page_title: Coca production in Colombia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Coca production in Colombia / History
context_page_description: In 2012, coca production in Colombia amounted to 0.2% of Colombia's overall GDP and 3% of Colombia's GDP related to the agricultural sector. The great majority of coca cultivation takes place in the departments of Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta, Guaviare, Nariño, Antioquia, and Vichada.
context_section_description: Before the 1990s, harvesting coca leaves had been a relatively small-scale business in Colombia. Though Peru and Bolivia dominated coca-leaf production in the 1980s and early 1990s, manual-eradication campaigns there, the successful rupture of the air bridge that previously facilitated the illegal transport of Bolivian and Peruvian coca leaf to Colombia, and a fungus that wiped out a large percentage of Peru's coca crops made it more difficult for the cartels to obtain coca from these countries.
  In response, Colombia's drug cartels purchased land in Colombia to expand local production, pushing coca cultivation into areas of southern Colombia controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Colombia replaced Bolivia and Peru as the primary producer of coca leaf between 1996 and 1997, but fell back behind Peru again in 2012.
  With only 14 percent of the global coca-leaf market in 1991, by 2004 Colombia was responsible for 80 percent of the world's cocaine production. One estimate has Colombia's coca cultivation hectarage growing from 13,000 in the mid-1980s, to 80,000 hectares(ha) in 1998, to 99,000 in 2007. The US Department of State estimated in its 2015 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report that the area devoted to coca cultivation remained relatively stable in 2013, increasing only three percent from 78,000 ha in 2012 to 80,500 ha in 2013, with an increase primarily in Norte de Santander, national parks, indigenous reserves, within a 10-kilometer zone along the border with Ecuador where aerial spraying is prohibited, and along the Pacific coast, and it was decreasing in the center of the country. As of September 2015, 2014 production and cultivation estimates were not available.
  Another estimate has Colombia's coca cultivation area growing from 40,100 in 1990 to 163,300 in 2000, but dropping to 78,000 in 2007 as a result of government eradication programs.  Overall, any decrease due to eradication has been tempered by an increase in productivity, as estimated coca production grew from 463 metric tons in 2001 to 610 metric tons in 2006. A 2017 UNODC report into the cultivation of illicit crops in Colombia showed that the number of hectares under coca cultivation leapt from 96,000 in 2015 to 146,000 in 2016.
  As of 2006, coca production in Colombia employed an estimated 67,000 households. According to U.S. government reports, children are employed in the production of coca in Colombia.
caption: A Coca plant.
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