9. Social Control in Bolivia: A Humane Alternative to the Forced Eradication of Coca Crops

This chapter provides an overview of coca control policy in Bolivia. Two decades of forced coca eradication was a demonstrable failure, generating poverty and gross human right violations, without meeting its objective—reducing Bolivia’s coca crop. In 2004, the Bolivian government granted each registered coca growing family in the Chapare (one of Bolivia’s two main coca growing regions) the right to grow a cato (1600 m²) of coca. Policymakers and coca growers jointly agreed upon the size of the coca plot in an effort to provide each family with the equivalent of a monthly minimum wage as income from coca, and to reduce violence. The Morales administration has continued this policy, and over the past eight years the coca producer’s unions, government officials and members of the international community have built a complex sustainable coca monitoring, licensing, and reduction system. Drawing on 30 months of ethnographic research, the chapter outlines Bolivia’s new approach to coca control. It weights the program’s effectiveness as well as the significant challenges to implementation. It is argued that by focusing on the social welfare, human rights and economic stability of coca farming families, Bolivia’s collaborative approach might be more effective at reducing coca acreage in the long term than the previous strategy of forced eradication.