Colombia: Colombia’s Coca Substitution Program Failing to Help Farmers or Slow Deforestation

Aug 9, 2024 | Aimee Gabay, Mongabay
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For Indigenous communities in Colombia’s Amazonian and Andean forests, coca is sacred. Many ancestral traditions, such as healing and shamanic practices, include the use and cultivation of the plant. But ever since the mid-1980s, when the global demand for cocaine peaked, the coca leaf became associated with other phenomena: environmental degradation, poverty and violence.