Political ecology- how cocaine demand in the west is driving Colombian farmers to destroy their backyard. Could Alexander von Humboldt theories hold a solution to the war on drugs?
The northeastern Columbian region of Catatumbo, which borders Venezuela, is one of the biggest coca growing regions in South America with over 40,000 hectares dedicated to growing the crop (UNODC, 2020.) According to the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) coca crops in Colombia exceeded 245,000 hectares at the end of 2020, with cocaine production capacity at 1,010 metric tonnes a year. The remote rainforest region has experienced ongoing violence and abuse against civilians for decades due to political corruption, criminal rule and poverty, which allowed cocaine production to thrive (Human Rights Watch 2021.). A 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) made big promises across the criminal justice and ecological spectrum. It was to see improvement in infrastructure with focus on new roads and aqueducts built, electricity, housing and better childcare in the region. (Duque, 2016). A crop substitution program enabling coca growing farmers to pursue legal business, while severing links between the insurgency and drug trafficking was to be put in place. Over 100,000 families who had grown coca to survive, were to destroy their crop. (Crisis Group 2021).
But the transport routes and government subsidies failed to materialise.(Amnesty 2021.) Farmers couldn’t get rid of their legal crops like pineapple or yucca, because roads didn’t exist to transport them. (Muse T, 2022). Catatumbo’s agricultural workers accused the state of abandoning and stigmatising them. Many locals suspect government corruption, and priorities to safeguard exploitation of resources like oil, gold and coal. (Perez A 2021). Alvaro Perez, an activist from the Tarra Municipality in the Catatumbo region, told Newsweek Espanol, the army and paramilitary groups are primarily there to ‘pave the way for extractive projects.’ He said: “They sow terror among the population in order to displace people, leaving the land free for them to do as they please with it.” For burning forests, destroying biodiversity and displacing indigenous tribes to feed the frenzied cocaine habits from Western and European countries, while being under constant threat of violence, the cocoa farmers make around €200 profit for every two-and-a-half month harvest. (Advocacy for human rights in the Americas 2021).
Two hundred years before the war on drugs raged across Latin America, German naturalist and geographer Alexander von Humbold, explored South America. His findings and discoveries, mirrored the power relations in the Catatumbo region and neighbouring lands. Humbold concluded that if land users are poor, and made poor, and do not have access to sufficient resources, ‘they are forced to degrade the environment in which they find themselves in order to make a living.’ (Eibach J., Haller T., 2021). While travelling across Latin America between 1799 and 1804, he observed the interaction of indigenous people with nature through a western lens. He studied indigenous people and their observation of nature, drew comparison between great cultural achievements in Europe and Indigenous equivalents and became a pioneer of what would later be called political ecology. (Jackson S.T., Wall D. 2014.). He was also interested in power relations in the context of exploitation, expropriation and environmental degradation. (Eibach J., Haller T., 2021).
In their essay, in the Journal of Political Ecology, “Pioneering political ecology: perceptions of nature, Indigenous practices and power relations during Alexander von Humboldt's travels in Latin America,” Joachim Eibach and Tobias Halle write that Humbold stated that overuse of ecosystems by the workings of ‘unequal power relations does not simply unfold among small-scale resource users, but rather is connected to how more powerful corporate and state actors gain access to land, alienating the poorer and less powerful in the process.” His examination of local resource governance and attentiveness to native land users, make him an early political ecological pioneer, who’s elements of thinking hold the key to solutions to the power struggles across the hills of Catatumbo. (Humboldt A). This paper will endeavour to identify and depict the winners and losers, examine hierarchies in the cocaine trafficking business, while finding possible alternatives as per Hombold’s political ecology discoveries for the people who have no choice, but to destroy their own land, for the profits of others.
While trekking through the Andes, Humbold unwittingly became the world’s first climate scientist, when he examined soil erosion on lakesides as a result of human activity. By recognising that humans can destroy ecosystems, he warned about the power to upset the delicate balance of nature. (Bell P, 2019). His prescient observations now echo through the forests he traversed. These have become the epicentre of a €1 trillion war on drugs, where bloodshed, carels, dirty money, corrupt officials and land grabbing prevail to feed an insatiable appetite for cocaine in the west. (Levins H. 2021). Per Humbold’s politically ecological ideology, those exploited ‘losers’ are the farmers from the villages of Catatumbo who risk death and incarceration over the land they destroy, while the ‘winners’ are Western end consumers, corrupt officials, and cartel bosses, who are also known as ‘invisibles. The journey from humble coca leaf to the world's most expensive drug involves many actors (Blaschke J 2021). Almost 50 percent of Colombia’s cocoa is grown on indegnous lands, management zones, and protected areas harming communities and land. Here Rainforest is slashed and burned to make way for the plant. Once it is grown, it is harvested. It takes over 400kg of coca leaf to produce one kg of cocaine in a process that takes up to four days. Once cut down, coca is soaked in gasoline and cement, hydrochloric acid and other toxic solvents like acetone or ether in makeshift Illegal laboratories. (Mowbray, 2022). It takes 284 litres of gasoline to make 1kg of cocaine. According to Rain Forest Watch, a significant portion of Colombia’s gasoline supply is diverted to produce the drug. One part of dumped petrol can contaminate 750,000 parts groundwater (Volkenhausen T. 2021). The centre of drug studies at the University of the Andes, states up to 3.5 million metric tonnes of gasoline is used in the processing of cocaine, resulting in soil degradation, water pollution and damaged ecosystems. A 2014 survey by the Colombian justice ministry found over 95percent of cocoa farms use chemical fertilisers.
But the 170,000 farmers who grow coca are ‘good people’, says municipal government secretary Isnardo Rincon of the village of San Jose del Tarrasaid in the Catatumbo region. They are merely pawns at the bottom of the food chain, who feed the relentless appetite for the popular party drug, which is available across all continents in every city and every town in the world. (Rincon 2021). The roughly 20 million regular cocaine users, most of whom are based in the US and Europe, are responsible for a criminal bloodbath, while causing a growing ecological footprint across Colombia and neighbours Peru and Bolivia. (UN office of Drugs and Crime 2021). The World Drug Report, 2021 suggests cocaine production constitutes a ‘fundamental threat to security and stability in some parts of the world,’. From its source to the end consumer, the white powder is leaving a trace of criminal and environmental destruction that is contributing to the destabilisation of the ‘safe operating space of humanity’ on earth. (Rockstroem J. 2015.) This includes climate change, biodiversity integrity, and release of novel chemicals. (Stockholm Resilience Centre 2021).
Colombian President Iván Duque says the narcotic supply chain – from coca cultivation to global cocaine trafficking – “is the scourge behind rising massacres, forced displacement and assassinations of community leaders in Colombia.” On the other side of the supply chain, cartel leaders and crime bosses profiteer from a growing demand for the drug. (Levins H. 2021). Where a coca farmer makes barely enough to support themselves and their families, drug cartels estimated annual earnings range between €18 and €39bn. (Unodc 2021). As the cocaine business evolves, so do the actors involved, choosing low profiles, calling themselves ‘the invisibles.’ Once the drug leaves the farmers, it journeys across Central America or crosses the Atlantic Ocean to Europe where it fetches up to €60,000 per kilo, while being cut with cutting agents along the way. Once it lands in Europe a gram of cocaine is purchased for between €80 and €150 euro, where European dealers cut the drug for profit. Along the supply chain, corrupt government officials, who take bribes, port workers, police and coast guards cash in (Friedensdorf C., 2021.). Corporations also get a piece of the pie. Until 2015, Monsanto’s controversial herbicide glyphosate, Roundup was used for aerial spraying in Colombia. Funded by US drug enforcement, the practice began in Colombia in 1994, and it was spraying onto 4,420,000 acres of Colombian territory. But the government suspended the program in 2015 after a World Health Organisation survey found it to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.” But it didn’t stop Colombia’s president wanting to reintroduce fumigation, using drones amongst others. (Isaacson A. 2021).
Despite global efforts to stop the war on drugs, the demand is bigger than ever and the war on drugs, which has been raging for over 50 years has had a more destabilising effect. “Drugs have destroyed many lives, but wrongheaded governmental politics have destroyed more. I think it is obvious that after 40 years of war on drugs, it has not worked. There should be decriminalisation of drugs.” Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan suggested. But it may not have to go so far. A new strategy is needed that persuades coca farmers to abandon a plant that offers a stable income and an attractive alternative. Where Humbold identifies political ecology, he may also hold the solutions. If Hombold’s thinking were applied to the modern day war on drugs, it would call for access to civil employment and fertile land, while local Indigenous viewpoints would be called upon and their perspectives valued.
Solutions to aid the farmers could include taking a coca leaf out of Bolivia’s book. Rather than criminalise the coca growing process, reduce police violence and narco slayings, the Bolivian government under president Evo Morales in 2008, ‘expelled the DEA.’ Morales, who previously led a coca growers' union during the 1980s and 1990s, where he spearheaded heated anti-eradication protests during the peak of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, DEA's influence, created a system allowing families to grow coca. (Tegel S., 2021). The system — later dubbed by Morales as "coca yes, cocaine no" — allows each family to cultivate up to 1,600 square metres. The system is heavily monitored and farmers are obliged to sell their leaves at authorised markets, and if they cannot produce a receipt, they must justify why their harvest was lost with official certification. This makes it easier for farmers to follow the legal path. (Tegel S., 2021).In a bid to find harmony between nature and man, ex Bolivian president Evo Morales, said; “We in Bolivia, without US military bases and without the DEA, even without the shared responsibility of drug-consuming countries, have demonstrated that it is possible to confront drug trafficking with the participation of the people," Morales said earlier this year.
The Bolivian government also helps farmers who want to grow other fruits like citrus fruit, peanuts, yucca, and rice via grants. Grants should be made available to promote the substitution of cocoa. "Families need support to diversify their crops, not prohibition — you can't coerce families into not being hungry," Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. Rodrigo Botero, director of the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development (FCDS), says the first step required is the registration of ownership of land for coca farmers. “This way, they get extension, occupation time and legal status of the land.” Mirroring Humbold’s vision, a strategy to reduce violence should focus on bringing coca farmers back under the state’s protective umbrella while providing them with genuine licit alternatives to the crop. Given support, the vast majority of cultivators have already signalled that they would willingly forsake the coca economy. They proved compliance, when 80 percent of them accepted the terms of the 2016 accord.. (Calma J. 2019.)
The US administration’s highly criticised war effort has been counterproductive. (Lopez G 2016). “The funds provided by the United States to end the war on drugs, "have ultimately pushed drug trafficking and the laundering of spectacular profits into remote, biodiverse spaces, where they threaten both ecosystems and people, and undermine conservation goals and local livelihoods." "In this way, the War on Drugs is working directly at odds against the billions of dollars invested in conservation by donor countries, international conservation NGOs, advocacy groups, and local communities," (Wrathall 2021) The market for cocaine, will keep cartel members wealthy, and the market is so lucrative, criminal groups are willing to go to war for it.
Poverty drives farmers to illegally grow plants as infrastures don’t allow for any other kind of plant growing. In these countries the leaves play a significant cultural role, having spiritual, therapeutic and social functions. (Lopez. G. 2021) Drug trafficking and the 51 year old war on drugs has filled Colombia’s internal armed conflict has cost over €1 trillion in the US alone, has seen over 260,000 dead, millions displaced and hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest slashed for coca plantation. In order to seek environmental justice, the war on drugs as it stands needs to diversify. (Tree S 2022). "Families need support to diversify their crops, not prohibition — you can't coerce families into not being hungry," says Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies. "The US approach towards the war on drugs in Colombia perpetuated a vicious cycle, when it should back comprehensive efforts to boost Colombia’s rural economies.”
Findings by researchers in Texas, Oregon, suggested the ‘war on drugs’ pushed traffickers into remote forest areas, where the shadowy underground economy they have built is devastating the environment. Researcher Jennifer A Devine says; "Our findings suggest the best way to address drug-fueled deforestation, violence and insecurity in the region is to invest in community land management and to recognize community land rights. Doing this will also help to save the region´s remaining forests and address climate threats. But we have to move quickly."
In finding a way to end the cycle of poverty, violence, where the poor are forced to degrade the environment in which they find themselves to make a living,and land destruction in South America’s coca belt, the answer may lie with Humbold. “The philosophical study of nature endeavours, in the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past.” By learning from past mistakes, when governments and those with vested interests align to create a future without exploitation between the people and the land they live on.
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