UN: Colombia coca crop down 25 percent, making Peru top grower

BOGOTA, Colombia — Colombia reduced its area under coca cultivation by 25 percent last year, the United Nations said Thursday, meaning Peru has likely surpassed it as the world's No. 1 cocaine-producing country.

The annual reduction was Colombia's biggest since the international body began monitoring it in 2001.

The U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime is not slated to release 2012 Peru coca crop numbers until next month.

Earlier this week, it announced that Bolivia's crop, the world's third-largest, dropped for a second straight year.

The UNODC said the Colombian coca crop fell to 185 square miles (48,000 hectares) last year from 247 square miles (64,000 hectares) in 2011. It placed Peru's crop at 240 square miles (62,500 hectares) in 2011.

Peru says it destroyed 54 square miles (14,000 hectares) of coca last year, all manually. That compares to 505 square miles (131,000 hectares) eradicated in Colombia, most via U.S.-funded aerial spraying.

Neither UNODC officials in Peru's nor the country's drug czar, Carmen Masias, would comment on whether Peru has passed Colombia.

"There is more area (under cultivation), and more unrefined cocaine," he said. Much of it is being smuggled eastward via small plane to Bolivia for final processing, he said.

That cocaine almost exclusively serves the Brazilian, Argentine and European markets while Colombian cocaine is primarily shipped to the United States.

Colombian and U.N. authorities attributed the big drop in Colombia's coca crop last year to repeated eradication of land where coca growers have tried to replant and to a migration of a lot of coca growers to mining.

Coca bushes on such parcels are relatively immature and yield fewer leaves than more mature plants, explaining why Colombia's potential cocaine production only dropped 10 percent last year to 345 metric tons, by U.N count.

In neither Peru nor Bolivia does the U.N. make estimates of potential cocaine production.