One was the UN's own World Drug Report, an annual product of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), analyzing illicit drug use, production, and trafficking. One of the phenomena discussed by UNODC each year, of course, is cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine gets derived. Coca is grown in the Andean nations of Bolivia, Colombia and Peru.
The big news -- sort of -- was that Peruvian coca cultivation has surpassed Colombian growing for the first time since 1997. This happened because Peruvian growing has increased the last several years, while Colombian has decreased. UN drug chief Antonio Maria Costa had this to say about the Colombians: "The drug control policies adopted by the Colombian government over the past few years -- combining security and development -- are paying off."
But paying off for exactly whom? For Peruvians in the coca business, among others. Because once again, the main effect of the coca fight has not been to reduce the size of the crop -- total growing only declined by five percent last year, an amount easily accounted for by changes in demand or other fluctuations -- but to shift it from place to place.
The uploaded graph here tells the story. From roughly 1990 to 2000, coca cultivation in Bolivia and Peru dropped dramatically. But Colombian growing increased just as dramatically. Demonstrating that supply will fill demand, when the kind of money is available to be made as the cocaine trade has to offer, total world growing of coca stayed roughly constant despite enormous shifts from country to country. The years 2003 to 2009 in a more gradual way show the same thing in reverse. And even the apparent drop shown from 2000 to 2003 is not what it seems, as 2001 saw the introduction of new, high-yield coca seeds. As the report noted, "
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