Cocaine, as is widely understood, isn’t very good for people. It’s addictive, bad for your health, illegal and expensive. And it’s not great for human society either.
The impact of cocaine trafficking on the environment, however, is only occasionally considered. Now scientists from universities in the US have looked at how enforcement policies impact the way cocaine traffickers operate and the effect this has on those areas of Central America that provide habitat for forest-living birds.
What they found was that, following cocaine seizures and other anti-narcotics operations, there was a massive spike in the suitability of the five most important forest areas within Central America for trafficking activity.
Cocaine smuggling can lead to deforestation for a number of reasons, the paper published in Nature Sustainability reveals. There can be illegal construction of both roads and landing strips to move shipments, and it is accompanied by an expansion of cattle pastures to facilitate money laundering. Cocaine production and smuggling is also linked to illegal mining, which has also had hugely detrimental impacts on the environment.
This new research goes further than this to examine what these impacts mean for birds. “One in five migratory species that overwinter in Central America [from North America] have at least half of their global population in areas at heightened risk for narcotrafficking,” said paper’s lead author Dr Amanda Rodewald, senior director of the Center for Avian Population Studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
These include birds such as the golden-cheeked warbler, classed as a Federally Endangered species in the US and as Endangered by the IUCN Red List.
Though they acknowledge there are no easy solutions, the scientists say that conventional strategies that are based on making cocaine seizures are part of the problem, forcing traffickers to move their operations into new areas – and often those new areas are ones of high biodiversity value.
An alternative approach, they suggest, would be to work with indigenous communities in these landscapes and help them deter the traffickers from establishing themselves. Strategies could include “enhancing transparency and the rule of law, improving land tenure rights and reducing poverty”.
The production and movement of cocaine, which includes growing the coca plants in South America, processing and shipping, has a huge environmental impact, and it’s not going to be solved overnight. But, as Rodewald points out, the policies of the USA, which is by far the biggest importer, are exacerbating those impacts.
“With nearly one third of Americans participating in birdwatching or feeding, we hope to show that what may otherwise like a distant or irrelevant policy can affect the birds they love,” she says.
Main image: coca farming in the Americas. Credit: Getty
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