Social Investment and Smallholder Coca Cultivation in Colombia

Abstract

Colombia is the largest supplier of coca leaf in the world, and fields smaller than one-hectare account for more than 60 per cent of cultivation. Despite the obvious relevance of smallholding growers to the strategies to control illicit crops, there are few insights into what motivates these smallholders to cultivate coca. We analyse the motivations of coca growers by estimating a discrete choice model including head of household characteristics, household variables, and agricultural unit attributes. We found that extremely poor farmers are more likely to grow coca than non-poor farmers in the same area, while households connected to the energy grid, with access to credit, and receiving cash payments for their licit crops, are less likely to grow coca crops. Our results suggest that strategies aiming to discourage farmers from growing coca should: 1) target specifically the poorest households in the region and not just seek to improve general living conditions, 2) expand rural electrification, and 3) enhance legal productivity by providing access to credit, technical support, and/or contracts on harvests before planting.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank SIMCI at the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Colombia for making the data available for this study, and in particular Leonardo Correa and his team for insightful discussions on illicit crops. We also thank Leonardo Fabio Morales for his feedback on multiple drafts of this paper. For their comments and suggestions in the early stages of this research, we thank Stephen Billings, Jennifer Troyer, and John Szmer. All remaining errors are our own. Liliana M. Davalos was supported, in part by NSF-DGE1633299, and Eleonora Davalos was supported by Colciencias and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Smallholder households are family farms that practise subsistence agriculture in which most of the labour comes from the household (Arias, Hallam, Krivonos, & Morrison, 2013; Netting, 1993).

2. The area under coca cultivation declined by 52 per cent since 2001, from 144,800 to 69,000 hectares in 2014, (author’s estimates based on UNODC (2008) and UNODC (2016b)).

3. The SISBEN index is a proxy means index including information on socioeconomic characteristics of the individual, characteristics of his/her home, the size of the household, education, health, employment, and income. For more details about the methodology, visit: https://www.sisben.gov.co/Inicio.aspx.

4. In 1996, for example, the crop substitution program in the Orinoco basin received almost 5,000 requests for credit to improve irrigation, crop processing, and other activities related to legal crop production, only 127 were funded during the first semester because of insufficient resources (Ramírez & Molano, 1998).

5. Cocaine price decreased from COP 5,393/kg in 2001 to COP 3,204/kg in 2017 (UNODC, 2007a, 2018). Price in constant Colombian pesos.