On Friday March 13, Jonathan Jacobson ’80 came to Log Lunch to speak about the environmental impact of the drug trade on the Amazon rain forest. Jacobson is currently chief of the information exchange partnership branch in the office of information collection at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Before this position, he worked at the EPA’s lead paint program and as a hazardous waste and superfund site government contractor for the agency. Yet, as Professor Bradburd noted in Jacobson’s introduction, “the coolest job he’ll ever have” was as the environmental advisor to the counter-narcotics program in Lima, Peru from 2000-2002. It was this experience that largely informed the subject of this alumnus’s Log Lunch talk.
An important but underappreciated and under-understood aspect of environmental issues, narcotic cultivation and production has massive impacts on land and health. Working in Peru, Jacobsen mainly dealt with the indigenous coca crop and its drug product, cocaine. Coca is native to the Andes and was traditionally used by the native residents to stave off hunger, yet international demand for the product rose substantially in the 1970s.
Yet production of this crop creates massive negative environmental and health consequences. First, cultivation causes large-scale deforestation. In Peru and Colombia, crop growth destroyed 2.3 million and 1.3 million hectares of rainforest, representing 25 percent and 30 percent of the nations’ deforestation, respectively. Second, the impact of deforestation is extremely damaging, not only because of soil erosion and loss of trees, but also because the places being destroyed are some of the most biodiverse in the world. Lastly, coca production involves the great use of pesticides and fertilizers, which are highly toxic and subject to misuse. These chemicals are used more in Colombia than in Peru, possibly because the plant is indigenous and thus better naturally suited to the Peruvian environment.
All of these factors combine to greatly impact not only the environment but also human health. The peasants who grow the crop are exposed to the chemicals and then must confront the water pollution from pesticides and loss of ecosystem services from the deforested land. Additionally, after cultivation, cocaine production takes place in clandestine rainforest labs where workers confront industrial chemicals and chemical waste.
To solve the environmental and health impacts associated with cocaine growth and production, Jacobson recommends increased data collection, trend monitoring, education, outreach, and support of alternative industry development, such as agriculture, tropical hardwoods, ecotourism, and rehabilitation of damaged areas.
In a positive shift, there has been a substantial reduction in the cocaine-cultivated area since 2001. If such a hopeful trend continues, the environmental and health consequences of cocaine, not to mention its harmful post-production effects, could be ameliorated to the benefit of the indigenous South American communities.
By Sara Clark ‘15
Megamenu Social