Power and Terror, by Noam Chomsky: on Drugs

Noam Chomsky: Poisoning crops & biodiversity justified as "war on drugs"

These are poor coffee farmers, mostly. Once the coffee trees are destroyed and the land is fumigated & poisoned, it's poisoned forever. Not only are lives destroyed and crops, but biodiversity is also destroyed, and rather crucially, the tradition of peasant agriculture is destroyed.

The fumigation is officially justified as a "war on drugs." This is hard to take seriously except as a cover for a counterinsurgency program, and another stage in the long history of driving peasants off the land for the benefit of wealthy elites and resource extraction by foreign investors.

The consequence is that if this area ever goes back to agriculture, it will be monoculture for agro-export with laboratory-produced seeds, bought from Monsanto. There's no real other alternative.