Pushed out By Corporate Agriculture: Legal and Illegal Drug Cultivation in a Context of Economic Exclusion

How do legality and illegality affect drug cultivation? This paper draws on three years of ethnographic fieldwork with coffee and ex-coca farmers in Colombia and one year of fieldwork with marijuana growers in Oklahoma to argue that illegality exposes drug cultivators to criminalization but also allows small-scale farmers an elusive productive niche within a global agricultural economy that privileges corporate agriculture.

In my first case, a rural Colombian village, I describe a transition from one stimulant to another and then back again. Farmers grew coffee before economic liberalization allowed industrial coffee production to drive prices below production costs. This pushed them to grow coca (the raw material for cocaine), with prices protected from the competition of corporate agriculture by its very illegality. Decades of violence and criminalization inspired farmers to accept a coca substitution program to transition to legal agriculture like coffee. But with coffee’s global prices perilously low, these farmers again find themselves priced out of legal global markets, with many considering a return to coca or a precarious future in urban slums.

My second case focuses on rural marijuana farmers in southeastern Oklahoma. For decades, they grew for illegal markets, which exposed them to criminalization but guaranteed high prices. When the state legalized medical marijuana, they acquired legal cultivation licenses. However, market saturation drove prices downwards, with small-scale farmers pushed out by better-capitalized firms. While some abandon cultivation altogether, others return to illegality, growing for a lucrative (yet illicit) inter-state trade in marijuana that gives them their only chance at profitability.

The comparison suggests two related findings. One, illegal drug cultivation is inspired less by greed than by farmers’ exclusion from legal markets dominated by corporate agriculture. And two, legalization policies diminish the social costs of criminalization and violence but privilege corporate interests and exclude small-scale farmers.