Colombia's coca crop shrank by nearly a fifth last year while cultivation of the bush that is the basis of cocaine rose for a third straight year in Peru and Bolivia, the world's two other coca-producing nations, AP quoted the United Nations as saying today. The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said the 18 percent reduction in Colombia, the world's top cocaine producer, from 2007 owed in part to record manual eradication _ as opposed to aerial herbicide spraying _ of 96,100 hectares (371 square miles) of the crop. Traffickers tend to migrate to countries where there is less police pressure and eradication, the UNODC's representative for Colombia, Aldo Lale-Demoz, told reporters. «There's a shift from Colombia toward Peru and Bolivia,» he said, calling Peru more worrisome due to «the penetration of international cartels, above all Mexicans.» In its annual survey of the Andes' cocaine trade, the U.N. agency said coca cultivation in Colombia dropped to 81,000 hectares _ the lowest since 2004 _ while Bolivia's crop increased by 6 percent and Peru's by 4.5 percent. It put Bolivia's coca crop last year at 30,500 hectares (117 square miles) and Peru's at 56,100 hectares (216 square miles). Crop eradication was down in both countries, by 13 percent and 16 percent respectively. In last year's report, the U.N. noted a 27 percent increase in coca cultivation in Colombia, the world's top producer of cocaine. Estimated cocaine production in Colombia, a major recipient of U.S. anti-drug aid, was down 28 percent last year to 430 metric tons from 2007 _ with 20,000 fewer households growing coca, the U.N. said. Colombia analyst Adam Isacson, of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, cautioned about «one element that should keep the champagne corks from popping» in the Andean nation's government: Peasants who lost their savings in collapsed pyramid schemes in October began replanting coca on a huge scale. That certainly offset, said Isacson, some of the gains reported by the U.N. from use of the herbicide glyphosate on 133,496 hectares (515 square miles) of coca crop last year.
