For Indigenous communities in Colombia’s Amazonian and Andean forests, coca is sacred. Many ancestral traditions, such as healing and shamanic practices, include the use and cultivation of the plant. But ever since the mid-1980s, when the global demand for cocaine peaked, the coca leaf became associated with other phenomena: environmental degradation, poverty and violence. According to experts and coca leaf growers and pickers, known as cocaleros, government efforts to control these issues have been inefficient. Coca production and deforestation continue to skyrocket in the country. As part of the landmark 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) paramilitary group, which set out to correct unequal land use caused by internal displacement, the government developed the National Comprehensive Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops. Known as the PNIS, it sought to get farmers to voluntarily give up growing coca in favor of legal alternatives, as part of efforts to help coca-growing communities overcome conditions of poverty and marginalization. “We joined the substitution program to eradicate coca and because here you need money to invest in a project,” a farmer from the municipality of Tumaco, not named for security reasons, told the land research network Observatorio de Tierras. Like many others, the farmer said he trusted in the promises of the program and signed an agreement with the PNIS, “but they didn’t come here with food aid, they didn’t come here with anything,” he said. “We need help, my children are in school…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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