SINAHOTA, Bolivia — Soaring food prices may achieve what the United States has spent millions of dollars trying to do: persuade Bolivian farmers to sow their fields with less potent crops than cocaine’s raw ingredient.
The unlikely advocate for change is Bolivian President Evo Morales, who as leader of a powerful coca growers union fought U.S. crop-substitution programs for two decades.
But rising grain prices and food shortages have made him reconsider. He’s now asking coca farmers to supplement their crops with rice and corn as a way of holding down coca production while helping to feed South America’s poorest country.
U.S. programs have often banned the planting of coca — a small green leaf sacred to Andean peoples and the base ingredient of cocaine — as a condition for farmers to receive aid to try new crops.
In his own twist on alternative development, Morales is willing to split the difference: Growers can maintain up to 1 cato of coca, or about a third of an acre, which earns them about $100 a month while they receive a loan to plant other products as well.
The cato limit — in practice since 2004 — is seen by U.S. drug officials as a questionably legal concession to drug smugglers, but it has become the linchpin of Morales’ strategy to fight narcotics while supporting the leaf’s traditional use as a mild stimulant with medicinal qualities.
The Chapare region’s coca growers union, of which Morales is still president, is requiring each of its 35,000 members to plant 2 1/2 acres of rice this year, part of a government plan for coca farmers to plant 125,000 acres of rice. The region, a stretch of central Bolivian foothills, now raises just 22,000 acres of coca.
If they limit their coca crop to just the cato, growers are entitled to $500 loans to plant rice, corn and other increasingly lucrative foodstuffs, and even a $2,000 grant to build a house.
Experts say Morales’ plan may help keep growers afloat while alternative crops have a chance to take hold — and global food prices continue to climb.
