IPS is one of the USA’s leading progressive, multi-issue, analysis and advocacy organization. IPS scholars have crafted policies to help those in society with the least power and to give their advocates the intellectual ammunition to make changes in public policy consistent with the values of demilitarization, social justice, economic, racial and gender equality, environmental sustainability, and democratic participation.

El IPS es una de las principales organizaciones estadounidenses de análisis y de apoyo progresista y exhaustivo. Los investigadores del IPS han elaborado políticas para ayudar a los grupos más vulnerables de la sociedad y dar a sus activistas las municiones intelectuales necesarias para cambiar la política actual del gobierno, a fin de que sea más consonante con los valores de la desmilitarización, de la justicia social, de la participación democrática y de la sostenibilidad económica, racial, de género y del medio ambiente.

L’IPS est l’une des organisations américaines clés en matière d’analyse et de sensibilisation politique. Les chercheurs de l’IPS ont conçu des politiques d’aide aux groupes les plus vulnérables de la société pour donner à leurs militants les munitions intellectuelles nécessaires pour changer la politique publique actuelle afin qu’elle se conforme aux valeurs de démilitarisation, de justice sociale, de participation démocratique, et de durabilité économique, raciale, d’égalité des sexes et en matière environnementale.

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)

Colombia’s government is moving closer to reinstating a program, suspended in 2015, that would spray herbicides from aircraft over territories where coca is cultivated. Twenty-five U.S. and Colombian organizations have joined on this letter to President Joe Biden urging him to avoid supporting a renewed “fumigation” program, succinctly laying out the reasons why this would be an unfortunate policy mistake. The letter was shared with the White House on March 26.

President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.
The White House
Washington, DC

We write out of strong concern about the imminent restart of a program that your administration is inheriting from its predecessor: an effort to eradicate coca in Colombia by spraying herbicides from aircraft. 

We encourage you not to provide funding for this program

, which not only failed to achieve past objectives, but sends a message of cruelty and callousness with which the United States should no longer be associated. It will undermine the peace accords that are a powerful legacy of the Obama-Biden administration.

Aerial fumigation can bring short-term reductions in the number of acres planted with coca. But past experience shows not only that these gains reverse quickly, but that the strategy undermines other U.S. and Colombian security objectives. Recurring to fumigation is like going back in time, ignoring much that we have learned about what does and does not work.

Many of our organizations have published studies documenting the harm that fumigation has done in the past. The December 2020 report of the U.S. government’s bipartisan Western Hemisphere Drug Policy Commission found that forced eradication brought “enormous costs and dismal results.” Just since the end of February, we have seen strong critiques of forced eradication and fumigation from the International Crisis Group; the Ideas for Peace Foundation, a Colombian business sector think tank; a list of over 200 scholars, and seven UN human rights rapporteurs.

Between 1994 and 2015, a U.S.-backed program supported a fleet of aircraft, and teams of contract pilots and maintenance personnel, that sprayed the herbicide glyphosate over 4.42 million acres of Colombian territory—a land area 3 1/2 times the size of Delaware. In 2015 the Colombian government suspended the spray program, citing public health concerns based on a World Health Organization study finding glyphosate to be “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

For a few years afterward, the Colombian government failed to replace the strategy with anything—neither eradication nor assistance to affected areas. During the late 2010s, Colombia’s coca crop increased to record levels. Nearly all of the increase 

happened in the exact municipalities and communities where fumigation had been heaviest

. After 20 years of constant eradication, farmers continue to face the same on-the-ground reality.

Most Colombian producers of the coca bush are not organized crime-tied criminals or supporters of illegal armed groups. They are families with small plots of land. Estimates of the number of families who make a living off of coca vary from “more than 119,500” to 215,000. If one assumes four people per family, then more than 2 percent of Colombia’s 50 million people depend on coca. Households earn about $1,000 per person per year from the crop, making them by far the lowest-paid link in the cocaine supply chain.

They live in “agricultural frontier” zones where evidence of Colombia’s government is scarce. Paved or maintained roads are nonexistent. The national electric grid is far off. There is no such thing as potable water or land titles. In some areas, even currency is hard to obtain, and stores offer the option of paying for groceries with coca paste.

These people need to be governed and protected by their state. An aircraft flying anonymously overhead, spraying chemicals on populated areas, is the exact opposite of that. But the program has other important disadvantages:

Because it targets poor households in ungoverned areas, chemical fumigation sends a 

, and associates that message with the United States. Your administration is steadily working to undo the Trump administration’s cruel migratory measures, which imposed suffering on a weak, impoverished population at the U.S.-Mexico border. We ask that you also avoid returning to “deterrence though cruelty” in rural Colombia.

Like any eradication without assistance, fumigation further 

weakens governance and threatens to worsen security

 in Colombia’s ungoverned territories, where illegal economies and armed groups thrive. Forced eradication, especially when uncoordinated with efforts to physically bring government services into territory, sends families from poverty to extreme poverty, with no official help in sight. This hurts the government’s legitimacy in frontier areas where it badly needs to be built up.

After perhaps a short-term drop in cultivation, fumigation is not effective at reducing the coca crop. Past experience shows 

 and other means of minimizing lost harvests, in contexts of absent government and few alternative crops.

Fumigation goes against what Colombia’s 2016 peace accord promised

. That document’s first and fourth chapters offered a blueprint for reducing illicit crops: first by engaging families in substitution programs, and then by carrying out a 15-year “comprehensive rural reform” effort to bring state presence to rural areas. Fumigation was meant to be a last resort, for circumstances when families were refusing opportunities to substitute crops and when manual eradication was viewed as too dangerous. Rushing to fumigate is a slap in the face to brave farmer association leaders who took the risky step of defying traffickers and leading their communities into the fourth chapter’s crop substitution programs.

fumigation risks large-scale social discord

 in rural Colombia. In 1996, after the program first got started, much of rural Colombia ground to a halt for weeks or months as mostly peaceful coca-grower protests broke out around the country. Today, farmers are even better organized than they were 25 years ago.

risks for human health and the environment

. The 2015 WHO document is one of many studies that give us reasonable doubts about the health impacts of spraying high concentrations of glyphosate over populated areas from aircraft. Bayer, the company that purchased glyphosate producer Monsanto, has agreed to settlements with U.S. plaintiffs potentially totaling over $11 billion—another reason for reasonable doubt. While the environmental impacts are less clear, glyphosate’s own labeling warns against spraying near standing water sources, and we are concerned about its use in proximity to rainforest ecosystems. The largest environmental impact, though, is likely to be the way many past farmers have responded after losing crops to fumigation, while remaining in a vacuum of government presence: they move somewhere else and cut down more rainforest to grow coca again.

Like all forced eradication unaccompanied by assistance, fumigation is 

 themselves. In 2013, not long before the program’s suspension, FARC guerrillas shot down two spray planes within the space of two weeks. While planes and their escort helicopters will be more armored than before, the vulnerability remains. Eradication is far safer when it is agreed with communities by a government that is physically present in its own territory.

In March 2020, Donald Trump met with Colombian President Iván Duque and told him, “You’re going to have to spray.” The country’s highest court has required Duque’s government to meet a series of health, environment, consultation, and other requirements. Colombia’s Defense Minister is now predicting that the spraying could restart in April.

This time, U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg has stated, the U.S. role in the program won’t be as extensive. Still, during the Trump administration, the State Department supported maintenance of the spray plane fleet, upgrades to bases, and training of eradication personnel, among other services. State Department reports sent to Congress in late February and early March hailed fumigation’s imminent restart as a sign of progress.

we reiterate our hope that the Biden administration will turn away from supporting Colombia’s spray program while there is still time

. The United States should not support aerial fumigation in Colombia again. Nor does it have to. We know what to do.

Farmers with land titles hardly ever grow coca. Farmers who live near paved roads hardly ever grow coca. Criminal groups are badly weakened by proximity of a functioning government that is able to resolve disputes and punish lawbreaking.

This is a longer-term project, but Colombia’s 2016 peace accord offered a good blueprint for setting it in motion: a fast-moving, consultative crop substitution program, tied to a slower-moving but comprehensive rural reform program. Though those programs exist and parts of the Duque government are carrying them out diligently, they are underfunded and well behind where they should be as accord implementation enters its fifth year.

It’s not too late to help Colombia jumpstart the model offered by Colombia’s peace accord, which the Obama-Biden administration so effectively supported. We urge you to take that path instead of that of renewed fumigation, which we know to be a dead end.

Center for International Environmental Law

Centro Estudios sobre Seguridad y Drogas, Universidad de los Andes (Colombia)

Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America

Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento (Colombia)

Fellowship of Reconciliation: Peace Presence

Institute for Policy Studies, Drug Policy Project

Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights

Mennonite Central Committee U.S. Washington Office

Presbyterian Church (USA), Office of Public Witness

United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries

25 organizations call for an end to U.S. support for aerial herbicide fumigation in Colombia

LONDON [27 JUNE 2019] – Harm Reduction International and almost 120 human rights organisations from around the world – including Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists – published open letters today calling on the United Nations’ major drug control bodies to intervene and help stop Sri Lanka’s move to resume executions after 43 years.

President Maithripala Sirisena signed the execution warrants this week for four people convicted of drug-related offences.

The letters – sent to the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) and UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) – underscore that the death penalty for drug offences violates international human rights law. The signatories state that “Remaining silent as Sri Lanka puts an end to a 43-year de facto moratorium on executions would strike a blow to the INCB’s and UNODC’s commitments to human rights compliance as a core principle of international drug policy.”

Giada Girelli, human rights analyst at Harm Reduction International, said: “There is simply no evidence that the death penalty is an effective deterrent against the drug trade. President Sirisena’s move is a gross violation of human rights – UN bodies must urge authorities in Sri Lanka to reverse this and work to consign the death penalty to the history books.”

Harm Reduction International’s latest research shows that global executions for drug offences fell by almost 90% from 2015-18, in large part because of judicial reforms in Iran. Of the 35 countries that retain the death penalty for drug offences, only four carried out executions in 2018 (China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Singapore).

Over 100 human rights groups urge UN to demand Sri Lanka halt executions of drug offenders

Civil society groups from all over the world have released a statement condemning governments for failing to acknowledge the devastating consequences of punitive and repressive drug policies as they prepare for a UN summit on the issue next month.

In April 2016, world leaders will gather in New York to decide on the future of global drug policy, at the first UN General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the topic in two decades. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for this meeting to be a “wide-ranging and open debate that considers all options.” But as the preparations continue this week in Vienna at an annual meeting of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, it is becoming clear that the ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to rethink the failed ‘war on drugs’ is unlikely to deliver.

Keep up-to-date with drug policy developments by subscribing to the IDPC Monthly Alert.

Civil society statement - The UNGASS outcome document: Diplomacy or denialism?

Poor people, especially people of color, face a far greater risk of being fined, arrested, and even incarcerated for minor offenses than other Americans. A broken taillight, an unpaid parking ticket, a minor drug offense, sitting on a sidewalk, or sleeping in a park can all result in jail time. In this report, we seek to understand the multi-faceted, growing phenomenon of the “criminalization of poverty.”

In many ways, this phenomenon is not new: The introduction of public assistance programs gave rise to prejudices against beneficiaries and to systemic efforts to obstruct access to the assistance.

This form of criminalizing poverty — racial profiling or the targeting of poor black and Latina single mothers trying to access public assistance — is a relatively familiar reality. Less well-known known are the new and growing trends which increase this criminalization of being poor that affect or will affect hundreds of millions of Americans. These troubling trends are eliminating their chances to get out of poverty and access resources that make a safe and decent life possible.

In this report we will summarize these realities, filling out the true breadth and depth of this national crisis. The key elements we examine are:

the targeting of poor people with fines and fees for misdemeanors, and the resurgence of debtors’ prisons – the imprisonment of people unable to pay debts resulting from the increase in fines and fees;

mass incarceration of poor ethnic minorities for non-violent offenses, and the barriers to employment and re-entry into society once they have served their sentences;

excessive punishment of poor children that creates a “school-to-prison pipeline”;

increase in arrests of homeless people and people feeding the homeless, and criminalizing life-sustaining activities such as sleeping in public when no shelter is available; and

confiscating what little resources and property poor people might have through “civil asset forfeiture.”

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)

Region

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25 organizations call for an end to U.S. support for aerial herbicide fumigation in Colombia

Over 100 human rights groups urge UN to demand Sri Lanka halt executions of drug offenders

Civil society statement - The UNGASS outcome document: Diplomacy or denialism?

The poor get prison: The alarming spread of the criminalisation of poverty