Cocaine farmers in Colombia were gifted a monumental win back in 2013 when a United States co-sponsored program that would crop dust cocaine farms was shut down. The furor over health concerns had reached a fever pitch. Rural Colombian farmers and villagers were protesting over one of the ingredients used in the spray the United States was dumping on cocaine farms. The Colombian government ultimately worried that the crop dusting program being run by the United States was turning Colombian citizens against them, and causing a spike in support for the rebel FARC group.
So, the Colombian government shut down the US-ran crop dusting program which saw cocaine farming sink to its lowest levels in decades. Since the spraying program ended in 2013, the spike in cocaine production has gone through the goddamn roof. There was a 39% increase in cocaine production from 2013 to 2014, a 42% increase from 2014 to 2015, and another 16% increase from 2015 to 2016.
The area of land in Colombia now being used to farm coca, the plant used to synthesize cocaine, now measures over half the size of the entire state of Rhode Island.
In 2016, that production saw another significant increase, rising a little over 13%, from 392,897.5 acres to about 444,800 acres, or about 695 square miles, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
The latest cultivation estimate is derived from satellite imagery gathered by the US and indicates that farmers around the country have been growing more of the plant.
“If that’s accurate, it’s 180,000 hectares of coca, up from 159,000 in 2015,” Adam Isacson, senior associate for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, wrote on Twitter on Monday. “A 13% increase is less than I expected: it rose 42% from 2014-15.”
The 2016 figure would, however, indicate more than double the acreage planted at its lowest point in 2012, when cultivation covered 301 square miles, down from 656 square miles in 2001. via Business Insider
This means that by the end of last year the total area of land being used to farm cocaine has DOUBLED since the United States ceased its controversial crop dusting program back in 2013.
Drug farmers have been planting coca at an unbelievable rate after seeing that the Colombian government isn’t going to intervene. It appears there was some trepidation about going all in on cocaine farming when the United States was spraying chemicals, but now that these drug farmers realize the Colombian government won’t be coming after their cash crop they are throwing all of their drug money resources at making cocaine popular again.
Over on Business Insider, they cite statistics about how cocaine use in the United States is up since the 2013 spike in production. The number of overdose deaths from cocaine is up, but the spike in cocaine use here in the USA is NOTHING compared to the spike in Colombia. This might suggest that our Border Patrol agents have become much more proficient at stopping the flow of cocaine across our borders, or it might just mean that Americans have moved onto Molly.
I highly suggest clicking through to the Wall Street Journal to check out what the Colombian government is doing to try and dissuade farmers from growing cocaine because it’s a fairly novel approach to stopping the cultivation of drugs.