Colombia retains its title as the world’s leading producer of cocaine. The country even broke a new record in 2022 for the production of white powder, as well as coca crops, the UN announced on Monday. According to a report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (Undoc), coca leaf crops increased by almost 13% in 2022, reaching a record 230,000 hectares.
In 2021, the country had 204,000 hectares of coca plantations, already an increase of 43% compared to 2020. If we see a slowdown in growth in 2022, this figure is nevertheless the highest recorded by the UN since he started monitoring cocaine production in 2001. Drug production also increased significantly in 2022, mainly destined for the United States and Europe. It went from 1,400 tonnes of cocaine to 1,738 tonnes.
Cultures concentrated in the south and northeast
This upward trend has been consolidated since 2014, despite the muscular method favored to fight against drug trafficking. 65% of coca crops are concentrated in the departments of Narino and Putumayo (south), both bordering Ecuador, and in the department of North Santander (north-east), bordering Venezuela.
The rest of the country “presented a relatively stable behavior, with a 3% increase in the area cultivated with coca”, specifies the report. Of the 1,122 municipalities in Colombia, coca leaf cultivation is present in 185 of them, adds Undoc. Nearly half of the drug crops (49%) are found in indigenous reserves (10%), forest reserves (15%), in Afro-Colombian regions (19%) or in natural parks (5% ).
The United States, leading consumers of Colombian cocaine
Thus, Colombia remains by far the largest grower of coca leaves in the world, ahead of Peru and Bolivia. The United States, which historically financed the war on drugs, is the primary consumer of Colombian cocaine. These new alarming figures, with a trend that should not be reversed in 2023, are published while the left-wing president Gustavo Petro (elected in the summer of 2022) is constantly denouncing the “failure” of the war on drugs and policies of total repression implemented by his conservative and liberal predecessors.
This weekend, during a Latin American summit in Cali (southwest) devoted to the subject, Gustavo Petro repeated the same observation, in unison with his Mexican counterpart Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador. Colombia and Mexico are “the biggest victims” of this war, said the two heads of state. “The policy called the War on Drugs has failed. It is useless”, judged Gustavo Petro.