A besieged land: When organized crime decides what a country eats

Across large parts of Colombia, the land is still productive, just no longer for food.

In some rural villages the question is no longer what will be planted, but what will have to be bought. Kitchen gardens disappear, fish grow scarce, and groceries arrive from far away. The land keeps producing, only not food. It produces fast money. This is not a side effect of the drug trade. It is how it settles in. The territory changes function and, with it, something more basic: what the country is able to eat.

For years violence was discussed as if it existed only between armed groups. Yet another process was unfolding quietly: the transformation of the soil itself. It did not begin recently, nor does it depend only on today’s drug economy. It has been building for decades.

“Colombia has one of the five highest rates of humid tropical forest deforestation in the world. Of the 15.4 million hectares destroyed globally in the 1980s, 4.5 percent occurred in Colombia, mostly in the Amazon region,” writes Darío González Posso, an agro-industrial engineer and FAO consultant, in Coca, Deforestation and Food Security in the Colombian Amazon.

The sequence repeats itself: a family arrives, clears forest to survive, and plants food. Over time coca appears and everything changes. The land stops supporting settlements and begins supporting income streams. The territory ceases to be a place to live and becomes a place to produce quickly.

When income replaces food

“External demand for coca, combined with declining cultivation in other countries, increased Colombia’s planted area from 37,500 hectares in early 1991 to more than 100,000 hectares in 1999,” Posso notes. Three decades later the scale is different: official monitoring by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recorded roughly 253,000 hectares in 2023.

The deeper shift does not occur in the jungle but in the kitchen. Coca does not replace a crop, it replaces an agricultural economy. Local markets shrink, exchange disappears, and food begins to arrive from farther away. In many towns basic goods no longer come from the neighboring farm but from another region altogether.

The effects are gradual. Prices depend on transport, fuel, road conditions, weather elsewhere in the country. Diets become more uniform and less fresh. What was once routine becomes occasional.

For those living there, the decision is rarely moral. It is practical. Illicit crops pay more and pay immediately. The problem comes later: after repeated cycles the soil loses fertility and planting again becomes impossible even if violence declines. Legal agriculture stops being viable.

A business that requires territory

Coca does not operate alone. In the Amazon nothing operates in isolation. “Drug trafficking, illegal mining, illegal logging and wildlife trafficking converge and reinforce one another in the Amazon basin,” reports the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The forest is not a hiding place but infrastructure. Rivers function as transport routes, deforestation opens airstrips, gold finances operations and timber sustains logistics. Environmental damage is not accidental. It stabilizes control. When the land no longer supports other livelihoods, the population depends on the only one available.

And it does not remain confined to the jungle. Food travels farther, prices fluctuate more often, and fewer regions carry the burden of feeding the country. What appears local accumulates nationally.

Where the state arrives late

The problem is not only criminal. It is also about presence. Where the state appears mainly as enforcement, the illegal economy becomes the only constant structure.

“Ghana and Colombia share common drivers of illegal mining, including poverty, unemployment, lack of land rights and weak governance systems,” notes research from the University of Ghana.

For that reason repression rarely changes the outcome. “Addressing illegal mining requires more than strict regulation; it requires rebuilding trust between communities and institutions.”

When no other livelihood exists, the cycle resumes. Prohibition alone does little. Without stable alternatives, illegal economies return.

For years the debate treated drugs, mining, environment and food as separate issues. In practice they describe the same question: who exercises power over the territory. When soil no longer allows planting, dependence stops being agricultural and becomes political.

Colombia is not only losing forest. It is losing governing capacity over parts of its territory. What is grown, or no longer grown, is only the visible evidence.