Colombia's crop of coca—the basis for cocaine—grew by 27 percent last year, the United Nations reported Wednesday, calling the increase “a surprise and a shock” amid major U.S.-funded eradication efforts. Coca cultivation rose 4 percent in Peru and 5 percent in Bolivia, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in its annual report. It estimated cocaine production in the Andean region was stable, however, at just below 1,000 metric tons annually. “The increase in coca cultivation in Colombia is a surprise and a shock: a surprise because it comes at a time when the Colombian government is trying so hard to eradicate coca; a shock because of the magnitude of cultivation,” UNODC director Antonio Maria Costa said in a statement. Costa noted, however, that nearly half of Colombia's coca comes from 10 of the country's 195 municipalities. “Just like in Afghanistan, where most opium is grown in provinces with a heavy Taliban presence, in Colombia most coca is grown in areas controlled by insurgents,” he said. Colombian cocaine production failed to keep pace with coca planting because police pressure forced an interruption in the growing cycle, General Oscar Naranjo, the chief of Colombia's police, told reporters. “These young crops, the new ones, are less productive,” he said in Bogot. The United States has spent over $5 billion in Colombia over the past seven years to fight both a long-running civil war and the world's largest cocaine industry, a business that helps fund the five-decade insurgency.
