WASHINGTON. — Bush administration officials hailed a United Nations report released Wednesday showing that world cocaine production remained flat in 2007 compared with 2006, even though cultivation of the raw coca leaf in Colombia alone showed a “shocking” increase.
Officials said farmers are planting more coca because the Colombian government’s anti-drug policies are making it harder to turn the leaf into cocaine.
“The cocaine industry is under stress,” said John Walters, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “It can’t produce at the same level.”
But critics of the Bush administration’s emphasis on aggressive law enforcement partnerships in Latin America in the battle against drug trafficking pointed to the cultivation figure in Colombia — as well as the smaller increase in cultivation in Bolivia and Peru — to claim that the policies are not working.
Especially troublesome were the figures for Colombia, where the United States has invested more than $1 billion since 2000 trying to help the Colombian government tame coca cultivation in what is the world’s biggest producer of cocaine.
Coca cultivation rose by a “shocking” 27 percent alone in Colombia in 2007, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, even as cocaine production there declined by 2 percent.
The rise in coca cultivation marks a reversal in the trend since 2000, when the Colombian government began Plan Colombia, an anti-drug program funded in part by the U.S. government.
The U.N. report will undoubtedly renew the debate in Congress over whether the Plan Colombia program is succeeding in reducing coca cultivation.
