Auteur: Anthony HENMAN
Organisation: LIA
The production of coca leaves has led to the development of a relatively prosperous peasant economy, successfully combining dense populations, small family holdings, and a high degree of political organisation. Were this to have been acheived by any other means, development economists would have applauded the results.
Being unable to supplant the logic of market forces, crop substitution programmes can have little impact in the producing areas, and find their main purpose in a hidden agenda: that of dividing peasant leadership, and thereby opening up their communities to political interference by outside forces.
The main principle sustaining the present high returns of coca agriculture is the illegality of its ultimate products. Were this illegality to be removed, coca prices would inevitably fall, leading to a greater diversification of agriculture in the producing regions - a result which is sought for in vain by today's crop substitution projects. Paradoxically, then, the legalisation of coca derivatives would acheive many of the objectives sought by prohibitionist policies, and lead to a better integrated, less concentrated, and more ecologically sound pattern of agricultural production.
In the shorter term, too, a strengthening of the legal coca sector - that used to supply traditional local markets for teas and chewing - could offer a significant incentive to sounder economic and environmental practices. By offering to substitute not the crop, but the use to which it is ultimately put, the legal coca industry already contributes to the reduction of drug-related harm, providing local consumers with coca in its most beneficial or least damaging form.
Such a positive intervention in the drug consumption market, such a genuine re-eduction of demand, should be extended immediately world-wide. This is why anti-prohibitionists argue for the revision of that clause of the Single Convention which prohibits international trade in coca leaves, and support peasant producers in their just struggle to find a legal market for their products.
