april 1996

EUROPEAN DRUGS CONTROL POLICY & THE ANDEAN REGION
Effectiveness and Trends
by Elizabeth Joyce.

Introduction

An explanation of how the European Union (EU) came to form a common policy on drugs towards Latin America, what it involves and the changes that have emerged in the past five years should shed some light on how drugs production in the Andean region is perceived in Europe. I will touch on the politics of supply reduction policies and the conceptual obstacles that impede a greater European focus on alternative rural development. I hope my examination of these obstacles will provide a useful introduction to Andy Atkins's proposals on how these problems may be resolved.

The Nature and Development of European Drugs Policy

Given the account of rural development from Leonel Narváez Gomez, EU drug policy towards the Andean countries is an interesting focus because the European Union set out with an explicit commitment to seek alternative strategies on drugs in its relations with Latin America and, initially at least, this was seen to include a particular concentration on alternative development. In the past three years or so, the focus of EU cooperation funding has shifted and it is important to understand some of the reasons why.

There are two aspects to EU drugs policy towards Latin America. First, it supplies cooperation funding for drugs-related development programmes and second, it grants special, temporary access to the European market under the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) scheme for goods from the Andean countries (Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and from Central America. The GSP access is granted specifically to help reduce those countries' reliance on the drugs trade by improving export opportunities for legitimate goods. These trade measures are currently under review.

By and large, the European Union itself is not involved in cooperation on drugs-related law enforcement matters since such actions remain outside its competence. Individual EU member states do offer police-related aid, mostly in the form of training and donations of equipment. There is also, of course, some operational police cooperation on drugs investigations. Individual European countries also provide funds for alternative rural development schemes aimed at providing alternative sources of income for coca growers, and for demand reduction programmes in the Andean countries.. All: these types of aid, whether for law enforcement and judicial matters, or for alternative development and demand reduction programmes are offered either directly or through the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP). European donor countries provide the bulk of UNDCP funding, Italy being notable in this regard. Britain funds UNDCP programmes under all these headings and, together with France, has a special interest in the Caribbean.

The Importance of Latin America in the Development of EU Policy

However, the first point to make about the common EU external policy on drugs is that it is of fairly recent origin, dating back only to the mid-1980s. The European Commission provided funds for initial drug-related programmes in Latin America from 1987 onwards. Between 1987 and 1991, almost half the resources from the Community's main budget line for drugs the North South Cooperation Programme in the fight against drugs were directed towards Latin America and most of these were committed to alternative development schemes. Commission officials had a vision of the European Community becoming a major donor of drugs-related aid with a focus on matters other than law enforcement.

The European Commission took its initial decisions to focus on Latin America at a time when cocaine abuse was perceived to be a potential threat to Europe rather than an actual one. Moreover, the Andean countries represented fresh ground in which to test out new strategies unhampered by the well-established actions of the European member states which had their own economic and security interests in other regions where drugs are produced, such as Asia. The European Union's focus on Latin America, however, is also a testimony to effective Andean diplomacy in Europe, notably on the part of Colombia.

Following the assassination in September 1989 of Colombian Senator Luis Carlos Galán allegedly by sicarios in the pay of the Medellin cartel, Colombian President Virgilio Barco visited Europe to seek cooperation in his fight against drugs'. His timing was propitious. Thanks in part to the highly-publicised US drugs war in the Andes, the international community was aware as never before of the drugs situation in countries such as Colombia. The campaign of violence in Colombia was also widely reported.

In addition, Europeans were becoming aware for the first time of the extremely high level of cocaine seizures in Europe. In 1987, European police forces seized 1.9 tonnes of heroin and 3.5 tonnes of cocaine. By 1992, according to Interpol, they were seizing approximately three times more cocaine (17 tonnes) than heroin (5.2 tonnes). This dramatic increase in cocaine seizures appeared to bear out Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA) warnings that the US market for cocaine was saturated and that Latin American traffickers were targeting Europe. Barco's audience in Europe was consequently responsive to his plea for greater cooperation. As a result, the UK cooperated with the UN and Colombia on the first ministerial world summit on the reduction of demand for drugs, with a particular emphasis on cocaine, which was held in London in April 1990. The UK also pledged £11 million in drugs-related aid to Colombia.

Barco, however, also visited Brussels. As a result, the European Parliament passed an ambitious resolution calling on the Commission to provide sufficient aid and financial resources to enable [Colombia] to make good the damage which might be caused to the nation' by the drugs trade. In this sense, Barco provided a firm political motivation for Community action.

As a direct result of Barco's visit, the European Community allocated 60 million ECU (US$72 million) in aid specifically to Colombia. More importantly perhaps, the Community decided to grant Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador preferential access to the European market for four years from 1990 under the GSP, a measure subsequently extended to other Latin American countries.

EU Support for Alternative Development in Latin America

There is a tendency to regard European drugs-related cooperation with Latin America as negligible compared to that of the United States. Certainly, in comparison with total US drugs aid, including law enforcement cooperation and military aid, this is the case. In 1995, the United States allocated $428 million to international drugs control programmes, the bulk of which is devoted to the suppression of drugs supplies from Latin America. However, when alternative development is considered alone, the picture has been somewhat different. First, European governments supply the bulk of funding for UNDCP activities in Latin America. Second, in 1991 at least, EU commitments alone (not including the bilateral commitments of member states) to alternative development programmes in, for example, Bolivia far outstripped those of the United States.

The European Community approach to Latin America is peculiar, not simply because more funds were committed to the region, but because the European Community did not focus on alternative development in committing aid to, for example, countries in Asia. There, funds tended to be directed towards demand reduction programmes. So why did the European Community focus on alternative development in Latin America, in particular?

There are several reasons, all of which point to this form of cooperation with the Andean countries as being experimental. The European Community was taking its first tentative steps in developing a foreign policy on drugs and it was anxious to avoid mistakes.

First, Commission officials decided that national drugs control programmes were better established in Latin America relative to those in other parts of the world. The European Union has always found official political dialogue a fruitful enterprise in Latin America. We are right to accentuate the North-South differences in this discussion but it should not be forgotten that, in many ways, Latin America is one of the most accessible regions of the South to Europeans. The shared heritage of political institutions, language, culture and religion should not be ignored. EU member states had few serious strategic and economic interests in Latin America so the Commission could go ahead without risking too much political capital.

Second, the UNDCP was particularly active in Latin America (in the early 1990s, some 63 per cent of its operational budget was allocated to programmes in Latin America), and the European Community believed it could both channel some of its resources to the UN and learn from the UNDCP's experience in the region. Third, the European Community had a particular wish to support the work of NGOs active in the drugs field, and Commission officials judged Latin American NGOs to be reassuringly effective in comparison with those in other regions. The European Community had a particular vision with regard to NGO cooperation. Given the limited scale of resources available to the Commission, officials felt that one of the most useful ways of maximising the effects of its aid would be to encourage contacts and cooperation between Latin American and European NGOs. Thus, in this 1987-91 period, the Commission favoured programmes set up and implemented by European NGOs already active in Latin America which were working or could work with a Latin American counterpart. The Commission could play a role in helping to set up relations between NGOs in the two regions which might later become sustainable if EC funding were diverted to other programmes. Moreover, the NGOs would supply the expertise that the Commission knew it lacked in implementation. The Commission also favoured co-financing, with the European Commission providing up to 50 per cent of funds for a programme, reaching 75 per cent only in exceptional circumstances. The initiative for such programmes came from the NGOs themselves in seeking funding from the Commission.

Changes to the European Union's Approach to Latin America

Three important changes have emerged in EU drugs cooperation with Latin America since 1991. First, Latin America is not the priority it was five years ago. Inevitably, there has been increasing concern about trafficking from Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the European Council has recommended that the Maghreb and the Middle East be regarded as priority areas for drugs cooperation. Again, this concern is inevitable given these regions' proximity to Europe. Latin America no longer receives the bulk of funds from the North-South Cooperation Programme on drugs, its share having dropped to about 30 per cent of total disbursements.

Second, there has been a discernible shift away from the funding of NGO programmes and towards cooperation with national governments. The European Commission is now directing funding towards work with official Latin American counterparts on drawing up national strategies on drugs. This approach would appear to complement the UNDCP tendency in recent years to concentrate its efforts on drawing up Master Plans on drugs policy with national governments. Much EU funding for NGO programmes is being discontinued. This partly reflects the fact that Commission officials now acknowledge that, contrary to what they had once hoped, drugs-related funding for international programmes is not going to increase substantially in the foreseeable future. The latest European Action Plan on drugs recommends that funds allocated under the North-South Cooperation Programme remain static at around 10 million ECU until 2000.

Third, there has been a shift away from the funding of alternative development programmes and towards those involved with demand reduction and prevention, particularly with young people in urban areas. The shift to a focus on demand reduction programmes is in line with the European Union's general policies on international action. The Commission always saw the NorthSouth Cooperation Programme as primarily a means to promote social policies, but in 1987-91 this was seen to include alternative development strategies as well as demand reduction.

The shift appears to have been made in response to budgetary and administrative constraints as well as to general and increasing scepticism in Europe about the effectiveness of alternative development in reducing the supply of drugs. From the late 1980s onwards, Commission officials were suggesting the shift towards an emphasis on demand reduction should be made, arguing from a practical administrative point of view, rather from any conceptual disagreement with the principles underlying alternative development strategies or from a perceived need for more demand reduction programmes in Latin America.

They argued that, given the small budget available, funds could be more efficiently spent on small demand reduction programmes. Such programmes could be clearly defined and more easily controlled. On the other hand, alternative development implied larger programmes, with a proportionally small input from the European Commission and a high degree of operational dependence on external institutions, which meant that the Commission had less control over the programme's operation and its overall outcome. This is possibly good news for those concerned with demand reduction programmes in the Andes but, nevertheless, represents a rather serious retrenchment in EU commitment to alternative development.

Reassessing the European Union's Strategies

Scepticism in Europe about alternative development has meant that the Commission has been obliged to rethink its strategies. Despite the fears of British Eurosceptics, the European Commission does not act completely autonomously and particularly not with regard to EU external policies. In many ways; EU drugs policy as a whole can be seen as an object lesson in the high level of dependence that the Commission has on the approval of the member states for its political policies, whether expressed directly or through the European Parliament.

Consider the European Parliament as an example. There is an almost complete lack of consensus in the European Parliament on drugs policy, whether domestic or international. This demonstrates one of the particular strengths of Europe in relation to drugs policy, that is, its heterogeneity and its consequent relative openness to new strategies, certainly in comparison with the United States.

In terms of policy towards the Andean region, this heterogeneity can also be a weakness. Where there is no consensus on even the conceptual approaches to illicit drugs, there can be little chance that the European Union wil form a coherent common EU policy. Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) tend, quite logically, to emphasise a focus on domestic demand reduction even if this is at the expense of development strategies employed in other parts of the world.

This brings us to the conceptual problems of alternative development as perceived by European policy makers, that is the division of drugs policies into supply reduction and demand reduction, concepts invented in the United States to describe accurately US policies and adopted worldwide. Alternative development is a supply reduction policy. Its purpose is to effect a reduction in the supply of drugs. The concept of supply reduction is a US invention, US drugs control being predicated on dual objectives: the elimination of drugs before they reach US borders and the elimination of the traffickers who make drugs available to the United States. Both objectives aim at reducing the amount of drugs entering the United States and at increasing their cost to the consumer.

Alternative development is for the United States part of an integrated attempt to diminish supply and is inextricably linked with law enforcement. It is, as characterised by James Painter, the carrot in a carrot and stick scenario.

United States policy makers have no problems with this approach. A US Agency for International Development (USAID) official responsible for development programmes' in the Andean region has described it thus: Our efforts to provide alternative crops and income cannot succeed unless there is sustained and effective enforcement and interdiction, activities which drive the price of coca down towards its production cost.'

In the United States, coca farmers are often regarded as identical in terms of criminal and moral culpability to drug traffickers. Consider Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington DC. You may remember his conviction for crack-cocaine possession a few years back and his subsequent re-election as mayor. In a 1988 Congressional hearing on drugs, he described Andean coca farmers as international drug thugs' against whom the US government had not moved quickly and strongly enough. His argument was that US consumers should not be criminalised but that someone should be and that someone has to be the growers and producers.

Few approaches are as crude or, in its assumption that the average Andean coca grower takes an international approach to his job, as wildly inaccurate as this. Nevertheless, a slightly more sophisticated corollary of this argument is conducted along national lines to the same effect. Here is Charles Rangel, chairman of the House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, speaking at the same hearing: We don't grow opium in this country, we don't grow coca leaves in this country, and we have yet to hear publicly the Secretary of State express his utter contempt for countries and allies and friends that do grow these drugs and poison that come into the United States.'

Such extremes of opinion are rare, although not unknown, in Europe with regard to drugs production in the Andean region. Nevertheless, the basic policy impulse remains the same. For policymakers, alternative development is not the same as development. Its purpose is to effect a reduction in the drugs supply. If this cannot be demonstrated, policymakers will argue that they cannot justify extra development funds favouring coca producers over other Andean rural sectors. If alternative development is de-linked from the need to reduce supply and.from the carrot and stick scenario involving law enforcement, policymakers would argue that other rural sectors in the Andean region are equally and perhaps more deserving of development aid.

In Europe, there is a vague awareness that alternative development is ineffective both in its specific aim to reduce rural farmers' economic dependence on the drugs trade and in its larger aim to reduce the supply of illicit drugs to Europe. This is a crucial factor in the European Union's shift towards funding for demand reduction programmes in Latin America which, being designed to help a developing country, can be assessed according to more traditional development criteria. Such programmes are, of course, useful but they alone will not create an increase in European drugs-related aid to the Andean countries. They will always remain a small-scale affair.

This basic question about the purpose of alternative development simply has to be addressed because, given the current conceptual framework, its effectiveness as a supply reduction policy will always be uppermost in European policymakers' minds. Those of us concerned with development simply cannot afford to ignore this fact.

Obviously, none of the Andean countries are economically able to sustain massive alternative development programmes alone. Nor, given that this illicit production is sustained by foreign consumers, should they be expected to. If we want fewer drugs to reach Europe, we have to pay, and alternative development is not an easy, quick-fix solution.

However, if the aim is to increase the quantity of money available for alternative development and the quality of the programmes undertaken, we cannot ignore the fact that European policy makers are going to ask questions about results. Alternative development aid is not development aid. It has a different purpose and that purpose may require that proportionally higher amounts of money are spent on it. If, however, we fail to explain clearly its aims and consequences, then aid budgets for alternative development will remain static, or as in the case of the EU budgets, they will diminish.

Conclusion

European action on drugs in the Andes is a relatively new phenomenon. Little is known generally in Europe about the causes and consequences of rural drugs production, or about the effects of policies undertaken to reduce it. However, an important approach to drugs alternative development must not be ignored because of uninformed scepticism and hazy perceptions. That is why CIIR, in seeking to inform European policymakers and a wider public about such matters, is playing a rare and vital role in the European-Latin American drugs debate.

Elizabeth Joyce is currently researching international cooperation on drugs policy at Oxford University. She is the author of several articles and studies, including a recent report on European-Latin American drugs cooperation for the Institute for European-Latin American Relations.