Peru Farmers Drop Cocaine in Favor of Cocoa
Monday, February 1, 2010
Deep in a valley where Peru's snow-capped Andes melt into Amazon jungle, Wilder Diaz Angulo cuts open a football-sized cocoa pod and separates precious brown beans from their fleshy white placentas.
The farmer takes care not to damage a single bean. That would hurt his chances of getting the best price for the specialty organic cocoa his cooperative sells for export to high-end chocolate retailers in Europe and the United States.
Life is calmer now that Mr. Angulo sells cocoa instead of coca.
But just a few short years ago he was dodging bullets and hiding from Peruvian soldiers, Colombian drug traffickers, and the brutal leftist Shining Path insurgents. Like hundreds of thousands of other farmers in Peru's fertile San Martin region, Angulo participated in the global cocaine trade.
"Coca brought lots of easy money mucho dinero," says Angulo with a wistful smile. "But now we feel comfortable and safe. We don't have to hide from anyone."
Peru's drug traffickers have moved into more remote areas, and cocoa growers from across the globe are coming here to learn how to duplicate Peru's success. It's not a quick fix. But years of coordinated effort by the United Nations, the US and Peruvian governments, foreign aid groups, local leaders, and the farmers are now paying dividends. And key reasons for the turnaround listening to local needs, creating synergy among a diverse array of actors, and sticking to market fundamentals could carry lessons for other "narcostates" such as Afghanistan and Colombia.
"This whole area used to be a terrorist haven," says Fernando Rubio, an environmental activist and agroforestry promoter. "Now it is a success story. [French President Nicolas Sarkozy] says it's the best chocolate in the world."
Peru's cocaine production is far below what it was in the late 1980s and early '90s, when the country was home to the world's largest cocaine industry. Back then, more than 25 percent of Peru's coca cultivation on some 44,500 acres occurred in San Martin. Now, coca is grown on less than 2.500 acres, according to US embassy figures.
The US worked with former right-wing authoritarian President Alberto Fujimori to eradicate coca crops and push insurgents and narcotraffickers out of San Martin. But initial efforts to get farmers to switch to other crops failed.
In the late 1990s, various foreign aid groups ushered in programs that taught San Martin coca farmers how to grow alternative crops, but didn't do much to connect them with the niche markets that brought the best prices, and rarely coordinated with one another. The result was a damaging lack of trust that led many communities to kick out the groups, says Darwin Aguila Solano, the San Martin regional director for Chemonics, a Washington-based firm contracted by the US Agency for International Development to help the region develop its cocoa and coffee industries.
"When we started, people didn't like us," says Mr. Solano, explaining that peasant farmers thought they would be taught to grow crops that weren't profitable. Farmers often turn to growing coca to pull themselves out of poverty, he notes.
So in 2003, Solano just listened. His group organized events where local civic groups and leaders could gather and list their top concerns and needs. "We're facilitators, not bosses," says Solano. "We focused on getting the active participation of the people and their organizations, and we had to get agreement with the local government."
Another key was synergy. Solano's group brought all major stakeholders heads of local government, Peruvian and US drug enforcement and development officials, and foreign aid groups into one room. The goal was to avoid duplicating efforts or working at cross purposes. "It wasn't easy," says Solano, noting that USAID at one point threatened to pull money out of the effort if nongovernmental groups didn't cooperate.
Market fundamentals were also crucial. "NGOs often promote welfare-ism or paternalism," says Solano. Farmers are asked to produce something "without knowing if there's really a market for it. We needed to start with the market demand in order to [know what to] produce."
Today, the approach is paying off. One cocoa cooperative in the Juanjui area of San Martin, for example, exported 2,000 metric tons of top-quality organic cocoa last year, up from 190 metric tons in 2003.
"The Organization of American States came here for 10 days and said: 'We have a model,' " says Solano.
Similar principles have been applied to coffee, with equally impressive results. Coffee farmers in the village of Alto Shamboyaku now make more than double what they made for a bag of coffee in the 1980s, selling it to the Oro Verde (Green Gold) fair trade cooperative.
"We don't care about coca now," says Tercero Salas, the mayor of the small community. "We know we can get a good price growing coffee."
The Oro Verde cooperative exports 10 times as much top-rate coffee as it did in 2000 and nearly 100 times as much cocoa, says manager Hiderico Bocangel Cabala.
"The highlands are happy about coffee. The lowlands are happy about cocoa. I'm happy about both," says Mr. Cabala.
"The miracle of Oro Verde is the people who want to be their own boss, to be entrepreneurs," he says. "Poverty is not in the land, it's in people's minds."
Comments
technical comment
There should be a way to send this article (or any other) to somebody just from here. so an option to email to a friend would be fine.
I like the newsletter!!
Great Idea
Thanks for the suggestion. We'd thought about adding that feature, but decided against it at the last minute, figuring people would feel more comfortable sending articles themselves.
I'm always suspicious of what websites do with email addresses once they have them, and perhaps we were playing a bit too much into that feeling when we decided against having the feature on our site. We're pretty rock solid on e-privacy (a policy to be posted shortly), so I suppose we were a bit overzealous there.
We'll definitely look into getting the feature added later this year, once all of the currently scheduled bits have ben added.
Thanks again,
Michael, TransFair Canada
PS: I'm glad you like the newsletter!
Coca Farmers
I have just recently left South America to return to North America, and I would like to pose a few comments and share my opinion on this article.
Coca farmers are known as "campesinos" which is a general term loosely falling under the definition as "subsistence farmer". Campesinos are indigenous people who are farmers, and a lot of the time these farmers are farming coca leaves.
The Coca Leaf is a sacred plant in South America, used by a wide variety and majority of the population to cure minor ailments and as a natural prevention method against altitude sickness. The Coca Leaf is used in a plethora of natural products such as coca lipbalm, coca tea, coca cookies, toothpastes, etc, and at least one bag of coca leaves are demanded by the miners of South America before they begin their days work.
Many miners will refuse to enter the mine without a bag of coca leaves, because it is a stimulant that provides people with energy,people who otherwise would not have enough money to constantly provide nutrients to their bodies with a steady supply of food, so they use the traditional Andes cure, the Coca Leaf.
The Coca leaf is also offered to different gods of the Andean culture before entering in the mine and in many traditional ritualistic practices. When you take away this plant and opportunity to harvest this leaf, you are contributing to the downfall of the traditional Andean customs and the belief system of the quechua and aymara people.
The growers of the Coca Leaf are rarely associated with the production, manufacturing and selling of Cocaine, and they are merely just trying to do what their predecessors did thousands of years ago.
It is great that these farmers are provided with other crops to grow and sustain themselves off of, even perhaps profit more off of, such as cocoa, but we must strive to remember that culture preservation is an extremely important aspect of maintaining pure and natural ways of life, and it is vitally crucial that we look to how the Indigenous peoples of the planet have survived so long and have maintained their resilience through their ancient practices.
Cocaine production was never a problem merely decades ago, and is it not fair that the farmers have to suffer from a government implemented (mainly westernized) societal problem. I am not denying the amount of drug users in South America but a large portion of South American cocaine is trafficked into the United States of America, Canada, and Europe. From primary and personal experience I have witnesses the people of South America fight for their right to maintain their coca crops and I feel that we must respect their way of life.
If the Cocaine problem is concerning the people organizing these actions against coca farming, they should try and focus more on the people who have with open arms and open borders, freely transported and manufactured cocaine (a lot of these people being the puppet masters of politicians and politicians themselves). This comment was not intended to sway a selected audience in a pre-planned direction, but more so to let people know that Coca farming is useful and needed for more things than Cocaine.
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