APURIMAC-ENE VALLEY, Peru (Reuters) -- For 10 hours a day,
Lucia Huarca strips green coca leaves off bushes with callused hands and
collects her harvest in her wide blue skirt alongside fellow women day-laborers
and their children in ragged, filthy T-shirts in a field in Peru's southern jungle.

Her day's haul -- typically 66 lbs (30 kilos), for which she will get paid around $3 --
will probably end up in the hands of drugs traffickers to be transformed into
cocaine.

Despite a decade-long, U.S.-backed crackdown to strangle the drug trade at source
in the world's No. 2 cocaine producing country, coca cultivation is thriving -- even
spreading -- where Huarca works in the lush Apurimac-Ene valley across the
Andes, some 520 miles (830 km) southeast of Lima.

"We live off coca because we're poor. Without it, our children can't eat," said
Huarca, 52, as she harvested a field in Pichari where stray coffee plants nestling
among the coca bushes bear witness to the plot's now-abandoned crop.

A few yards away, men with picks cleared ferns ready for replanting with coca -- a
sacred plant for Peru's Inca emperors and still enthusiastically -- and legally --
chewed by Andean people as a cure for altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger, and
harvested as an ingredient in Coca Cola.

Coca can be sold legally to the State Coca Co. but it offers lower prices than do
drug traffickers.

Meanwhile, glutted markets and plunging world prices for traditional coffee and
cocoa output have turned coca leaf into the only viable cash crop and backbone of
the local economy.

Such a picture is not likely to cheer U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell when he
visits Peru and Colombia, the world's cocaine capital, from Monday to Wednesday
for a visit in which fighting the drug trade will be high on the agenda.

Peru is already complaining that its skies are inundated with drug smugglers after
Washington halted joint surveillance flights in April, when Peru's air force killed an
American missionary and her baby after mistaking their plane for traffickers.

Stark reality

Peru's eradication efforts in the 1990s made it a key ally in Washington's regional
drug war. But analysts say the illicit trade here has been boosted by the U.S.-backed
anti-drug Plan Colombia, spurring prices which coffee, cocoa and alternative crops
such as fruit and palm hearts cannot hope to match and leaving dirt-poor farmers
little choice but to depend on coca.

Producers say export-ready coffee fetches just 60 cents a kilo, a big loss on the
$1.52 each kilo costs to produce. Coca goes for up to $2.30 on the black market.
Farmers say they would have to sell eight kilos of coffee to buy one of beef.

Despite official figures, experts say the stark reality is that Peru's coca production is
rising again.

Some hills are literally covered with closely-packed, vivid green coca bushes and in
villages and on many roadsides, carpets of leaves left out to dry in the sun are
common.

 Copyright 2001 Reuters.