Pubdate: Sat, 30 Mar 2002
Source: St. Petersburg Times (FL)
Section:  World and Nation
Copyright: 2002 St. Petersburg Times
Contact:  http://www.sptimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Author: David Adams, Times Latin America Correspondent

U.S. ABANDONS COLOMBIA PLAN ON SUBSTITUTE CROPS

There Is More Bad News From The Front Lines Of The Drug War

U.S. officials have abandoned an alternative development plan that was 
supposed to be a key element in halting the cultivation of drug crops in 
southern Colombia.

The action comes as Washington is considering broadening its military 
support for Colombia, which is likely to intensify the war in the poorest 
drug-producing regions.

According to a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the 
plan failed to wean local farmers away from cultivating the lucrative coca 
plant used to make cocaine.

The study, which has not been publicly released, also blames poor soil 
quality and a lack of security in the remote area of Putumayo, which is a 
battleground for guerrillas and paramilitary groups.

Originally the idea was to encourage peasant farmers to stop growing coca 
using a carrot-and-stick policy. Money and technical help were made 
available to farmers who agreed voluntarily to plant legal crops. Those who 
didn't were threatened with eradication of their coca fields by aerial 
spraying.

Although the decision to halt the alternative development program withdraws 
a major plank from the overall counter-drug policy, officials say they plan 
to forge ahead anyway with the spraying.

This has critics alarmed.

"They are going back to a strategy that has not worked in the past," said 
Adam Isacson, refering to the all-stick-and-no-carrot policy in the mid to 
late 1980s in the Guaviare region of Colombia. Although coca was 
successfully wiped out from this area, production simply moved elsewhere.

"Even if they are successful in Putumayo, what's to stop that happening 
again," says Isacson. "There's lots of room to go."

Isacson points out that the entire coca production in South America only 
occupies about 544,000 acres, which is about three-quarters the size of 
Rhode Island. But southeastern Colombia alone -- where most of the coca is 
grown -- is 100-million acres, or roughly the size of Texas, New Mexico and 
Oklahoma combined.

Experts have long compared the way drug production shifts to the effect on 
a balloon when you squash it an one end and expands elsewhere.

But U.S. officials believe they can outpace the "balloon effect" by massive 
spraying on a scale never before witnessed. This year the target is to 
spray 370,500 acres, going up to almost 500,000 next year. The philosophy 
appears to be the more farmers are sprayed, the more likely they will give up.

But critics say Washington may be giving up too soon on the less 
destructive approach of alternative development. They note that 
counter-drug officials never liked the idea of voluntary eradication pacts 
with farmers, believing it to be too soft and slow an approach.

The USAID office in Colombia was understaffed and ill-equipped to deal with 
the job it was given, critics charge. U.S. program managers also relied too 
heavily on Colombian officials with little or no knowledge of the area, 
which had been long ignored by the central government. Local development 
groups and municipal officials were bypassed by Bogota's notoriously 
elitist federal bureaucracy.

Isacson and others argue that the program could have been made to work had 
it been given more time and greater resources. Peasants were given a 
deadline of July 27 this year to destroy their coca crops or risk being 
sprayed. Despite signing pacts with 35,000 farmers, Putumayo department 
officials say only 8,200 farmers ever received the aid they were promised.

That was partly due to a U.S. government insistence that farmers destroy 
all their coca crops before receiving any U.S. aid. That led to resentment 
among farmers who asked what they were supposed to live on during the time 
it took to grow new crops.

A report last month by the General Accounting Office, the auditing branch 
of Congress, found that USAID spent barely 10 percent of its $52- million 
budget for Putumayo. That was only a tiny portion of the $1.3- billion 
budgeted for the overall strategy, known as Plan Colombia, which focused 
mainly on military training for counter-narcotics operations and the aerial 
spraying of crops.

The GAO report also noted that the program was hampered by a lack of 
security in the region.

Given these obstacles, critics argue it is perhaps premature to declare the 
plan a failure. With the July deadline approaching, peasants will now be 
left to fend for themselves as best they can.

That will likely result in food shortages as well as greater environmental 
damage, as farmers are pushed deeper into the rain forest to grow their 
illegal crops.

It is also likely to create greater mistrust of the government, a factor 
guerrilla recruiters can be expected to exploit.

U.S. officials say they won't be abandoning the needs of the region 
altogether. Instead, they say they are turning their efforts to large 
infrastructure projects, such as bridges and roads, to provide jobs and 
improve access for farmers to local markets. Other smaller projects will 
include new schools, health clinics, and provision of running water and 
electricity.

These are all things badly needed by Putumayo's peasant communities. But 
after so many broken government promises, it may take a lot more than that 
to break southern Colombia's dependence on coca farming.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth