U.S. Doubts Effects of Coca Plan

Alternative Program Fails to Win Over Colombian Farmers

By Scott Wilson-Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 7, 2002; Page A13

CAIRO, Colombia -- As the civil war in Colombia persists, U.S. officials have become increasingly pessimistic about whether a popular U.S.-sponsored program that pays farmers to uproot coca and replace it with legal crops will have any lasting success against the drug industry.

The alternative development program is the most socially oriented element of a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package Congress approved almost two years ago with the goal of cutting Colombia's coca production in half by 2005. Although it is only a small fraction of a package tilted heavily toward military assistance, alternative development has long been seen as the most politically acceptable part of a U.S. anti-drug strategy frequently criticized as a war plan targeting Colombia's Marxist insurgency.

A number of U.S. officials are rethinking the program less than a year after it began here in southern Colombia's coca fields. Security concerns, unfavorable economics and a history of mistrust between the Colombian government and coca farmers who produce 90 percent of the cocaine arriving in the United States have complicated the program in ways that U.S. officials now believe could be insurmountable.

Following two critical recent reviews of the program, U.S. officials have decided to shift its focus from helping individual farmers to creating public works jobs in coca-growing regions, tailor development projects by community and begin development efforts in areas less fraught by civil war than this one 350 miles south of the capital, Bogota. Even so, U.S. officials acknowledge, funding the $42.5 million program beyond this year is in question.

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