Lessons for Drug Policy Series COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION A PATH TO INNOVATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND PEACE IN COLOMBIA Lessons for Drug Policy Series COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION A PATH TO INNOVATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND PEACE IN COLOMBIA Dora Lucila Troyano Sanchez David Restrepo March 2018 GLOBAL DRUG POLICY PROGRAM © 2018 Open Society Foundations This publication is available as a PDF on the Open Society Foundations website under a Creative Commons license that allows copying and distributing the publication, only in its entirety, as long as it is attributed to the Open Society Foundations and used for noncommercial educational or public policy purposes. Photographs may not be used separately from the publication. ISBN: 978-1-940983-80-6 Published by Open Society Foundations 224 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 USA www.opensocietyfoundations.org For more information contact: Global Drug Policy Program, Open Society Foundations www.opensocietyfoundations.org/about/programs/global-drug-policy-program Cover photograph: A farmer holding coca leaves in Cauca, Colombia, June 2012. © Luis Robayo l AFP l Getty Images Layout by Judit Kovács l Createch Ltd. Printing by GHP Media l United States FOREWORD In Colombia, as in many other parts of the world, armed conflict and the illicit drug market are symbiotically linked. When there is a major shift in one of these two phenomena, a change to the other is inevitable. Colombia’s momentous ending of a 50-year civil war was a pivotal moment for the global war on drugs. The signing of a peace accord in 2016 by the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the Colombian government closed half a century of war during which more than 200,000 people were killed, almost 6 million were internally displaced, 27,000 were kidnapped, and 25,000 people were disappeared. Such an enduring conflict with so much bloodshed and disruption is not easily healed. However, the popular desire for peace has been a powerful salve. Despite strong opposition from different political sectors, the disarmament and demobilization of FARC has already shown concrete results reducing violence in Colombia to its lowest level in decades. The original conflict in Colombia was triggered by deeply rooted political and socioeconomic exclusion of both rural and urban poor communities. Some of these factors are still present. The World Bank ranks Colombia among the 10 countries with the most unequal income distribution in the world. The conflict emerged in the 1960s within the context of social, economic, and political disenfranchisement. In the early 1980s, the tensions increased and violence reached epidemic proportions. By 2002, the violence reached 67.3 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (compared to Mexico’s 22.6 peak in 2011 or the United States’ recent 4.9). This was partially a result of the steep expansion of the illicit production and trade of cocaine that allowed armed actors to expand their presence in Colombia, increasing firepower and the violence associated with drug cartels. As the world’s top producer of coca and cocaine, Colombia 3 became a battlefield for the global “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” that was technically and financially supported by the U.S. government, among other nations. This scenario was, in part, facilitated by the 1961 United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs which established that “the Parties shall so far as possible enforce the uprooting of all coca bushes which grow wild. They shall destroy the coca bushes if illegally cultivated” (Article 26). It even went further, defying ancient indigenous traditions, by introducing in article 49 that “coca leaf chewing must be abolished within twenty-five years from the coming into force of this Convention.” The 1961 Convention turned a sacred plant that has been used in the Andean region for almost 8,000 years into an illicit commodity from which criminal organizations could profit and wars could be financed. Despite the provisions introduced by the UN and heavily enforced by member states, the reality is that the coca leaf’s uses extend well beyond the production of cocaine. For millennia, it has been used in the indigenous Andes as a cultural artifact, a manifestation of sovereignty, a core nutritional ingredient, and an essential medicine. The peace accord between FARC and the Colombian government attempts to break the distorted view of the coca leaf and the violence that grew from its production into cocaine by dedicating one of the six chapters of the agreement to the “Solution to the Illicit Drugs Problem.” The chapter views the drug phenomena in Colombia through the lens of human development. With this perspective, coca-growing communities can actively participate in reducing dependency on coca crops and can potentially design their own local development plans. Furthermore, the agreement also offered the opportunity to restore rights to communities by promoting policies that “maintain the recognition of the ancestral and traditional uses of the coca leaf as part of the cultural identity of indigenous communities and enable the possibility of utilizing crops with illicit uses for medical or scientific purposes as well as other legitimate purposes that may be established.” Within the context of the provisions of the peace accord, concrete policy innovations were introduced in 2017. The National Training Service (SENA), a government entity in charge of offering vocational training in vulnerable communities, a peacebuilding organization, and members of the Lerma coca-growing community formed a partnership that became the key to success in advancing policy reform. Thanks to this partnership, and the dedicated 4 COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION work of Dora Lucila Troyano Sanchez, the National Narcotics Fund (FNE) granted the very first permit to legally purchase, transport, and stock raw coca leaves for their transformation into licit goods such as fertilizers and nutritional ingredients to be used in scientific research. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has called for a rethinking of the design and implementation of policies aimed at controlling the supply of drugs. In a recent speech to the UN General Assembly, the Nobel Peace Prize winner assured the world’s leaders that the war on drugs “has not been won, nor is being won and we require new approaches and new strategies.” The small policy changes Colombia has made represent a gradual move toward a more humane approach to the drug phenomena. One cannot be naïve and suggest that coca industrialization will fully absorb the illicit market for coca that currently supplies cocaine to more than 18 million users around the world. This industry will dignify the work of thousands of farmers by allowing them to legally profit from a traditional agricultural practice and will promote the rights of communities that have been using coca as an element of their culture. However, as long as these issues of culture, rural development, poverty, and inequality are approached narrowly from the penal and punitive perspective, the illicit market will flourish. The new approaches outlined in Coca Industrialization: A Path to Innovation, Development, and Peace in Colombia, open opportunities to allow coca-growing communities to find their agricultural practices destigmatized, decriminalized, and productively regulated. Alliances and pathways that this industry has yet to explore are numerous; from pharmaceutical applications to addiction treatment and nutritional possibilities. However, the fact that responsible policy reform has been conducted based on evidence and led by civil society and the cocaleros (coca farmers) themselves, has placed Colombia in the vanguard of international efforts to promote innovative drug policy reform. Diego García-Devis Senior Program Officer for Latin America Global Drug Policy Program Open Society Foundations FOREWORD 5 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 9 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 11 1. WHAT DOES THE COCA LEAF OFFER? 13 1.1 Geographical Distribution 13 1.2 The Question of Coca’s Nutritional Value 16 1.3 The Data 16 1.4 The Results 18 2. COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION EXPERIENCES 21 2.1 Overview of Legal Coca Leaf Industries in Peru and Bolivia 21 2.2 Overview of Colombia’s Coca Leaf Industry 23 3. THE NORMATIVE FRAMEWORK FOR COLOMBIA 27 3.1 Brief History of Colombia’s Coca Laws 27 3.2 The “Gray Area”: The Colombian State’s Dual Stance toward Coca 34 3.3 Opportunities for the State to Strengthen Coca Industrialization 38 7 4. HORIZONS FOR COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION 41 4.1 The 2016 Peace Agreement Context 41 4.2 Lessons from the Lerma Model: SENA Cauca’s Community-Centered Approach to Coca Research and Industrialization Reform 47 4.3 Scaling Up the Lerma Model: Coca Innovation to Strengthen the Implementation of the 2016 Peace Agreement 51 4.4 Summary of Recommendations 56 CONCLUSIONS 59 REFERENCES 61 APPENDIX: INTERVIEWEES 65 ABOUT THE AUTHORS 67 8 COCA INDUSTRIALIZATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This report was made possible thanks to the collaboration of social organizations within the Cauca Department, to numerous civil servants within the Ministry of Justice and Law and the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, and to the Regional Directorate of the National Training Service (Dirección Regional del Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje–SENA) in Cauca. Special thanks go to Juan Carlos Garzón and Julián Wilches for their dedication and support in reviewing the drafts, and for their major contribution to the content. Thanks also go to Anthony Henman, María Mercedes Moreno, and Gladys Sánchez for their corrections and for helping organize this text overall. The authors are grateful to the Lerma community for providing inspiration and support throughout the entire process, and especially to Herney Ruiz and family. Warm thanks to Adriana Sánchez and Mariam Tanzilla for their patience and dedication with administrative procedures. Finally, we would like to address our deepest thanks to Kasia Malinowska and Diego García-Devis, who have generously invested time and resources to support this project. 9 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY For decades, Colombia has faced the challenge of promoting economic development and peace in its coca growing regions while quelling the flow of coca for unlawful purposes.