Where it all begins: Colombia's peasant farmers fuel Pacific drug trade

The cocaine market is booming in Australia and New Zealand, causing ripples throughout the Pacific region. But long before it is snorted in cities such as Sydney or Auckland, the drug is produced by peasant farmers in Colombia, where coca crop output is at record highs.

In 2017, around 171,000 hectares (423,000 acres) of the South American nation’s land was used to grow coca, the plant whose leaf is the base ingredient of cocaine – up 25,000 hectares (17%) on the year before, according to the United Nation’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

While cocaine produced in Colombia is causing havoc in the Pacific, for the rural farmers that cultivate coca, it is a lifeline. “Here coca rules everything,” said Miguel Fernández, an activist in the country’s western Cauca province, who added that it is more practical to shift coca on the region’s winding dirt roads than it is other traditional crops. “It also has spiritual qualities for indigenous people here.”

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The boom in production comes despite a peace deal signed in 2016 with leftist rebels the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc). That deal, which ended 52 years of civil war that killed 260,000 and displaced over 7 million people, had provisions to formalise land ownership for peasant farmers, and help them switch coca crops for legal alternatives such as coffee and cacao.

But the international market continues to grow, with Australia and New Zealand proving particularly attractive for traffickers. A gram of cocaine in Sydney can sell for up to US$300, whereas in the United States the national average is $62.

Analysts say that tighter border controls in the United States, along with a proliferation of opioids on the streets, may be deterring traffickers from moving the drugs north.

“Prices in the United States are falling so traffickers are looking for new markets, and obviously Australia is very attractive because aside from the difficulty of getting cocaine into the country, it is very lucrative,” said Ariel Ávila, an analyst at the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation, a think tank in Bogotá. “The second thing is that this change in the market is generating new routes … and in all of these places it has created new criminal structures.”

Once local gangs have bought the coca leaves from the farmers, they are shifted to clandestine laboratories, often hidden under the jungle canopy, and processed into cocaine. That cocaine then makes its way to port.

In the Pacific, drugs from Colombia arrive in various ways. Some come in shipping containers, some via drug mules on commercial flights and some are sailed over the ocean packed into small boats. And the route is unlikely to change in the near future.

Colombia has traditionally been an ally of the United States in the global war on drugs, but the relationship has become rocky. In March President Donald Trump lambasted Iván Duque, his Colombian counterpart, telling reporters that “more drugs are coming out of Colombia right now than before he was president — so he has done nothing for us.”

Farmers in Colombia fear a return to the days of scorched earth drug war tactics, when crops would be sprayed aerially with pesticides and the military would come in shooting. “Those days cost us lives,” said Eduin Marcelo Capaz, the human right coordinator for an indigenous association in the coca-rich Cauca province.