UN findings come a day after Colombian President Gustavo Petro known as for a new method to fight drug trafficking.
Colombia has set a new document for the cultivation of the coca leaf, which is used to fabricate cocaine, a United Nations report has discovered.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) stated on Monday that 230,000 hectares (568,340 acres) of land had been planted with coca final 12 months throughout the South American nation – a 13 p.c enhance from 2021.
Potential cocaine output additionally rose 24 p.c to about 1.73 million kilogrammes (1,738 tonnes), the workplace discovered.
These had been the best numbers because the UN started monitoring in 2001.
“It is worrying that each year there is an increase in coca crops in the country,” UNODC’s regional director, Candice Welsch, stated throughout a presentation of the report.
Colombia has lengthy been the world’s greatest producer of cocaine, a extremely addictive drug that’s unlawful in most international locations, and it has confronted strain, notably from the United States, to crack down on manufacturing.
But authorities efforts to get farmers to maneuver away from unlawful coca crops have confronted a sequence of challenges, together with a scarcity of promised subsidies and different incentives. Many poor Colombians concerned in coca farming say they haven’t any different selection.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has known as the struggle on medicine “irrational”, has proposed regulating narcotics, increasing voluntary crop substitution programmes, focusing enforcement on drug gang management and growing social funding in manufacturing areas.
Most lately, on Saturday, Petro known as for an alliance between Latin American international locations to carry a unified voice to the combat in opposition to drug trafficking.
He proposed recognising drug consumption as a public well being downside as a substitute of confronting it with what he known as a “failed” militarised method.
“What I propose is to have a different and unified voice that defends our society, our future and our history and stops repeating a failed discourse,” Petro stated in a speech to shut the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs, held within the Colombian metropolis of Cali.
“It is time to rebuild hope and not repeat the bloody and ferocious wars, the ill-named ‘war on drugs’, viewing drugs as a military problem and not as a health problem for society.”
According to Monday’s UN report, practically two-thirds of Colombia’s coca crops are grown within the southern departments of Narino and Putumayo, bordering Ecuador – itself battling a scourge of drug gang-associated violence – and in North Santander on the border with Venezuela.
Around half of Colombia’s drug crops are present in Indigenous reserves, forest reserves and pure parks, in response to the report.
Much of the sector is managed by armed teams, together with these led by left-wing fighters, proper-wing paramilitaries or drug cartels.
The Colombian authorities has stated it’s set to undertake a new drug coverage quickly aimed toward dismantling legal organisations with the least attainable hurt to poor, rural producers.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/11/colombia-sets-new-coca-cultivation-record-un-report-finds?traffic_source=rss
