The Case for Coca and Climate Justice 

Transcript Abstract

This presentation will explore the communities and landscapes caught in the crossfire of two interconnected crises; Drug Prohibition & the Climate Emergency.

(From the perspective of members of the International Coalition on Drug Policy Reform and Environmental Justice, presented by Clemmie James.)

The Prohibition of coca and cocaine is an economic and political system causing environmental devastation, human rights violations and posing a serious threat to delivering climate justice in the world’s most critical forest regions – and yet – reforming drug policies is absent from the climate agenda.

Profits from the coca/cocaine trade are laundered throughout the tropics, becoming the investment bank for agribusiness, cattle ranching, palm oil plantations and extractive economies such as logging and mining – some legal, most not, though all of which slash biodiversity, destroy forests and encroach on indigenous lands and protected areas, thus increasing our further vulnerability to the climate change.

But the bigger crisis so often overlooked – is that as long as organised crime groups corrupt state infrastructure it is unlikely regional or national governments will protect these precious landscapes or those vulnerable communities that inhabit them. In a context of scarce territorial rights combined with the punative police repression to the cocaine trade, ecosystems and communities across Latin America experience increased threats and violence, hindering the development of new green and climate resilient economies.

The presentation will join the dots on how drug prohibition and associated illegal economy creates a cascade of harm though multifaceted economic and ecological ecosystems in Latin America and beyond. Whether that is; the ecological degradation of the Darrien Gap due to the high population of migrants snaking through the jungle fleeing drug war violence yet paying drug organised crime groups to smuggle them through borders, or the efforts to deliver harm reduction services for the growing unhoused population of crack cocaine users in Skid Row, Los Angeles during compounding wildfires, or the increased armed violence and territorial conflicts across drug trafficking routes in legally protected regions undermining conservation efforts throughout Brazil or increased state fragility as coca cultivation rapidly expands into Honduras as it has the right agro ecological conditions for growing the same types of coca that currently thrive in Colombia.

The geographic concentration of the coca-cocaine production chain, and the added value of this global market, impacts land use and governance and is a concrete obstacle to climate justice in the region. While the prohibition of plant based drugs such as coca, poppy and cannabis are historically rooted in racism, the agribusiness side of these psychoactive crops and its associated socio environmental impacts are often overlooked in climate policies.

This presentation will conclude by exploring how the legal regulation of cocaine is gaining political backing and social movement advocacy, and how it can be relevant to advance territorial rights and reduce corruption to deliver solid climate strategies. How engagement in that vacuum from the Coca advocacy space is crucial, as is the commitment and knowledge transfer of a wide range of intersecting social justice areas. Our planet can not withstand the current unregulated cocaine industry but nor is there a world where Big Cocaine promises ecological justice.

Reforms need to be designed with multi stakeholder engagement and promote a multi species perspective. Creating a future that rigorously promotes and protects indigenous and traditional rights and practices, agroecology and land justice in an urgent attempt to deliver climate justice.