crop eradication

Afghanis: beholden to the markets

The UNODC recently released its annual report concerning opium cultivation in Afghanistan. Unsurprisingly, levels of opium production have continued to rise despite more efforts made at eradication. In fact, the amount of area under opium poppy cultivation has risen to some of the highest levels ever seen. So what exactly is driving this rise in production levels? The simple answer is the opium market, which like every other market is driven by supply and demand.

Shoveling Water: War on drugs, War on people

This short film is produced by Witness for Peace. It considers the human and environmental costs of the disastrous ongoing efforts to eradicate coca production in Colombia using aerial fumigation. The film features occasional Transform blogger Sanho Tree, a drug policy analyst from the Washington based Institute for Policy Studies

South America: Fumigation footage

This raw unedited footage shows fumigation planes flying low over farms near the Ecuadorian border. They were trailed by clouds of herbicide, which kills crops of coffee, yucca, peanuts and bananas.

The United States-financed spraying is supposed to kill illegal coca bushes, the base ingredient for making cocaine. But as one farmer said, "They fumigated the whole land, corn, rice, bananas, pineapples and forage...the three animals we had, cows and calves, died three weeks later."

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