What’s green or white, comes from Peru, and costs U.S. taxpayers millions in subsidies, lost wages and jobs? It’s asparagus, the U.S. government’s ineffective and not-so-secret weapon in the “war on drugs.”
 
While President George H.W. Bush was famous for his hatred of broccoli, his asparagus policies, continued by former President Clinton and the current president Bush, have had a dramatic impact on the U.S. and Peruvian asparagus industries.
 
“To reduce the flow of cocaine into this country by encouraging farmers in Peru to grow food instead of coca, the United States in the early 1990's started to subsidize a year-round Peruvian asparagus industry,” the New York Times reports. As part of the Andean Trade Program and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA), the U.S. government sent millions of alternative development aid dollars to Peru and other Andean countries. Under the program, Peru’s share of the U.S. and world asparagus market has skyrocketed.
 
But the ATPDEA aid program – like every flawed U.S. effort in the drug war – is a study in unintended consequences.
 
Asparagus farmers in Michigan, California, and Washington State – the three biggest producers in this country – have seen their prices undercut by the U.S. government’s subsidization of cheap foreign labor. U.S. farms have gone belly-up, and companies such as Del Monte Foods have left the U.S. for Peru, taking with them hundreds of jobs.
 
Because of the farm failures, the U.S. government has been prodded by state legislators to prop up domestic asparagus production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture now buys millions of pounds of unsold asparagus from Washington and Michigan farmers to distribute domestically as part of its food aid programs – a direct result of the U.S. government’s subsidization of Peruvian asparagus farming.
 
The White House and its Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) are not sympathetic to the concerns of U.S. farmers who feel that the “war on drugs” is eradicating their livelihood. "Apologies to the people affected," said David Murray, an ONDCP official, to the Times, "but the idea of creating alternative development, countrywide, does serve our purposes."
 
But a closer look at the government’s own data shows a different story.
 
Outsourcing of U.S. asparagus production to Peru and other alternative development projects “had little effect on drug crop (primarily coca, the raw material of cocaine) eradication in the Andean region in 1995,” according to a report prepared by the U.S. government’s own International Trade Commission. What’s more, the Peruvian asparagus, though abundant, is generally of a lower quality than U.S. asparagus. “A large proportion of this asparagus is rejected by the processing plants because it does not meet export quality standards,” according to a report issued last year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
 
In short, the U.S. government’s misguided asparagus program is hurting American workers and taxpayers while doing little to stem the illicit drug trade. Outsourcing asparagus farming to Peru – like every other government scheme to rid the world of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin – will not win the “war on drugs.”