According to In U.S. Drug War, Ally Bolivia Loses Ground to Coca Farmers, Bolivia almost eliminated coca farming — but it’s bounced back:
The coca bush emerged as the country’s principal cash crop in the 1980s, spurred by rising demand for cocaine in the U.S. and Europe. The hardy plant grows readily and the leaves are easy to harvest and transport. At its peak in the mid-1980s, cultivation covered about 100,000 acres of the lush Chapare region, a semitropical lowland. Coca sales generated about $500 million a year, or 6% of Bolivia’s $8 billion gross domestic product.
Times were good for the farmers. “Our lives improved greatly,” Mr. Torrico says. “We had more stores. We could eat better, dress our kids better and send them to schools.”
Then, after a decade of sporadic eradication efforts, in 1998 the government cracked down hard with Operation Dignity. It has uprooted more than a billion plants, slashing the total coca harvest to 30 million tons last year from 270 million tons in 1996, according to U.S. and Bolivian officials.
A few thoughts:
- Coca emerged as Bolivia’s principal cash crop in the 1980s? It wasn’t already the country’s main crop?
- Operation Dignity? If Orwell were alive today…
Anyway, here’s what I suspect is the real story:
Since 1983, AID has spent about $270 million on such programs, designed to provide farmers with legal alternatives to growing coca.
A lot of the money goes to private contractors, such as the program’s current chief contractor, Development Alternatives Inc. of Bethesda, Md. The consulting firm holds a $90.2 million contract that runs from June 1999 through November 2004. Development Alternatives and various subcontractors have carried out studies of alternative crops, provided agricultural training, repaired roads and boosted eco-tourism projects.
The GAO says the consultants and AID have failed to overcome “numerous business challenges” that have made it hard for Chapare’s farmers to get ahead. Among the difficulties have been the low yield and poor quality of crops, as well as inadequate transportation and limited access to credit, the report says.
Much of the millions of dollars spent on crop substitution “simply disappears because of administrative overhead and expensive consultants,” says Howard Clark, a former regional environmentalist with AID who worked in Chapare during the mid-1990s.
The programs keep getting money even though the alternative crops don’t grow:
“Coca just grows,” Ms. Ayalde says. “It’s a weed. Farmers don’t have to worry about markets and diseases. It always gets a good price.”
[...]
Juan Solis, 52, from the Chapare village of Chimore, bitterly recalls visits by technicians from Winrock International, an Arkansas-based nonprofit funded with money from the estate of former Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. “They told me to plant passion fruit, but there were never any good results,” he says. “Then, I paid $5 each, $250, for 50 coconut-tree seedlings. Seven lived and 43 died. Only one ever produced a coconut.” The foreign experts constantly came and went, offering one disappointing new crop after another, Mr. Solis says.
[...]
Mr. Torrico says that in 1989, he enthusiastically spent $15 each for 1,000 macadamia seedlings after extension agents told him he would earn $6,800 an acre. “It was a big disaster, a total loss,” he recalls. Apparently, agricultural experts didn’t take into account the difference in the length of days and nights between Chapare and Costa Rica, the source of the seedlings.
Mr. Torrico planted orange trees after advisers told him they would open a processing plant. The plant never was built, and the oranges developed cankers. He turned to palm hearts after agronomists predicted that the tropical delicacy would be a winner. When a glut ensued, he adds, the market couldn’t absorb all the production. “They said we could sell each plant for one dollar, but we got only 50 cents,” he says.