat rows of opium poppies grown by Indian 
communities are clearly visible. Government airplanes spray herbicide 
there, and the coffee farmers say enough wafts down to adulterate their 
coffee plants and sabotage their crop's organic quality. The Colombian 
massif looming overhead is the watershed for the many rivers that tumble 
through the region, and there are fears of ecological damage.

"They're just spraying a certain area," said coffee farmer Hely Hernandez. 
"But the wind, the water spread it everywhere."

No crop substitution or other assistance is currently offered or planned 
for the region's high-altitude poppy growers, whose food crops are wiped 
out along with the drugs. Cauca Gov. Carlos Negret, an outspoken critic of 
Bogota's policies, has complained about the lack of coordination between 
the police and military in charge of the spraying, drug interdiction and 
fighting the rebels, and the civilians in charge of crop substitution and 
other development programs.

Similar complaints have come from the governor and mayors in neighboring 
Putumayo, where the largest concentration of spraying and military 
operations is planned. In July, they announced their opposition to all 
fumigation and refused to cooperate with it.

Large swaths of Cauca are occupied by guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed 
Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army, and right-wing 
paramilitary forces have begun moving into the state from the north. 
Although farmers say the guerrilla columns that frequently pass through La 
Sierra seldom bother them, there would be no one to call if they did. Like 
nearly a third of Cauca's 41 regions, La Sierra has no police or military 
presence.

Asked if growing organic coffee is worth the effort, farmer Jesus Abad 
declared it "a good question. . . . Lots of people got rid of their own 
food and other crops to grow coca because of the money.

"We were 150 farmers when we started," he said of his group in the coffee 
project. "And there are 43 of us left. But our production is going up 
little by little, and a lot of them are now seeing what we've accomplished. 
It doesn't all happen at once."

For the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is administering 
most of the non-military part of the U.S. funding, Plan Colombia marks a 
new beginning. Barely a year ago, AID had decided to "graduate" Colombia 
from its programs, a euphemism for shutting down operations altogether.

Today, AID has leased vast new office space in Bogota, and plans to 
increase its skeleton staff to 50 U.S. government employees and 
contractors. In addition to the crop substitution funds, there is money for 
assisting people displaced by the war and for helping to rebuild Colombian 
democracy.

"For the first time! Social investment from the United States!" Pastrana 
marveled in a recent interview.

Not everyone is as happy as the Colombian president. Opposition to U.S. 
military aid among human rights and humanitarian organizations that fear it 
will widen the war has rubbed off on the development projects, and the 
guerrillas have said that anyone who accepts U.S. money will become a 
potential military target. As a result, regulations have been waived that 
would have required AID's clasped-hands logo to be imprinted on all U.S. 
assistance, from bags of food to earth-moving equipment. AID has prohibited 
U.S. officials from traveling to project sites outside of major cities.

Colombia and the United States have agreed that Plante, the four-year-old 
Colombian government alternative development agency, will determine the 
overall direction of the program and provide technical help. Although AID 
funds will be administered by international contractors, rather than by any 
Colombian government agency, Plante's role makes U.S. officials nervous.

"Plante's performance has been mixed," said one U.S. official, who 
questioned its ability to absorb major new funding. State officials such as 
Negret, the Cauca governor, accuse Plante of being a pawn of political 
powers in Bogota, dispensing aid as regional pork. Some non-governmental 
aid agencies here consider it inept at best, and corrupt at worst.

To participate in the program, farmers must sign a document listing all 
their coca or poppy acreage--only those with less than eight acres of coca 
or 2.7 acres of poppy are eligible--and promise to rid of it. The timing of 
the voluntary eradication is flexible, said the Plante director, Maria Inez 
Restrepo. "Not everybody is going to do it in 10 months."

With the promise of help comes a threat. If the drug crops remain after the 
agreed time, they get sprayed. "It only works if there's a credible risk 
that . . . some law enforcement action will take place--either fumigation 
or interdiction of their harvest"--that will affect their earnings, an AID 
official said.

There have been heated discussions between Plan Colombia's military-police 
and civilian sides in both Washington and Bogota over the correct balance 
among development, fumigation and drug interdiction.

Over the summer, the military-police side agreed to cut back somewhat to 
give development the space and time to work. But time is something aid 
workers feel is in short supply. "There is a lot at stake in demonstrating 
that the alternative development approach can succeed, and succeed 
quickly," the Washington official said. "The problem is, all the jobs are 
hard ones. You've got to get farmers to develop a different economy than 
they have now. And you've got a year. Hello? Trees don't grow in a year."

Among the biggest unknowns is how the drug traffickers and the guerrillas 
will react if the programs pick up speed. "There's been no reaction from 
the traffickers so far" to the several, small substitution programs begun 
by the United Nations in recent years, said program director Klaus Nyholm. 
"If you wanted to be malicious, you could say it's because we haven't had 
much effect on them."
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