Beyond the Coca Plot: Rethinking Development Priorities and Drug Policy

Despite decades of illicit crop substitution programs in Colombia, coca and cocaine production persist, while rural poverty and infrastructure deficits remain acute. This document argues that the central limitation lies in insufficient state capacity and misaligned drug policy priorities. Substitution policies framed within Alternative Development programs, centered on household-level assistance conditioned on prior eradication, have proven administratively burdensome, fiscally inefficient, and poorly aligned with territorial realities, often displacing rather than eliminating coca cultivation. Drawing on the economic geography of coca production, regional levels of market integration, environmental and ethnic considerations, this document proposes a shift from farm-level substitution toward a territorially differentiated approach. The coca farm should be the endpoint—not the starting point—of drug policy intervention. This document identifies three distinct territorial strategies. First, in low market integration areas with peasant-scale coca production, policy should prioritize the provision of collective goods—such as roads, electricity, water, and sanitation—to establish the basic conditions for legal economic activity. Second, in territories with higher market integration and small-scale coca cultivation, the priority should be the transformation of raw materials and value addition through provision of machinery, commercialization support, and land tenure security. Third, in highly isolated coca enclaves, state intervention should focus on security, territorial control and the dismantling of large-scale illicit production and trafficking structures. This approach seeks to reconcile two objectives often treated as contradictory: reducing rural poverty and limiting the supply of cocaine. Coca substitution is the endpoint of territorial development rather than its starting point. Sustained and sequenced public investment across these territorially differentiated strategies is a more coherent pathway toward both poverty reduction and the long-term contraction of illicit economies.