Slump in demand for coca pushes families to the brink

Noralba Galvis usually returns home to her village in the Colombian jungle with fresh supplies of rice, meat, salt and other foods stuffed into bags. But today, as the 40-year-old steps onboard a boat for the two-hour journey home along the Putumayo River, she carries just a single cardboard box.

- Luke Taylor

"My mother gave me these chicks," she said. "Chickens are great in times of emergency like these, when there is nothing else left to eat." 

Like most farmers in Putumayo, a southern department where the Andes meets the Amazon and Colombia borders Ecuador and Peru, Galvis depends on selling coca to make a living.

Despite years of efforts from successive Colombian governments to stamp out the green shrub used to make cocaine, it has thrived across the country's most remote corners since the 1990s.

If families in the region do not grow coca, there is a good chance they are employed in fields to strip coca leaves, or in rudimentary labs chemically transforming the plant into white powder. Many have abandoned growing food to focus on the shrub, depending on coca buyers for their income.

But no buyer has come to Galvis's village for three months, pushing her family-and nearly half a million other households - deeper into poverty.

"For most of us, coca is the only income we have," said Galvis, who is the community representative for her remote village of 50 families. "Now no one is buying and many of us mothers are having to go hungry."