Plan Colombia and Beyond

« San José de Apartadó and the U.S. human rights certification | Main | Jail for paramilitaries but not guerrillas? »

March 07, 2005

State's latest narcotics report: nothing to report

Every March 1, the State Department releases its “International Narcotics Control Strategy Report” (INCSR), a phone-book-sized document laying out what the United States and other governments did (or did not do) to fight drug trafficking in the previous year. Though the report often strains credibility in an effort to put a good spin on events, it is a decent source of statistics and details about U.S. policy that are otherwise hard to find. (It used to include the U.S. government’s list of countries “decertified” for being insufficiently cooperative in the drug war. That list now comes out in September.)

This report had been released exactly on March 1 during each of the past several years. Last week, however, the release was postponed from the first (a Tuesday) to the afternoon of the fourth (a Friday). Though the official reason for the delay was that Secretary of State Rice “wants to be able to have the opportunity to review it as thoroughly as possible before presenting it,” those of us who have been in Washington for a few years know that Friday afternoons are made for the release of bad or embarrassing news. (Television ratings and newspaper sales indicate that Friday night through Saturday is the least-noticed news cycle of the week.)

The main bad news that State’s Narcotics Bureau needed to bury, of course, was the explosion of opium-poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. In the Andes too, though, the administration probably did not want to draw attention to the fact that it had nothing new to report.

Coca cultivation

The INCSR used to include estimates of coca cultivation in each Andean country during the previous year. During the last few years, the number of hectares planted with coca in Colombia was not available in time for the report’s release – the report included a blank space which was filled weeks later. In this year’s report, blank spaces for 2004 appear for both Colombia and Peru.

“I think they’ll be available at the end of this month, that’s something that’s out of my control,” Bobby Charles, the soon-to-be-resigning Assistant Secretary for Narcotics and Law Enforcement, said at the report’s Friday afternoon rollout. However, Charles appeared to be preparing reporters for a smaller reduction in Colombian coca-growing than we have seen every year since 2001.

In 2002, we saw a 21 percent reduction in cultivation. In 2003, we saw a 15 percent reduction. This is going to get harder as time goes on because you’re compressing the areas in both coca and in poppy. You’re compressing the areas. You’re making them -- they’re more highly protected, if you will, right now by the drug traffickers and the drug trafficking organizations which, in that country, are also narcoterrorist organizations. But there is real progress.

Let’s look at the Colombian coca data from the report:

Even though we still know little about what happened in 2004, two things stand out sharply in this table:

1. Estimated cultivation: though the first row of this table (“potential harvest”) gets most of the attention, the third row tells another story. In fact, it seems to call into question fumigation’s effectiveness as a deterrent to planting coca. While the intensity of spraying increased by 48,000 hectares from 2001 to 2003, the amount of land planted with coca only decreased by 7,000 hectares. (Think of all the hundreds of millions of dollars spent to achieve this 7,000-hectare decrease!) We await a 2004 number; since eradication held relatively steady from 2003 to 2004, a tiny decrease (or even an increase) would effectively end the string of coca-cultivation declines that the U.S. and Colombian governments have been trumpeting since 2002.

2. HCl Potential: The fourth row is the estimate, in metric tons, of the cocaine produced in Colombia each year. Note that, for some reason, the State Department expects the tonnage to have increased by 100 tons – 22 percent! – from 2003 to 2004. The report’s text does not explain this number – instead, it confusingly refers to a reduction to 460 tons of pure cocaine, which equals 560 tons of “export-quality” cocaine; perhaps the 2003 and 2004 numbers were reversed by mistake. However, if – as is more likely – the table is correct and cocaine production increased for the first time since 2000-2001, it would indicate that Colombia’s coca-growers are adapting to massive fumigation. Either there is a lot of new cultivation that the satellites have not detected, or growers are “doing more with less” – growing more plants per hectare and using higher-yielding varieties, for instance – or both.

The “balloon effect”

Assistant Secretary Charles boasted that Plan Colombia appears to be the first anti-drug policy to avoid the “balloon effect” – a term that refers to squeezing one part of a balloon, only to see it bulge out elsewhere – since estimated coca cultivation does not seem to be increasing in Peru and Bolivia as quickly as it is declining in Colombia.

What’s fascinating on the metrics is that we are really not seeing the balloon effect. In terms of the entire region in 2003, there was an overall regional reduction of 16 percent of cultivation. That’s a remarkable thing by itself.

If there is no balloon effect, then the U.S. government has not only repealed the law of supply and demand, but it has managed to dissuade people from growing coca even though they live in ungoverned areas and have no other economic options. That’s no small feat.

Or, more likely, declarations of victory over the balloon effect are premature. Our colleague at the Washington Office on Latin America, John Walsh, said it best last month in the Financial Times: “Declaring the balloon effect dead now is a bit like jumping from a plane and believing that the law of gravity has been suspended because you haven’t hit the ground yet.”

Not only that, we don’t even know yet what happened in 2004. Of the three countries that grow nearly all of the world’s coca, the report released Friday only estimated 2004 coca cultivation in one, Bolivia. Granted, the report indicates a small drop in Bolivia’s “potential harvest” (to 24,600 hectares, from 28,450 in 2003 – the first drop since 2000), even though it fails to provide an estimate of coca-growing before eradication, indicates that eradication levels in fact decreased in 2004, and estimates an increase in the number of tons of cocaine produced. (Peru and Bolivia do not allow fumigation; illicit crops are eradicated manually, usually by counter-drug military and police units.)

Nonetheless, the report’s table of coca-growing in Peru – the second-largest coca producer – is almost totally blank for 2004. Peruvian authorities have already said that they expect the numbers to reveal a sharp increase in coca-growing last year. The head of Peru’s anti-drug agency (DEVIDA), Fernando Hurtado, said in January that he expected Peruvian coca cultivation to have risen in 2004 and to increase again in 2005. According to a Reuters story that ran at the time, “The rise in growing areas means some 160 tons of cocaine were produced in Peru in 2004 – 20 percent more than in 2003 – with a street value in the United States of $2 billion.”

A 20 percent increase in Peruvian coca production – even a 10 percent increase – would clearly signal that reports of the balloon effect’s demise are greatly exaggerated.

The price of drugs

When a product becomes scarcer, its price rises. Yet U.S. government data have shown the price of cocaine continuing to decrease on U.S. streets, extending a general downward trend that dates back over twenty years (see John Walsh’s December 2004 report for WOLA on the subject [PDF format]). Assistant Secretary Charles promised Friday that price increases will come soon.

The question that you haven’t asked me that I think is the tougher question is the question, “When are you going see the price and purity change here on the streets of America?” Because that’s going to be when it affects us directly. … And the hope is that you’re -- and I predict we will -- if we stay on this track, if the political will remains solid, I think within a year or two you will begin to see palpable, measurable, in things like stride data and other data points, you will be able to see changes in the -- I think you’ll actually see a change in price first and then you’ll see a change in measurable purity in major metropolitan areas.

We can probably take that promise in the same spirit as a series of similar statements over the past few years. Here are three from the White House’s drug czar, John Walters.

July 29, 2003: [W]e expect to see in the next 6 to 9 months significant disruptions in the purity and availability of cocaine throughout the world. ... The magnitude of this ought to be visible in reductions in purity, probably first, and then some availability problems. … [W]e expect this magnitude to affect the whole market and it should be visible in the next 6 to 12 months.

June 17, 2004: We believe, the latest intelligence reports that we have just completed, that project and look at flow, we believe we will see a change in availability into the United States, on the streets of the United States in the next 12 months as a result of what happens here. … We believe that will probably first appear in reductions in purity, because most of the market for this product, as you know, is dependent individuals. If you raise the price, they go into crisis.

August 10, 2004: These gains have allowed us to, for the first time, have intelligence estimates in the United States that in the next 12 months we will see changes in availability of cocaine in the United States, but in probably first lower purity and it could be followed by higher prices.

Better luck with next year’s report.

Posted by isacson at March 7, 2005 01:17 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://ciponline.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/66

Comments

Post a comment