Although cocaine is consumed in every part of the world, its base, the coca plant, is mainly cultivated in three Latin American countries: Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. The latter made headlines in the fall of 2023 due to a report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) claiming that the area used for coca crop in 2022 grew to 230,000 hectares, a 13 percent increase compared to 2021, according to Reuters reporting. As our chart shows, this further cements Colombia’s spot as the top coca producer in the world.
According to figures by UNODC and the Peruvian government, Colombia was responsible for almost two thirds of the total coca cultivation area in 2022. Peru came in second with 95,000 hectares, while Bolivia ranked third with 30,000 hectares. To combat the increase of land dedicated to coca plantations, Colombian President Gustavo Petro advocated for the recognition of drugs as a “health problem for society” instead of it being viewed as a “military problem” at the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Drugs this past September.
Following the conference, Petro presented a new national anti-drug plan in October 2023. Reuters summarized the underlying policies of the ten-year plan as aiming to “reduce the size of coca crops, cut potential cocaine output and prevent deforestation linked to drug trafficking, while helping transition small farmers to the legal economy.”
When looking at the cocaine market from the users’ perspective, the Americas, excluding the United States, also have the highest estimated share of people claiming to have consumed cocaine in 2021, with 6.6 million or 30 percent of total global users of the drug. The United States, whose government has continued putting pressure on the leaders of the countries mentioned above to step up their efforts to combat coca cultivation for decades, saw 4.8 million people using the drug in the corresponding year, according to data aggregated in the UNODC’s World Drug Report. Overall, the Americas made up around half of estimated cocaine users worldwide.
