Forests, Coca, and Conflict: Grass Frontier Dynamics and Deforestation in the Amazon-Andes

Abstract

Population growth with weak economic development can promote tropical deforestation, but government infrastructure investment can also open new frontiers and thus increase deforestation. In the Andean region of South America, population growth has been a leading explanation for both deforestation and coca cultivation, but coca generates armed conflict and attracts counter-drug measures, obscuring the differences between population-driven and frontier-opening models of deforestation. Using a 15-year panel from Colombia, we model deforestation, coca cultivation, and conflict victims as interrelated responses with a suite of covariates encompassing land cover, land cover changes, population, population changes, counter-drug measures, and government infrastructure spending. Infrastructure spending suppresses coca, coca and eradication by aerial fumigation both increase conflict, and conflict promotes deforestation and is associated with depopulation. But the strongest predictor of deforestation is pasture growth, which covaries with coca. While these models show that infrastructure spending can help reduce coca, and coca's influence on deforestation is indirect and mediated by conflict, the models also reveal the most important challenge to forest conservation is neither coca nor conflict, but an insatiable appetite for land that expresses itself through pasture growth.

The Amazon in the Crossfire. Review of the Special Chapter of the UN World Drug Report 2023 on the Amazon Basin

“…Deforestation is the main environmental concern related to illicit drug crop cultivation (UNODC 2016). Based on an increasing body of research, the WDR 2023 finds that the scale of its direct impact is limited however, and the deforestation phenomenon in the Amazon basin is mostly led by other factors (Davalos et al 2021, UNODC 2022, Murillo-Sandoval/Kilbride/ Tellman et al, 2023.). Although drug markets have expanded in the region overall, illicit coca cultivation does not appear to be clearly associated with large scale-deforestation.…”

Capítulo 18: Globalización, extractivismo y exclusión social: Manifestaciones específicas de cada país

“…Additionally, the activity implies further environmental degradation through the production of pasta base and the gradual expansion of the agricultural border. In the past, these were controlled by aerial spraying with glyphosate as part of the Plan Colombia, with worrying environmental consequences (Dávalos et al 2021). The Plan Colombia was jointly agreed between the Colombian and US governments in 1999.…”

“…The production of illicit drugs is one driver of deforestation, as previously discussed, but it is not the main one. Moreover, the relation between coca and deforestation is indirect through fueling cattle ranching, armed conflicts, and displacements, or the deforestation effects of measures to fight coca (Vélez and Erasso 2020;Dávalos et al 2021). Given the variety of factors behind the alarming levels of deforestation in the Amazon, this focuses on combating illegal drugs seems arbitrary and, in some cases, counterproductive (Rincón-Ruiz and Kallis 2013; Dávalos 2016; Vélez and Erasso 2020).…”

Forests in the time of peace

“…These colonization fronts turned into 'hotspots' for coca which provided subsistence to campesinos and a source of financing for armed groups and intensifying armed conflict (Ramírez, 2001;Dávalos et al, 2011;Dávalos, 2018). 3 At the end of the twentieth century Colombia was the leading coca producer in the world, more than 40 percent of which was cultivated in Putumayo (UNODC, 2005).…”