Address by Pino Arlacchi
United Nations Under-Secretary-General,
Executive Director
to the Session 1 of the
Fourth Transatlantic Interparliamentary Conference on Drug Control
Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia
21-23 February 2001
Your Excellency Vice-President Quiroga, Honourable Parliamentarians, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
First of all -- and I am sure I speak on behalf of everybody here today-- I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Bolivian Government, and in particular to the Bolivian Legislature, for organizing the 4th Interparliamentarian Conference on Drug Control.
Sir Jack your idea has taken root and has become a regular global event. Like every good idea, it has filled a need. Parliaments have always been active in national drug control issues, since they adopt legislation and approve budgets. But with a few exceptions, there was no real forum for parliamentarians to come into contact with the international efforts to confront the drug problem, and to discuss the underlying strategies. The speed with which your idea took root is testimony to the fact that the interest was there.
The invitation of Bolivia to host the 4th conference has a special significance. There was a time --not so long ago as we just saw in the video presentation-- when Bolivia was synonymous with cocaine production. This simply is no longer the case. Bolivia has in recent years reduced illicit coca cultivation by about 90%. Equally important, alternative development today reaches over 10,000 farmer families, producing a turnover of over 100 million US dollars annually, and attracting over 30 million US dollars worth of private sector investments.
Of course, more needs to be done in the coming years to expand alternative development, and to consolidate Bolivia's remarkable achievements. What is most important, however, is this: Bolivia has the right strategies in place to end the psychology of despair that has characterized the debate on the world drug problem for decades. Bolivia is showing us all that we can do a lot to roll back the international narcotics industry. This country offers the evidence that the time has come for the international community to change the way we think about drugs; the flow of addictive drugs is neither unstoppable nor irreversible.
You will hear later from Vice-President Quiroga how the Bolivian government and people have accomplished this.
What I would like to do now is to take a few minutes to reflect on how alternative development has evolved over the past decades, and to say a few words on the current global drug control situation.
Almost exactly 30 years ago, a small number of people set out to eliminate illicit crops. One of them was the King of Thailand, who took on personal responsibility for promoting the development of the semi-nomadic hill tribes in remote areas of his country.
At that time, opium poppy was the only feasible cash crop. The King recognized that the opium poppy was not in the long-term interests of his country. In fact, opium addiction was widespread among the hill tribes. And the heroin problem in Thailand's cities was very serious. In those days, the name of Thailand was also synonymous with drugs.
In those days, the scepticism was enormous that anything could be done to eliminate opium poppy in Thailand. In some ways it was justified, given the low level of resources available. But much of the scepticism concerned the very idea of what was being tried. Conventional wisdom said that the economics of the illegal drug business made it impossible to compete with poppy. Development aid agencies showed little interest in funding the work.
The small group of people who, together with the United Nations, set up the first projects in Thailand in 1971 did not share this scepticism. They were convinced that farmers would be able to make more money from other crops. The task was to identify these crops, and then to make them available to the farmers, with instruction and assistance.
Their strategy was called "crop substitution", and throughout the 1970s pilot projects were started in other countries. A lot of lessons were learned during those early years. We had some successes, but also many failures. It was indeed very hard to compete with opium poppy in these remote areas, because the drug crop was ideally suited to the local growing conditions. A year's production from an entire village could be carried over mountain trails on the back of one single donkey. If necessary, it was easy to store the opium crop until it could be sold later. Substitute crops could be identified, but marketing them was difficult.
The conclusion was clear. More than crop substitution was needed. As the work progressed, the focus became broader. Roads, irrigation schemes, and other infrastructure investments were added. More attention was given to the integration of the growing areas into the economic and social mainstream. Schools, clinics, agricultural credit schemes, marketing cooperatives, and non-agricultural employment became as important as the identification of new crops. Essentially, the concept of alternative development was born.
The results in Asia were impressive. Thailand became largely free of poppy by the late 1980s. In Pakistan this was achieved in the late 1990s. The methodology was used successfully in Lebanon when poppy appeared there during the civil war. Laos is applying it now, and expects to eliminate the remaining poppy within the next five years. Poppy is virtually gone from Viet Nam.
As anticipated by the sceptics, success in eliminating cultivation tended to lead to a displacement effect. This does not mean that alternative development is a failure. I would argue that it is an indicator of its success. Traffickers go elsewhere to find their raw materials. If we take a longer view, we can see that they are obliged to go to places that make their work more and more difficult. In Asia, they now rely on Afghanistan for three-quarters of their supply. Most of the remainder comes from Myanmar, the former Burma. China and Central Asia have held firm as a northern wall against the displacement effect. A fairly small portion of the global opium poppy supply comes from Colombia.
Experience in Asia was essentially the same everywhere. Once the authorities made it clear that the illegal crops would no longer be tolerated, in almost all cases the mere presence of law enforcement capacity was adequate to ensure that the poppy did not return. As experience was gained, the idea emerged that alternative development was in some ways a pact between the authorities and the farmers. As development aid progressed, illegal crops were phased out
As regards Afghanistan, maybe we are hard-core optimists. But who would have thought 3 years ago that the Taleban would effectively implement an opium poppy ban? Yet, this is exactly what seems to be happening right now. It is too early to draw firm conclusions. Of course, they have stock piles, and it is possible that the Taleban are playing a chess game with the international community. But the point is that, today, we are ready to play and win that game.
Attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s turned to South America and the coca bush. Again there were sceptics and believers. The sceptics repeated the old familiar arguments. And they added some new ones. Opium poppy was an annual plant, while coca was a perennial plant. Reduction in coca cultivation, therefore, depended on eradication. The presence of more sophisticated international organized trafficking groups, the non-believers said, would make it impossible to compete. Indeed, some of the cultivation was not there because of poverty, but rather because of pressure from criminal groups.
The believers - and many of them are with us today in Santa Cruz - felt that only minor adjustments were needed to adapt the Asian experience to Latin America. In fact, it was here in the Andean countries that the term alternative development -- desarrollo alternativo-- was coined.
The idea of alternative development is more than economic. While it involves economic alternatives to the coca bush, backed up by firm law enforcement policies, it also involves an alternative way of life - one that is not dominated by criminals. And in that combination lies the success of Bolivia.
The Bolivian Government has accurately read the will of the people of Bolivia, including the majority of the farmers in the Chapare, who want to move this region into a new era of prosperity and dignity. The task of the Government has not been easy. Hardcore coca growers under the sway of traffickers have resisted. Critics inside the country and abroad make accusations against the Government about the way it has handled these situations. But a broad-based system of transparent investigation exists to ensure that the law is respected.
The economic cost of Plan Dignidad was high, and it was carried out at a time when Bolivia had to face many other social problems unrelated to drugs. The job is not yet finished. Long-term sustainability will require more work and funding over the next 3 to 4 years.
It is true, and not surprising, that there has been a displacement effect in South America as well. While Peru has also made impressive progress in reducing coca cultivation, there has been a concentration in Colombia. In fact, most of the coca cultivation today is in Colombia.
But it is also true that during the 1990s, there has been a net drop in the total area under coca cultivation in the three countries, from a peak of 300,000 hectares in 1990 to under 200,000 hectares in the last years of the decade. In other words, not all the decrease in Bolivia and Peru has been offset by increases in Colombia.
We can conclude that alternative development --coupled with law enforcement-- can be successful in eliminating illicit crop cultivation from a given location. Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Mexico, Viet Nam and Bolivia are today minor global drug crop sources, or have been removed from that category. Laos and Peru will follow, we hope, in the near future.
Colombia will remain a major challenge in the years ahead, but I firmly believe that once a sound and large-scale alternative development programme is introduced there, we will be able to achieve a significant reduction in illicit crop cultivation in the coming 5 years.
Although I have chosen to concentrate on a global overview of alternative development, it is now universally accepted, of course, that successful drug control requires a balanced approach - measures against production, against trafficking and against consumption.
On the consumption end, there remains much to do throughout the world. Abuse is escalating in developing countries, especially along trafficking routes. The highest heroin abuse rates in the world are now in Asia, not in Europe or America. In fact, there are some signs of improvement in a number of industrialized countries. Overall, after continued expansion in the first half of the 1990s, drug abuse at the global level lost momentum in the second half of the decade. In fact, 27% of the countries reporting to the UN in 1997/98 indicated a decline in drug abuse. Before we reach an incorrect conclusion, I should add that forty per cent reported an increase, and amphetamine-type substances constitute a major challenge in many countries. But the important message here is that it is possible to reduce drug abuse.
As for trafficking, problems are now being reported by nearly every country in the world. Trafficking routes have continued to multiply. In addition, technological advances have benefited drug traffickers, and we must run even faster to stay in the race. However, there are bright spots. The big Colombian cartels have been broken. Efforts to interdict shipments of precursor chemicals are meeting with growing success. The global interception rate of cocaine is now close to 50%, signalling that law enforcement capabilities against this drug have improved substantially in the past decade.
Equally important, the new United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, signed in Palermo last December, will enable countries to launch an effective attack on money laundering. This Convention is a slap in the face to global criminal groups. For these reasons, I believe, the ratification of the new Convention on Transnational Organized Crime is now urgently needed.
The international community has been developing a number of global legal instruments over the past decades to combat narcotics and organized crime. As regards drugs in particular, the United Nations Special Session of 1998 has turned demand reduction and alternative development into accepted international concerns.
Today, we have concrete strategies and objectives to make drug control and crime prevention more effective. There is no need for us to capitulate ... and this is a success in my book.
Thank you for your attention.