From Scientific American:
The humble coca shrub has survived decades of efforts to eradicate it and global warming will not pose a greater challenge than that
Few cry for the cocaleros.
Cocaine is the bane of law enforcement across the Americas. But both the drug and the coca farmers – known in Spanish as cocaleros – who cultivate the drug's source face the same threats as any other crop or product in our warming climate. Except that cocaine appears ready for the challenges.
The coca bush is the raw material for a lucrative and often-violent drug trade and the target of decades of international eradication efforts. It has funded civil wars and contributed to climate change, as cocaleros cut down forests in the Andean nations of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia to plant more of the shrubs.
But while scientists have raised alarms about the potential threats climate change may pose to other tropical commodities like chocolate and coffee, little effort has been spent exploring what an era of rising temperatures could mean for coca. Most research in the past few decades has been aimed at finding new ways to kill it.
"There's the beginnings of a more open debate about drug policy in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America, but the question of coca cultivation remains very prickly," said John Walsh, a drug policy analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S.-based think tank. "Obviously, because it's the raw material for cocaine, and cocaine remains if not pubic enemy No. 1, then pretty high on the list in most people's point of view."...MORE
