Community compensation: Key instrument in the strategy of the fight against drug trafficking

Disadvantages

If on the one hand some important advances were achieved through voluntary eradication, the experience of several years in the implementation of the Integral Programme for Development and Substitution, it has been demonstrated, on the other, that the primary system that was implemented did not produce the expected outcomes.

• It partially solved the economic impact of eradication, without producing any improvement in the community's economy, within the socioeconomic environment where farmers live and work.
• It did, however, create a negative setting for the integral development of the farmer and his or her family.
• The system of individual compensation, in cash, generated an incentive to replace the already eradicated cultivation and the expansion of new cultivated areas.

Community compensation

The system of community compensation consists of the designation of an amount of money for implementing infrastructure projects and/or mixed farming projects for the community. Such an amount is given for voluntary reduction of coca cultivation, and is part of the U$2,500 originally allocated for individual compensation.

Estimates indicate that by December 2001, the date when compensation for voluntary reduction comes to an end, the resources allocated to community compensation will have reached a figure of 35 million dollars.

Expected outcomes

The new modality is intended to:

• Help solve the problems of the family unit, at the same time that community problems where the family belongs are to be solved. The objective is for coca substitution to effectively promote new productive, legal and alternative patterns within the whole community.
• Become an effective incentive for the eradication of coca cultivation, avoiding the distortions caused by the system of individual compensation.
• Provide the community with the opportunity to decide, according to its needs, where and how to invest its resources obtained from the voluntary reduction of coca crops.
• Increase the number of development projects that will directly benefit agricultural producers in the areas of excess coca leaf cultivation.

For peasants who decide to migrate from the coca zones, the designated amounts for community compensation will be allocated to basic infrastructure projects and productive projects in the new areas where they settle.

Compensation fund

Since the beginning of community compensation, on April 1 of 1998, the self-interest of peasants in this subject has increased, basically because they no longer harbor the doubts or fear that their leaders had spread in the communities about voluntary eradication.

Along these fines, to date there is an accumulated fund of approximately 450 thousand dollars for community compensation.

At present, projects are being developed, by request from peasants that will be implemented using the resources of community compensation.

As this brief outline is published, the Bolivian government considers that community compensation, as an instrument of the Bolivian Strategy for the Fight against Drug Trafficking 1998 - 2002, has a favorable outlook for achieving its objectives.