(21 Jun 2006)
Bogota - 20 June 2006
1. Exterior of UN building
2. Mid shot of Colombian flag and United Nations flag
3. Mid shot of police standing at the entrance of the UN building
4. Mid shot of UN representatives and reporters at the press conference
5. SOUNDBITE: (Spanish) Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nation's Office of Drugs and Crime:
"The strong increase of seizures in 2004 and 2003, for the 2005 we don't have any records yet, but the seizures of coca is more than one third, 38% percent, it is very significant proportion and shows the big capacity of the country's confiscation system of illegal products."
6. Cutaway of delegates at the press conference
7. SOUNDBITE: (Spanish) Antonio Maria Costa, Executive Director of the United Nation's Office of Drugs and Crime:
"You can see the important reduction of crops in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia together, which means a reduction in the region of more than a quarter, 28 percent in five or six years, so it is a sustainable, a crucial reduction regarding the drug market. As we can see there was a small rise in the statistics but not a significant percent during the last period in the three countries taken together."
8. Mid shot of delegates at the press conference
9. SOUNDBITE: (Spanish) Sabas Pretelt de la Vega, Colombia's Justice and Interior minister:
"The Colombian government's position to tell you the truth is to say that we want to increase the efforts. If we were fumigating 130,000 or 140,000, now we have to face the challenge of fumigating double, so we could reach all the crops and not allow the crops to grow again."
10. Mid shot of delegates and reporters after the press conference
FILE - Neiva - 2005
11. Various of small planes fumigating coca crops
12. Mid shot of coca picker taking off the leaves from the plant
13. Wide of small plane fumigation
FILE - Amazonas - 2006
14. Mid shot of men pulling out coca plants
STORYLINE:
Despite record drug seizures and the largest coca eradication campaign in history last year (2005), production of the plant used to make cocaine actually increased by eight percent in Colombia, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime said on Tuesday.
UN officials said seizures of illegal drugs were up 38 per cent over the 2003-2004 period, and there had been a reduction of crops in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, if taken together, by over a 25 per cent in the past five or six years.
But the production of coca - the plant used to make cocaine - increased to 330 square miles in 2005 - even as authorities sprayed coca fields totalling 25 times the size of Manhattan - according to UN drug officials.
The UN findings follow an April report by the US Office of National Drug Control Policy that reported a 26 percent increase in Colombia's coca production from 2004 to 2005, though that was partly due to a near doubling of the area surveyed.
Partially offsetting the rise in Colombian production were declines in the world's two other coca-producing countries, Bolivia and Peru, the UN added.
But taken together, the two reports are the strongest evidence yet that a cornerstone of the US-led war on drugs - the aerial fumigation of coca fields - is failing to meet its goal of halving coca production in the Andes.
The results may hamper the efforts by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, Washington's staunchest ally in Latin America, to win additional US backing for Plan Colombia, the anti-drug strategy that American taxpayers have financed to the tune of 4 (b) billion US dollars since 2000.
Keyword-culture
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