The transatlantic cocaine market

• United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

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20 June 2011Transnational cocaine trafficking has been affecting the Americas for the last 40 years. Although the value of the global market has declined greatly since the mid-1980s, the flow of cocaine in that region continues to have an impact on public health and to generate large revenues that fuel violence and corruption in many countries. While the size of the United States market was shrinking, new destination markets have appeared, affecting a new set of nations caught in the transit flow.

This report is about the biggest of these new flows: the trafficking of cocaine to meet growing European demand. The volume of cocaine consumed in Europe has doubled in the last decade. While European law enforcement agencies have hardened their defences, traffickers continue to innovate, seeking novel ways of getting their product to the consumer. Around 2004, South American traffickers began to experiment with a waystation that had rarely seen large volume shipments of cocaine: West Africa. In a few years, they had managed to undermine security and sow high-level corruption in a number of West African states.

Recognizing the threat, the international community quickly undertook a variety of interventions to address this flow. The novelty aspect was lost, the political instability proved self-defeating, and some very large seizures were made. By 2008, there was a remarkable decline in the number of both large maritime seizures and the number of cocaine couriers detected flying from West Africa to Europe.

But there were indications that the flow still continued, raising the possibility that traffickers had simply modified their technique, finding new methods for bringing cocaine to Europe, including through West Africa, without detection. There are statistical data to support this scenario: European cocaine seizures decreased from 121 tons in 2006 to 53 tons in 2009. Demand, in contrast, has not dropped by half during this period. Despite growing seizures in South America, prices have actually declined in much of Europe. Purity has also declined in a number of countries, such as the United Kingdom, resulting in some increase in real prices. But overall, it does not appear that supply has been drastically constrained, suggesting that the traffickers have found new ways of getting their product to market.

The expansion of the cocaine market across the Atlantic and, more recently, in South America, highlights the importance of treating cocaine as a global problem, and of developing strategies on the scale of the threat. Efforts must be increasingly coordinated and integrated into an international approach that adapts to new developments as quickly as the traffickers. There are many reasons to be optimistic about the capacity of the international community to achieve a significant reduction of the global cocaine market during the present decade. As clever, well-resourced and adaptable as traffickers may be, they are no match for the world’s nations working together.

Image: dullhunk / flick