And multiple annual harvests on the steep terrain causes tremendous soil erosion, particularly in the mountain slopes of Peru and Bolivia. This is in stark contrast to the experience in the Yungas of Bolivia, a location where coca is grown legally for a small local market and for the famous flavor extract in Coca Cola. Farmers in the Yungas often plant large leafy plants around coca bushes to protect the soil from the sunlight, plant the bush in deeper pits to allow for the formation of a sturdier root structure and construct stone terraces to allow for harvesting on what amounts to level ground. Tourists visiting the site of the ancient capital of the Incan Empire, Peru's Macchu Picchu, learn that these growing practices were the norm hundreds of years ago. They are rare today precisely because most cultivation must remain as concealed as possible.
Cultivators work at breakneck speed and are always ready to depart when authorities arrive.
The US State Department would have environmentalists believe that drug control is worth the costs. However, there is little evidence to source the assertion that strategies have been able to decrease drug abuse. In fact, when eradication efforts peak, coca cultivators sometimes respond by increasing cultivation. Because of the enormous gap between coca prices and black market cocaine prices, huge changes in the price of coca affect cocaine prices only by pennies. The War Against International Cocaine Trafficking.