Rising Food Prices May Help U.S. War on Drugs

In a strange and unexpected twist, the rising costs of food may help the United States on its long-running battle against illegal drugs. Farmers in Bolivia are replacing coca, cocaine’s raw ingredient, with food crops in many instances. The United States has long tried to get Bolivian farmers to substitute coca crops with food crops, providing incentives, but Bolivian president Evo Morales fought the attempts. Morales defends the right to grow the plant, which has a traditional use as a mild stimulant with medicinal qualities. However, farmers are beginning to see benefits to growing food.

From The International Herald Tribune:

The Chapare region’s coca growers’ union, of which Morales is still president, is requiring each of its 35,000 members to plant one hectare of rice this year as part of a government plan for coca farmers to plant 50,000 hectares of rice. The region, a stretch of central Bolivian foothills, now raises just 9,000 hectares of coca.

If they limit their coca crop to a cato, growers are entitled to loans of 3,600 bolivianos to plant rice, corn and other increasingly lucrative foodstuffs, and even a grant of 14,400 bolivianos to build a house.

The amount of rice that the coca union is requiring could earn the same as a cato of coca, though it requires six times the land and a lot more labor. But the price of rice has tripled in Bolivia since last year and is continuing to rise.

Rice also feeds a hungry domestic market, whereas the U.S.-backed crop replacement efforts promoted export products like bananas and pineapples and pitted the Chapare’s poor farmers against global agribusiness giants like Dole and Chiquita.

If the farmers find that producing domestic food crops rather than coca is profitable, more may abandon coca growing. That would ease pressure on the United States government, who have long tried to find ways to beat cocaine at the source.

Well, rice and cocaine are both white, and both come in plastic baggies…

Link [International Herald Tribune] via [Wannabe Hippy]
Photo credit: Flickr user azrainman

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