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Colombia: Fish farming instead of drug crops [1]
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Date: 2025-01
This article is republished from Dialogue Earth under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The Amazon rainforest in southern Colombia stretches lush and green across the horizon, but beneath its dense canopy lies a shifting reality. The southern province of Putumayo – a remote region bordering Ecuador, at the edge of the country’s Amazon – has long been dominated by coca plantations and burdened by the perennial shadow of the country’s armed conflict.
With its fertile ground for coca – the raw material for cocaine – the remote area has fostered a web of illegal activity that drives both local economies and the violent dynamics of armed groups vying for control.
For many in Putumayo, coca has remained an economic mainstay, a guaranteed income in a place where legal alternatives are scarce, infrastructure is limited, and state presence is intermittent at best.
In recent decades, successive Colombian governments have attempted to curb coca cultivation, yet eradication efforts have had limited success and production surged in 2023.
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The human and environmental cost of this illicit crop is enormous: homicides, ongoing human rights abuses, child exploitation, deforestation, soil degradation and water contamination leave lasting scars on Putumayo’s social fabric, as well as its lush ecosystem, threatening the Amazon’s biodiversity.
Amid this landscape, a small group on the outskirts of the town of Puerto Caicedo has charted a different course. The El Progreso Association of Female Fish Farmers and Agricultural Producers, known by its Spanish acronym of ASOPPAEP, is a women’s collective of former coca farmers turning their resources towards a legal and more eco-friendly alternative: fish farming.
“Before we had a greater economic fluidity, but we lived in the fear of knowing that it was something illicit, that if you encountered the army or an armed group it would be a problem,” Aura Ruiz, a representative of the ASOPPAEP, tells Dialogue Earth, as she stands in the shade by one of the collective’s numerous pools.
The group’s 12 members cleared their terrain of the coca plantations that previously peppered the area’s hills. Where coca once flourished, ASOPPAEP now operates a series of aquaculture pools which are home to thousands of tambaqui and tilapia fish, producing nearly 4,000 kilograms every six months.
“Now, we can cultivate our produce without any law or entity preventing us from doing so. It strengthens us, it gives us peace of mind and, beyond that, we know that we are contributing to the family economy,” Ruiz explains.
The environmental toll of coca
Putumayo’s rich soil and isolated location make it ideal for coca plantations. While coca has served as a vital income source for rural communities in the absence of other options, the environmental cost is devastating. Farmers cut swathes of rainforest to make room for coca plants, stripping the land of native vegetation and the species that rely on it, thus intensifying deforestation in the area.
“Coca farming oftentimes is a subsistence economy, which attracts violence amongst armed groups and harsh state crackdowns,” says Bram Ebus, a consultant at the International Crisis Group think-tank. “We cannot make the argument that coca plantations enrich local communities, or are actually wanted by local communities, but due to the lack of other livelihood opportunities people are oftentimes forced to partake because they need to make ends meet.”
Land grabbing and industries such as cattle ranching also contribute greatly to deforestation across the region, and are known to have links to illicit economies and the armed groups present in the area.
Additionally, the processing of coca into cocaine releases toxic chemicals, often dumped into nearby rivers and streams, poisoning the area’s water sources.
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