Published in the International Journal of Drug Policy
By María Mónica Parada-Hernández and Margarita Marín-Jaramillo
Illicit crop economies are shaped by gender arrangements that can play an important role in the experiences of illicit crop workers. In Colombia, the coca production – considered a war economy – granted peasant women a source of access to productive resources (land, credit and seeds) and paid work, conditions that are difficult to find in other legal agrarian economies. For this reason, policies pursuing a transition from war to peace, such as the ones that emerged from the 2016 Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla, must incorporate a gender perspective in order to acknowledge the social progress that women can achieve in war scenarios.