When Perea uprooted the green coca bushes on his small farm in Meta province, reachable only by river, he vowed never to plant them again. He replaced the raw material for cocaine with cassava and plantain, joining thousands of farmers in a government-run crop substitution programme that promised financial support. But the assistance never fully arrived. Floods and a lack of roads made it impossible to sell his legal produce. By 2024, disillusioned, Perea began planting coca again.
“It’s a tragedy,” he says. “But when you have children and no work, what choice do you have? If no help ever arrives, you go back to growing it.”
“Colombian farmer Perea resumed growing coca in 2024 after promised government aid for legal crops never arrived.”
Perea is not alone. Across Colombia, coca cultivation has reached record levels – more than 250,000 hectares – despite a nationwide substitution programme launched in 2017 that enrolled around 100,000 families. Each household was promised 36m Colombian pesos ($11,000; £8,000) in return for abandoning the crop. But many say they have been let down.
“Coca has some major advantages over other crops,” says Lucas Marín Llanes, a Colombian researcher who studies the coca economy. “Harvests are quick – farmers can get three or four a year – it’s easier to transport, and farmers know what price they’ll get.” Research Marín has worked on shows coca cultivation can boost local economies, increasing municipal GDP by as much as 10% in some areas between 2014 and 2019.
Colombia supplies an estimated 70% of the global cocaine supply. The drug’s raw material – the coca leaf – has long been an ancestral crop for indigenous communities, used in teas and medicines, but today most is processed into cocaine.
Elena Hernández moved to the coca-growing region of Guaviare during the boom of the 1990s, lured by better pay. “There was more money back then – you could see it everywhere,” she says. “I managed to save and buy a small house.” But the industry also brought violence and insecurity as armed groups fought for control, while the government tried to curb production through manual eradication, aerial fumigation and arrests. These efforts cut off families’ incomes but failed to stem cultivation. When the substitution programme was introduced, Hernández was eager to sign up.
The government’s struggle to persuade farmers like Perea and Hernández to switch to legal crops – and the resurgence of coca – underscores a tragedy with no end in sight.
