President Abelardo de la Espriella is proposing to resume aerial spraying of coca plantations, reviving a familiar strategy with limited lasting effects. Decades of drug enforcement show that illicit crops adapt and persist. Drug policy must target the most consequential stages of the cocaine business, address the conditions sustaining illicit cultivation, and reduce demand in consumer countries.
- Forced eradication targets one of the lowest-value stages of the cocaine business. Crops can be replanted or relocated, while the networks involved in processing, trafficking, and money laundering are able to adapt and thus continue operating.
- Illicit cultivation persists because of economic and territorial constraints. Insecurity, poor infrastructure, limited credit, and weak access to legal markets restrict rural livelihoods. Eradication alone cannot overcome these barriers, and replacing crops does not automatically translate to sustainable incomes taking their place.
- Eradication carries substantial economic, social, and human costs. Operations expose civilians and security personnel to injury and death, can undermine trust in the state, and give rise to health- and environmental concerns.
- “Hectares eradicated” is a measure of state activity, not necessarily policy success. Reducing coca cultivation, cocaine supply, criminal profits, and rural poverty are different objectives besides. Evaluations should instead examine lasting changes in criminal revenues, security, and household welfare.
Policy Implications
Drug policy should prioritise enforcement against the more profitable stages of the cocaine supply chain while supporting viable legal livelihoods via security, infrastructure, and market access. Success should be measured as lasting reductions in cocaine production, criminal revenues, and accompanying violence, alongside improvements in rural welfare. International cooperation must address drug trafficking, money laundering, and consumption demand through prevention and treatment.
Fighting Coca Plants, Not the Cocaine Business
For decades, Colombia’s drug policy has treated the size of the area under illicit cultivation as a key indicator of the scale of the problem and, by extension, the number of “hectares eradicated” as a measure of success. This approach has a clear practical advantage: illicit cultivation is visible, measurable, and directly actionable through forced eradication. However, researchers have long questioned whether eradication produces lasting reductions in cocaine production, while also raising concerns about its social, environmental, and human rights costs (Mejía and Restrepo 2016).
In 2026, these issues have returned to the forefront of public debate. Under President Abelardo de la Espriella, the new Colombian government has placed greater emphasis on coercive measures against drug trafficking and illegal armed groups. This includes proposals to resume aerial crop spraying using drones and to launch a programme involving an alternative herbicide. Despite their limited lasting effects, eradication policies remain politically attractive and enjoy support among key segments of the Colombian electorate (Gelvez and Angulo 2026).
Regardless of the exact chemical used for eradication or specific method employed, the coca plant is only the first input to a much broader transnational production chain. Thus, a policy centred on crop destruction generates substantial government activity without fundamentally altering the market it seeks to disrupt, while imposing high social and institutional costs. One way to understand the structure of the cocaine market is to examine how the value of the product changes along the supply chain, from coca leaves in producing regions to retail sales in Europe. Figure 1 outlines how coca growers earn the equivalent of just 0.5 per cent of the final product’s retail price on the European market, illustrating why eradication in producing regions targets the lowest-value segment of the supply chain.
Figure 1. Approximate Prices from Coca Leaves to Cocaine on the European Retail Market
Sources: Ministry of Justice and Law (2024); EUDA (2026).
This price disparity has important implications for the design and implementation of public policy. Coca growers generate a relatively inexpensive input that is produced across geographically dispersed areas and can be readily replaced by way of replanting (Rincón-Ruiz et al. 2016). Later stages of the supply chain control scarcer assets and capture a larger share of the profits – including processing laboratories, transportation routes, financial networks, and access to international markets. From a policy perspective, concentrating a substantial share of the state’s coercive capacity on coca cultivation means targeting one of the most easily replaceable facets of production. As long as the networks responsible for purchasing, processing, financing, and exporting remain operational, they have incentives to recruit new growers, encourage replanting, relocate operations, or temporarily absorb the additional costs imposed by eradication (Mejía and Restrepo 2016).
As long as buyers are willing to pay sufficiently high prices in consumer markets, incentives to rebuild disrupted production networks persist. The estimated number of cocaine users worldwide increased from approximately 17 million in 2013 to 25 million in 2023, with global production having similarly reached record highs (UNODC 2025). Sustained and widespread international demand places structural limits on what a country like Colombia can achieve via policies focused exclusively on reducing coca cultivation.
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