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Some villages in Colombia are facing uncertain economic times due to a problem that they have never had deal with before: too much cocaine.
According to a new report by the New York Times (via Yahoo News), the small, remote Colombian village of Cano Cabra has shrunk from 200 residents down to just 40 because drug traffickers have all but stopped buying the coca paste they produce.
Those who live in this community in the central part of the country rise early nearly every morning to pick coca leaf, scraping brittle branches, sometimes until their hands bleed. Later, they mix the leaves with gasoline and other chemicals to make chalky white bricks of coca paste.
But two years ago, the villagers said, something alarming happened: The drug traffickers who buy the coca paste and turn it into cocaine stopped showing up. Suddenly, people who were already poor had no income. Food became scarce. An exodus to other parts of Colombia in search of jobs followed.
Small villages like Cano Cabra all over Colombia are facing similar economic issues due to the lesser demand for their coca plants and the coca paste they make out of it.
The changing dynamics have led to blocks of unsold coca paste piling up across Colombia. The purchase of the paste in more than half of the country’s coca-growing regions has dropped precipitously or disappeared completely, spurring a humanitarian crisis in many remote, impoverished communities.
Economist Felipe Tascon says the market for illegal drugs has never seen “such a dramatic downturn.” He has been working with the national government to try and get the coca farmers to switch to crops that produce legal exports.
The overabundance of coca paste has been caused in large part due to countries like Ecuador and Peru increasing their cultivation of the coca leaf and the cocaine it produces.
Now there is so much cocaine that one U.S. official said, “We’re seeing production at levels that Pablo Escobar dreamed about.”
“Several regions have achieved economic development thanks to the coca and cocaine market,” said Diego Garcia-Devis, who manages the drug policy program at the Open Society Foundations. “What income will replace coca income? Another illegal income? Mining, trafficking of humans, wildlife, timber? Extortion?”