Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer, faces a change in drug policy

promises,’’ explained one of the men, a 44-year-old father of three who offered only his first name, Elver.

‘‘We tore up our plants, but we never got the help we needed,’’ he said. ‘‘So now we are back to planting coca. It is the only way to make a living here.’’

That is something that Colombia’s first leftist president is vowing to change, even as acreage sown with coca leaf soars to new heights and the Biden administration watches warily.

Exactly how Gustavo Petro plans to proceed remains a major question for a leader who took office in August and is also endeavouring to guide his country out of more than five decades of civil war and fix a reeling economy. The odds are stacked against him.

Colombia, long the world’s largest cocaine producer, had a record 204,000 ha of coca plants – enough to make 1400 tonnes of cocaine – under cultivation at the end of 2021, according to a report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The numbers – a 43% increase in acreage and a 14% hike in potential yield of cocaine compared with a year earlier – are the highest since the United Nations began gathering such data more than two decades ago.

The jumps ‘‘are without precedent,’’ Ne´stor Osuna, the Colombian justice minister, said in response to the report. ‘‘If we want to reverse these figures we have to do something different.’’

Coca bushes now cover nearly five times more territory than they did in the days of Pablo Escobar and his Medellı´n cartel. Yields are much higher these days thanks to improved agricultural techniques and more productive strains of the leaf. - LA Times