SILK FOR COCAINE

Between the 80-kilometer-long Western Cordillera and the Central Cordillera
ranges of the South American Andes lies the Cauca Valley, perhaps one of the
world's lushest. The soil here is so rich, it can yield up to five crops a
year. Between green mountains and equatorial forests, graceful coffee trees
line pastures and hills. One road, the winding and scenic Pan-American Highway,
cuts through the valley and connects the major cities of Cali and Popayan; it's
on the State Department's list of not-safe-to-travel routes. Guerrillas patrol
the hills and protect the farmers who grow the coca leaf.

In the hills, small farmlands are covered with coca plants. Four times a year,
the campesinos harvest the illicit crop and sell the leaves to a middleman who
delivers the product to processors in the Amazon Triangle. There is no
infrastructure in this part of Colombia-no passable roads to bring produce to
market-no electricity to support industry. There are no services-no schools
beyond the third grade, no hospitals, not even a doctor. The farmers are
impoverished and far removed from commerce. They don't choose to grow coca.
They have to.

In parts of the South American Andes, the coca plant predates the Inca Empire.
"It's part of the culture of our ancestors," says Cauca farmer Don Victor
Narvaez. "The practice of chewing was passed down from generation to
generation." Like all peasants in the region, Narvaez has a third-grade
education, but he is the leader of Santa Cruz, a community of 150 families, just
as his father was. "Our farms were not great coca plantations," he says. "We
grew coca on small plots for family consumption, chewing the leaf so we could
work and cure stomach illness."

Around 1950, roasted coca started turning up for sale in the markets, and by
1984, there was an active black market for leaves sold directly to drug
processors. "We gave up chewing our coca and started selling it," Narvaez says.
The coca black market made the peasant farmer rich-until about 1986. The coca
bonanza, however, was a distortion of the culture of the peasant: He knew
unbelievable wealth-$500 a month for coca compared to the average $60-and a
constant market for his crop for a few years. With no electricity in the area,
farmers bought appliances to put on display, refrigerators in which they stored
their money. Peasants built elaborate homes; construction work and domestic
help created new forms of employment. In those days of plenty, farmers purchased
rather than raised food. Champagne, ordered from Bogota, was regularly shipped
into the backlands.

The benefits, however, were short-lived. First, coca prices dropped-despite a
consistently high drug market-leaving the Andean farmer more impoverished than
he had been before. "The price of the leaf no longer pays for the expense of
growing coca," Narvaez says. Then the Colombian government began to eradicate
the coca plant, sending the army into the valley to burn fields and arrest and
imprison the heads of families. Farmers had neglected their other crops, fruits
and vegetables, as well as the legal cash crop, coffee. Without coca, the
peasants literally starved. Some peasants left the region, migrating to Bogota
to look for work. (In Colombia alone, it is estimated that 300 families abandon
their farms daily and move to the cities.) Other Cauca farmers joined the
guerrillas after experiencing the ruthless destruction by the Colombian
government of the community's source of income. Today, the FARC (Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) guerrillas control the entire area. "The
next trial for our families was the coca habit," says Narvaez. "Most of our
kids were addicted. The region was on the verge of madness-there was crime, a
breakdown of the system, and no one wanted to do anything but grow coca."

In a small section of this drug-war-torn region, however, some of the campesinos
are forgoing their coca plants for mulberry trees. Mulberry leaves feed
silkworms, which spin cocoons-a high-priced international commodity. Today, 40
families harvest silkworms in coca country. Growing silk not only cuts off drug
production, it frees the peasant from dependence on the drug market for his
livelihood, allows him to keep his land, and halts the migration to Bogota's
slums. By establishing a crop that will effectively deter farmers from planting
coca, the silk farmers hope to rejuvenate the twin communities of Santa Cruz and
Pan de Azucar. In fact, they envision the hills of the Cauca Valley covered
with mulberry. The project, called Silk for Life, is the brainchild of farmer's
advocate Patricia Conway. "Farmers earn three times what they get for coca
leaves when they produce silk," she says. A silk farmer can make $300 a month
while a coca farmer now makes less than $100 a month. "The idea of raising
cocoons and not cocaine is logical, economical, and just makes sense," she says.
"Instead, the United States sends in arms to suppress and terrorize farmers who
raise cocaine."

In 1991, the United States sent Colombia $125.6 million in assistance for
narcotics interdiction as well as Green Beret training and military personnel.
The 1992 budget allocates $134.1 million for the drug war in Colombia alone.
Newsweek recently reported a quietly escalating but very real Pentagon drug
war-Bush's Andean Initiative-complete with covert operations and involving
thousands of American troops and more than a billion dollars a year.

Silk for Life farmers are determined to play a role in the drug crisis which is
tearing apart their communities and families. By creating a model silk farm,
they hope to prove alternatives to coca exist and that the silk for cocaine swap
is economically viable. "Silk is the most profitable of all the crops we've
grown," Narvaez says. "It doesn't need expensive fertilizer or elaborate
installations like coffee does. The wonderful thing is that each family member
gets involved-silk becomes a family business." Because the campesinos no longer
engage in an illicit crop, Narvaez says, "they're not afraid; they don't have to
hide from the police."

Four-thousand-year-old silk farming may be about the most ecologically
gentle-"small, green, easy, and clean," Conway says. Mulberry trees are so
organic, they actually reclaim damaged land. Because chemicals are poisonous to
silkworms, the mulberry can't be chemically fed. In fact, silk farmers must
convince neighbors upwind not to spray. In this hemisphere, even without its
significance as a substitute crop, silk is just good business, Conway adds. "We
should see the farmers as excellent business partners rather than our enemies,
the way Washington portrays them. We should offer them financial assistance and
impetus." Instead, officials in Bogota and in Washington mistrust the peasant
and ridicule the idea of growing silk instead of coca. Efforts by farmers to
help themselves are dismissed as futile by authorities-ours as well as theirs.

"I have seen Bush's war on drugs bring this country to the brink of civil war,"
Conway says. "The rural areas of Cauca have been deliberately abandoned by
Colombia and are now controlled by the guerrillas." In October of 1990, four
thousand campesinos staged a four-day "sit in" on the Pan-American Highway to
protest the level of poverty and the lack of human services. When the army
tanks rolled in, farmers lined their own children across the road.
"American-supplied tanks stopped just in front of the kids," Conway says. "It
was an amazing statement only to ask for doctors and teachers." The standoff
ended when the Colombian government promised to provide a health-care program
for the peasants-a promise Colombia never kept.

Wisconsin-born Conway has been a farmer's activist and educator for two decades.
She first went to Colombia in 1982 and volunteered as a nurse and health-care
organizer in the Bogota slums. There she met Myriam Ramirez who lived with three
small children in a cardboard "house." The thing had just blown over. Conway's
first assignment: to walk the streets of Bogota at night collecting discarded
cardboard to rebuild Ramirez's home. "It took us six weeks to find the cardboard
and rebuild her place," Conway says. Then they added a 5 x 8 structure so
Conway could live in the community of farmers.

"Myriam was very eloquent about the plight of the farmer in Colombia," Conway
says. "She painted a picture of her native Cauca, farm life and the coca
bonanza." When Conway visited Ramirez's family in the twin communities of Santa
Cruz and Pan de Azucar, she fell in love with the region. A piece of land with
coca plants was for sale-$100. "I bought it to see what else would grow, though
it was worth owning just to set up a lounge chair and look out at the
mountains." At that point, Ramirez and Conway decided to form a small
economic-development community. Determined to find a crop-any crop besides
coca-that would grow in the valley, the Silk for Life project was born.

It was Bogota entomologist Rodrigo Torrez who told Conway about the developing
silk industry in Colombia. In 1970, Colombia's Coffee Growers Federation began
to experiment with growing mulberry trees as way to diversify and employ coffee
farmers in the months when coffee beans aren't harvested. Along with Colombia's
National Rehabilitation Plan, the Federation set up a program of technical
assistance for sericulture and worked with Coseda, a Colombian-Korean silk
venture, to grow silkworms and market cocoons. By 1987, the Coffee Federation
had 124 hectares in silk production (1 hectare = 2.4 acres).

Conway and a delegation of farmers from Santa Cruz and Pan de Azucar traveled
five hours by jeep to Timbio, the center of the Coffee Federation's silk
production. To the surprise of the farmers, Coffee Federation officials refused
to assist them, ostensibly because they were out of geographic range. But a
small group of Timbio silk farmers decided to help the Santa Cruz farmers try to
produce silk in the middle of coca country. They chose Narvaez's farm as the
experimental site. "Growing mulberries and harvesting silk usually takes eight
months," Conway says. "Without assistance from the Coffee Federation, it took
us three years. We experimented. We taught ourselves." Because of the lack of
transportation, Silk for Life brought in mulberry sticks in bundles of a hundred
at a time until 15,000 plants had been accumulated. Using sticks instead of
rooted plants meant it took 13 months to establish a field. Silk for Life also
had to generate the funds to help Narvaez buy an extra hectare of land in Santa
Cruz and convert an adobe house into a worm house. When the mulberries were
ready for harvest. farmer Dona Elvira bought silkworms and transported them by
jeep to Santa Cruz on a hot, six-hour trip. Cocoons were first harvested in
Santa Cruz in 1990 and sold to Coseda.

The silk-farming cultures of Asia believe that the quality of silk is contingent
upon the quality of life of each silkworm. And each silkworm requires constant
care and attention. A new silkworm cycle begins every five weeks when the
larvae are ready to feed on mulberry leaves. After gorging for three weeks, the
silkworm anchors itself on a cocooning frame and magically casts out the
mile-long filament it spins symmetrically around itself. Enclosed now in a
cocoon, the silkworm magically transforms into a moth, which emerges, mates,
lays eggs, and dies. But most farmed cocoons are not allowed to emerge. Baked
to kill the pupae, they're then sold to Korean-owned companies in Colombia where
the cocoons are unraveled into thread.

Only 80 percent of cocoons farmed are actually used for reeling into thread.
The rest are usually destroyed. In 1986, a Chinese delegation living in Timbio
told silk farmer Elvira Gomez that these cocoons could be bought back and hand
spun into silk yarn. The women began to teach each other how to degum
cocoons-sericin, the gluey protein substance produced with the thread, must be
removed in boiling water-and spin silk. "Boxes and boxes of beautiful hand-spun
silk were piling up in the back rooms of the coop," Conway says. "I decided to
sell silk in the United States." Conway met Kerry Evans, a professional weaver
in Milwaukee who was teaching Hmong women to weave as part of a development
program affiliated with the Milwaukee Area Technical College. The Hmong are a
farming people who fled from Laos and Vietnam; one of the biggest communities is
in Milwaukee. Evans and Conway joined forces.

Today, the Silk for Life Workshop in Milwaukee imports 150 pounds of Cauca yarn
a month, which Hmong women weave into white opera scarves, placemats, and
handbags. The Milwaukee workshop sells its products in their shop and through
their own and other catalogs. "Our goal has been to help women who are
unemployable in our culture," Evans says. "In addition to the Hmong, other
disadvantaged women-single women and ex-offenders-come to the workshop and learn
to weave." For these inner-city women, working the looms is more than just a
job. Weaving Andean yarn in Milwaukee connects them to Colombian peasant women
who are trying to eradicate the coca plant, a problem that directly affects the
communities in Milwaukee.

But Silk for Life is also a business venture. Last year it created silk-blend
fibers-rejected spun silk mixed with Wisconsin wool. In Cauca, 150 women are
hand-spinning silk thread in 14 different coops. And the Narvaez family-Don
Victor and his sons-have taken over silkworm-cultivation efforts in Santa Cruz.
With technical assistance and capital from Silk for Life, the farmers have
organized themselves into ASSOCA (Association of Sericulturists of South of
Cauca). The people in the region form grupos de amistad-groups of friends who
plant or harvest one family farm before they move on to a neighbor's farm. A
captain oversees silk production and works out a training and credit program.
Conway says that start-up production can cost less than $1,000-for mulberry
cuttings, organic fertilizer, a simple bamboo worm house with a tar paper roof,
and outside labor for preparing the field.

Crop substitution has been tried before as part of efforts to stem drug
production-without much success. The U.S. Agency for International Development
(AID) and the United Nations have had programs in Bolivia and Colombia,
respectively. A Bolivian buyout program, for example, paid farmers $2,000 a
hectare to stop raising coca and plant Brazil nuts. The only problem: Brazil
nuts take eight years to harvest-hardly an incentive to get farmers to stop
planting coca. In Bolivia, farmers took the money, planted the nuts, and just
replanted coca elsewhere.

Silk, Conway insists, meets the standards for a successful substitution
program-a crop that has international export potential, that is more lucrative
than coca, that is easy to get to market, and that is low-tech, well
established, and pays cash on the barrelhead like coca does. A report prepared
in 1990 for the Venezuelan planning commission by world-renowned sericulturist
C. B. Jagannatha Rao, concluded that the Andean countries of Bolivia, Peru,
Ecuador, and particularly Colombia are well-suited to the farming of cocoons and
production of raw silk. According to Rao, cocoon production is so profitable for
the family farmer, sericulture could easily become a useful and successful
substitute for coca.

For centuries, sericulture has been the domain of ancient sites centered in
China, Japan, Korea, and India, but it could be a tremendous boon to Andean
countries, where there is an abundance of labor and a long tradition of textile
manufacturing, particularly cotton in Colombia. The region also has ideal
conditions for maximum cocoon production. In Japan, where many of the steps
have been modernized, the silk farmer can expect two or three rearing periods a
year. (The average yearly crop is 560 kilograms of cocoons per hectare with two
rearing periods a year.) The Andean farmer, by comparison, can get ten crops a
year. According to reports published by the Export Promotion Fund, Colombia's
production has reached an average of 1,800 kilograms of cocoons per hectare per
year.

But a silk farmer in the Andes is not completely free to farm, price, and sell
his cocoons. He is dependent on an intermediary who imports the silkworm eggs,
incubates them, and then sells young worms to the farmer. The farmer is then
obligated to sell back all his cocoons to the same intermediary who dries and
exports them or holds them for use in the Colombian factory. Last spring, in
defiance of the system, the Santa Cruz farmers bought silkworm eggs directly
from a Korean producer, incubated them in Timbio, transported them by jeep to
Santa Cruz where they raised them, and then sold the cocoons to Proseda. Santa
Cruz's cocoon harvest was probably one of the best-quality harvests Colombia has
produced, says Narvaez.

In Timbio, ironically, the silk honeymoon seems to be over. The Coffee
Federation is spreading the word"There's no money in silk," they're saying. "Go
back to coffee." Farmers are tearing up their mulberry trees. Conway isn't
surprised. "I believe the only way silk farming can be successful is on the
small family farm with one or two hectares maximum." Wealthier Colombian farmers
lost money and became disillusioned with silk-"all because silk farming cannot
be industrialized, which is why it's a Third World crop."

Conway believes the day of the large agribusiness farms, with huge irrigation
systems and chemical pesticides and herbicides are over. The planet must rely on
small, decentralized organic producers, largely from the Third World, to produce
our food and fiber. "Unfortunately," Conway says, "the most endangered species
on the face of the earth is the Third World farmer-he's a vanishing breed."

Clearly, sericulture could bring a better livelihood to remote, impoverished
regions. "The future of the project will be the ability to incubate silkworms
at the farms," Narvaez says. In Santa Cruz, the farmers have even built their
own reservoir, hoping to find a way to bring electricity to the region's 300
families. Electricity means self-sufficiency and, the farmers hope,
silk-reeling capability in the future. For Narvaez, the success of the silk
project will mean that teachers and health-care practitioners will come to
Cauca.

Silk for Life initially piqued the interest of Wisconsin House Representative
Jerry Kleczka as well as Vice President Quayle. A 1990 Congressional budget
bill recommended that $200,000 of AID funds go to the project. In July 1991,
AID dispensed its first sum to the Colombian government. The ASSOCA received no
funds. Conway claims that American officials in Bogota think crop-substitution
efforts are ineffective. An AID official who wishes to remain anonymous seems to
agree." Colombia is different from Bolivia or Peru where crop substitution is
more pertinent," he says. "The focus of this embassy is to reduce drug trade,
the processing and distribution activities. Colombia has made significant
efforts in this area, particularly with raids against producers and
distributors." And poor farmers. "Until recently, our enemy was the Soviet
Union," Conway says. "Now we're labeling the South American farmers as the Evil
Empire. Our silk project couldn't be farther removed from a military one. It's
life-sustaining; it takes farmers out of the crossfire."

In a very recent development, Scalamandre Silk Company based in Long Island City
is interested in purchasing 1 million pounds of reeled silk from ASSOCA. At $25
per pound, the silk farmers could generate up to 25 million dollars in sales.
"That's like a $25 billion contract for a community in the States," Conway says.
"To the Cauca farmers, it's absolutely earth shaking." And, Conway says, it
means Silk for Life has found the solution to illegal crop cultivation. "We are
doing it," she says, "we're living it-no matter what AID officials say."

Conway believes that the link between industrial consumers and small family
farmers will revolutionize the way the world does business in the next decade.
"Scalamandre is a pioneer in this new world order," she says, "where farmers and
factory owners understand how the web of life works and each delicate strand
respects the other and protects the entire web."

The word about silk is spreading-at the grassroots level anyway. Conway has
received requests for assistance from developmental programs in Swaziland,
Africa, as well as from organizations throughout South America. "Everyone in
the region is waiting to see what will happen," Narvaez says. "We've been asked
to send seeds and trainers to other parts of Cauca. I am certain that in a few
years all of the Cauca Valley will be covered with mulberry trees and bamboo
worm houses."



A DREAM DEFERRED

*
Narvaez's dream for his valley may just shrivel up and die. Several months ago,
the Colombian National Police (CNP) discovered that Andean farmers are growing
poppies on larger plots than the police had ever anticipated. Clearly, the
cocaine traffikers are expanding their marketing opportunities, and poor farmers
are once again trying to cash in on yet another black-market drug, this one
demanded by the world heroin market. Colombia took immediate action. With crop
dusters on loan from the State Department as part of the Andean Initiative, the
CNP are spraying glyposate, the world's biggest-selling herbicide, over three
areas of Colombia, including the Cauca Valley. "Between manual and aerial
eradication, the police have sprayed about 4,000 hectares," says a U.S.
official.

*
Conway is furious and wants Congress to investigate. "Who authorized the
program?" she asks. "Why was Silk for Life not warned? How do businesses whose
organic crops are placed in jeopardy seek an injunction against any further
spraying?" In response, an aide says that the decision to spray is the
prerogative of the Colombian government. Conway believes the "big bad wolf in
all this is the U.S." Conway, accuses another official, "has a political
agenda." That accusation comes from, of all places, Washington, DC. (Sources
talked to Omni on the condition that they and the agencies they work for remain
anonymous.)

*
In Conway's defense, it should be noted that eradication programs are on the
rise in other Latin countries, and diverse groups including farmers, coffee
growers. universities, and environmental commissions are sounding an alarm,
concerned about the toxicity of the chemicals. President Fujimori of Peru
recently warned the U.S. that it could be entering another Vietnam if it goes to
war against 250,000 Peruvian coca farmers. Colombian farmers, Conway says, are
already in a rage over what they feel is a violation of their private property.

*
According to Conway, no organization conducted an environmental impact study to
determine how glyposate will affect the delicate balance of nature in the
biodiverse Cauca region-much less has anyone bothered to ask what will happen to
children who eat the fruits and vegetables off the sprayed plant? And the
farmers wonder how pilots distinguish between the plots of poppy and plots of
mulberry and corn; they're asking what will happen to the silkworm that eats the
sprayed mulberry leaf.

*
The question, says a representative from Monsanto which produces glyposate, is
moot. "The silkworm will starve; it won't eat sprayed mulberry leaves." The
question, says another official, is irrelevant. "Conway's silk project is
insignificant compared with the efforts to eradicate poppies." This official
accuses farmers of creating an environmental disaster, "slashing and burning to
clear areas for poppy plants." With one stroke, says this source, the
eradication program halts the flood of cheap opium into the United States and
saves virgin woodlands-an environmental coup.

*
Glyposate controls 90 different weeds, which are listed on a 100-page label with
specific directions and warnings. Poppies are not one of the target plants.
"Our company does not recommend our products for this use (widespread spraying
of poppies) in Colombia," says the representative. As to its safety, two
sources claim the stuff is "less toxic than table salt and aspirin." The EPA's
scientific advisory panel, however, recommended that it be classified as a Class
D carcinogen. Which means, after reviewing the data. the evidence of
carcinogenicity is inconclusive.

*
We are confronted with a welter of contradictory statements and positions. What
is clear, however, is that the drug war in Latin America, as expressed in Bush's
Andean Initiative, is an "obsessed" policy, a narrow focus on drug eradication
to the exclusion of the fundamental issue: agricultural alternatives that are
successful and provide farmers with a viable income.