Collateral damage: Thousands of poor Peruvian farmers ruined by US-backed anti-drug campaign

Edma Duran uses a machete to salvage the leaves she can from the family’s coca plot, which government workers have just destroyed in an record-breaking US-backed eradication campaign that has affected roughly a half million Peruvians.

“This is what we live off,” says Duran, who lives with her husband and six children in a village of 110 people that lacks electricity, phones and running water and is five hours from the nearest doctor.

Duran is among thousands of Peruvians who have lost their livelihoods to the government’s campaign to destroy the plant used to make cocaine. They say officials have offered only paltry compensation, or none at all.

A record 55,000 hectares of coca were destroyed in 2013-14 — dropping the Andean nation to No2 behind Colombia in land area under coca cultivation.

Peru nevertheless remains the world’s top cocaine-producing nation, and its most dense coca fields grow undisturbed far from Duran’s ravaged plot of less than a hectare.

The two-year effort has yielded a 30 per cent decrease in the amount of Peruvian land planted with coca, and the government says it’s on pace this year to destroy another 35,000 hectares — an area the size of Philadelphia.