UN: Peru coca production up for 4th straight year, gaining on Colombia as top producer

UN: Peru coca crop up 4th straight year

LIMA, Peru — Peru’s coca crop grew for a fourth straight year, edging the country closer to its South American neighbor Colombia in overall cultivation of the raw material of cocaine, the United Nations said Tuesday.

Owing to a 16 percent drop in acreage in Colombia, overall coca cultivation fell 5.3 percent in the world’s three major coca-producing nations last year, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said.

Cultivation of the hearty bush increased just 1 percent in Bolivia, the No. 3 producer, compared to a 6.8 percent rise in Peru, the U.N. said in its annual report on the crop.

That put the overall area under coca cultivation at 59,900 hectares (231 square miles) in Peru against 68,000 hectares (263 square miles) for Colombia and 30,900 hectares (119 square miles) for Bolivia. The U.N. figures are based on satellite images and field visits.

The size of Peru’s coca crop has nearly doubled in the past decade and the director of the country’s anti-drug agency, Romulo Pizarro, acknowledged “a sense of frustration” at the steady increase despite manual eradication and alternative development.

“Drug traffickers don’t sit by with their arms crossed,” he said. “Worldwide demand has increased.”

Remnants of the Shining Path rebel movement that terrorized Peru in the 1980s and 90s have in the past few years become increasingly involved in cocaine trafficking — while Colombian and Mexican traffickers have taken advantage of Peru’s relatively lax law enforcement to expand operations there.

New areas of cultivation in Peru include the Putumayo region bordering Colombia, Pizarro said.

The director of the U.N. drug office in Colombia, Aldo Lale-Demoz, told reporters in Bogota on Tuesday that the decrease in Colombia’s drug crop argues for “transferring, repeating and multiplying” eradication efforts to other countries.

But critics of Washington’s more than three-decade war on drugs say the latest U.N. numbers instead support their argument that an emphasis on eradication has failed to reduce supply at the cost of billions of dollars.

“The overall picture we have here is one of stability in terms of overall coca production throughout the Andes,” said Colette Younger, a senior fellow at the liberal Washington Office on Latin America in Washington, told The Associated Press. “If you look over the last really 20 years, coca production has remained relatively stable.”

Younger said counterdrug agencies in Peru are “poorly equipped and poorly trained” but that the biggest problem is corruption both on the national and local level.

She said she is heartened by a greater emphasis by President Barack Obama’s administration on weaning poor peasants off coca-growing in favor of such crops as cocoa and cassava.

Backed by more than a half billion dollars a year in U.S. aid, Colombia has made greater strides in battling police corruption and in devoting resources to counternarcotics efforts.

It is the only one of the three Andean coca-producing nations where aerial fumigation of coca crops with herbicides is employed.

Associated Press Writers Frank Bajak and Luisa Fernanda Cuellar in Bogota, Colombia, contributed to this report.