Sanho Tree speaks about US eradication policy in Colombia

TalkingDrugs: We are here with Mister Sancho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Studies at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC and we will ask him few questions about coca and cocaine production in South America, and US policies on those issues.

TD: Which countries are producing the most of coca and cocaine?

Sanho Tree: The majority of coca cultivated is being grown in Columbia and 90% of cocaine in the US comes from Colombia, it's the biggest exporter of cocaine in the world.Number 2 would be Peru and number 3 is Bolivia, but in Peru and Bolivia coca is also used for legal, traditional uses, and this is a very big distinction. In Columbia there is very little traditional use, only a few indigenous groups

TD: When did the US started the fumigation campaign in Colombia and how much does it cost American taxpayers?

ST: Since 2000, the United States has spent more than 6 billion dollars in aid for Colombia, the vast majority of that money has been used for fighting the drug war, and the main instrument of that policy has been cropdusters to spray the coca crops.So we have sprayed more than 1 million dollars  in Colombia. When it began in 2000 Colombia was the 3rd highest recipiant of US foreign assistance, after Israel and Egypt. It has not significantly reduced coca cultivation in any sustainable way, because it doesnt address why the farmers continue to grow coca year after year, and that's because of poverty, lack of infrastructure, lack of the state presence. We haven't invested in that, we have invested in destructive policies.

TD: How does fumigation affect people in Colombia and its and the natural environment?

ST: It causes a lot of destruction to both food crops and wild life, it also destroys a lot of coca crops. It only succeded in moving coca cultivation from one part of Columbia to another part. So when this programme begun only a few provinces in Columbia had coca cultivation, now it's in the most provinces in the country. We call this "the baloon effect"- when you squeeze one end of the baloon another one expands.

It has also destroyed a lot of eco-system- Columbia is second the most biodiversed country in the world and the chemical we are using is a very powerful herbicide. Even the commercial version of it should be used very precisely - you have the spray bottle and you should spray only the weed you want to kill. Instead we are dropping it from the airplane over large, large areas, so it causes a lot of destruction. I have been on many farms in Colombia that have been growing no coca at all, but were also destroyed by this spray, so it's very imprecise and causes a lot of collateral damage. It has not reduced coca cultivation in any meaningful way, because farmers go deep into the jungle, cut down rain forest and plant more coca because they have no alternatives, few plots of land have any access to the roads so they cannot transport legal plants to the market- it's much easier to transport few kilos of coca paste than tons of corn or other plants.

TD: Is coca a strong plant?

ST: Coca will grow in many types of soils and climates as long as it doesnt freeze as it is grown. In the Amazon basin soil is often very acidic so other food crops do not do very well in these regions but coca will survive in this kind of soil. There are also many varieties of coca, just as there are many varieties of corn or tomatoes. Some of them are better for high mountains, some are better for Amazon basin. It's also very resistant to the chemicals being used to destroy it.

TD: How much can coca farmers earn for grownig coca? (eg. per kilo) Whats the average price of cocaine on the streets in US?

ST: Farmers make very little money growing coca. There are legal crops that could compete with the profitability of coca like palmitos, but they require infrastructure for transport.
The average monthly household income for those living in poverty in Colombia is about $170 a month, if you grown coca you can make perhaps $700 per household, so it's no mystery what farmers continue to grown this.You can buy a kilo of pure cocaine in Columbia for about $1500, but when you smuggle this in to US, to the big cities, dealers cut it into little gram bags for retail sale you can get maybe $100,000- $150,000 for the exact same kilogram, so that shows you the value of drug prohibition.This is the problem with the drug war- the more you try to fight the drugs the more valuable they become, so the higher is the risk the higher is the reward.

TD: Are the pesticides used in Colombia dangerous for humans? President's Bush administration claimed they are not.

ST: Yes, I have seen the effects of this chemicals on human beings- a lot of rashes, diarrhea, vomiting, but it's very hard to prove in the court of law because we did not watch these people get sprayed, we didn't measured the amount of chemical and watch them get sick over time- it would be war crime just like the Nazis experimented on living human subjects.
 

TD: Do you think president Obama administration will change US drug policy in South America?

ST: Not in the first year or two I think. It is changing slowly. Traditionaly US aid has been 80% militarized- to the police and the army- to fight the drug war, and very little has gone to the alternative development, human rights, that sort of things. But in the past year or two under Democrat control in congress and with shifting the priorities of the Obama administration that percentage has changed significantly, but the fumigation program continues although there is less of it now. They are also switching for manual eradication, where they send  teams of people to physically cut down the bushes. In many ways it's also very destructive and very violent. It's very encouraging that Obama's administration has stopped eradication in Afganistan, because they know this is stupid, doesnt work and is going to endanger US and NATO troops.

Gradually that thinking will have to shift to Colombia, because we have very similiar conditions- we have insurgency that depends on support of the peasants and illicit sources of income. Obama's administration has so many priorities in terms of US economy, global economy, wars in Iraq and Afganistan, domestic health care reform- all this big agenda items take up a lot of time politically, so Obama doesn't have time to focus on fighting this big internal bureaucracy in United States on this issue.Drug policy reform is happening under president Obama, but it's happening relatively quietly and they are trying not to attract too much attention to it, because it gives Republicans another issue to attack them on.