On a recent Friday morning, about 200 coca and marijuana farmers gathered in the small town of Cajibio, southwestern Colombia, to hear the government out.
Colombian’s government was still licking its wounds after an initiative to legalize recreational marijuana had sunk in Congress less than 10 days before.
At the meeting, officials from the Justice Ministry laid out plans for how to tackle the country’s burgeoning production of illicit crops: build better roads and bridge to connect the farmers with legal markets, so that licit crops can be sold at a larger profit and keep people off from growing drugs; a government push to legalize land titles to formalize the farmer’s rights to the land they work on, and a new initiative to legalise pot.
Gloria Miranda, the director of drug policy at the Justice Ministry, stressed the government wanted to make it right to the farmers, but Yulier Lopez, a 48-years-old single mother who represents a group of about 800 marijuana farmers and who harvests about 250 plants of cannabis, was not much interested in listening.
It is time to start acting, Lopez said.
More than 200,000 farmers of drug crops live in criminality in Colombia because their harvest is illegal, according to COCCAM, a workers’ union representing farmers involved in cocaine and marijuana production.
Source: cnn.com
