United Nations reports Colombia’s potential cocaine output rose 24% in 2022 – days after country’s president proposes Latin American alliance to transform ‘war on drugs’

A new report from the United Nations shows that cocaine production in Colombia will reach 24 percent by 2022.

The increase rose to 1,915.8 tonnes, surpassing a 20-year high, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said on Monday.

The study also found that the coca crop reached 568,000 hectares in 2022, up from 13 percent the year before.

Coke is the main ingredient in cocaine, which has largely fueled the 60-year armed conflict with guerrilla groups that has killed at least 450 people.

During a presentation of the report, UNODC Regional Director Candice Welsch expressed concern about Colombia’s annual “increase in coca yields.”

Welsch attributed the upturn to an increase in crops in Putumayo province, which borders Ecuador. Elsewhere, production was relatively stable.

The release of the annual report came two days after Colombian President Gustavo Petro declared that Latin America needed to shift the region’s focus from a war on drugs to public health.

The Andean country’s first leftist president called the drug war a failed militarized strategy during his speech at the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs in Cali, Colombia.

“What I propose is to have a different and united voice that defends our society, our future and our history and stops repeating a failed discourse,” Petro said.

“It is time to rebuild hope and not repeat the bloody and brutal wars, the ill-named ‘war on drugs’, where drugs are seen as a military problem and not as a health problem for society.”

The countries participating in the conference said in a joint statement that demand for illicit drugs must be reduced by educating the public and combating inequality, poverty, lack of opportunity and violence.

They also agreed on the need to break the harmful links between drug and firearms trafficking, transnational organized crime, illegal logging, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, money laundering and corruption.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who attended the event, said countries should strengthen family unity with love, fight poverty and encourage the planting of corn, beans, cocoa, coffee, fruits and timber to cover the land area intended for illegal crops such as marijuana. , as well as poppy seeds and coca leaf – the raw materials for drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

The Mexican president said Latin American countries must support the United States in its fight against fentanyl out of a “moral obligation” and “humanism.”

“They are facing a pandemic,” Lopez Obrador said. “Regardless of our differences, human rights stand above partisan ideas and ideological positions, and the most important human right is the right to life.”

President Petro’s government wants to help rural communities voluntarily replace some 247,105 hectares of coca crops over the next four years, an official recently told Reuters.

The president has also promised more social investments in production areas and ruled out a restart of aerial fumigation with the herbicide glyphosate.

Nearly 13 percent of Colombia’s annual deforestation is linked to illegal crops, Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said at a drug conference last week.

The country’s deforestation reached 477 square kilometers last year, down 29 percent from 2021.

A crash in coca prices, caused by oversupply and new production in other regions, is contributing to food insecurity in Colombia and causing displacement, according to a report from the UN World Food Program.