PERU-TRADE: Coca Still Makes Things Better

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

CUZCO, Apr 6 1997 (IPS) - Nearly 500 years ago Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish conquistadors stripped this ancient Inca mountain capital of its vast fortune in gold , and destroyed much of the city in the process.

Several picturesque ruins and time-honoured customs are all that remain of that period. One of these is the sipping of ‘mate de coca’, the tea made from a few long, green leaves that is supposed to help visitors acclimatise to the 3,000-metre altitude.

This simple brew is banned from entering the United States, as the U.S. government pours tens of millions of dollars into efforts to destroy the coca plant, the source of cocaine and of crack, the cheaper equivalent found in the western hemisphere’s inner cities and slums. But some coca leaves are still shipped legally to the United States. They leave from the Peru government’s Empresa Nacional de la Coca (ENACO) warehouses in Trujillo on this country’s north- western coast.

Their final destination is in the millions of bottles of the popular soft drink Coca-Cola, according to the book, ‘One River’, written by Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis, published last year.

ENACO’s supplies originate on about six percent of the estimated 300,000 hectares of land area that is used to grow coca in Peru. Government agents make annual shipments of some 1,750 kilogrammes of the leaves to New York City, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). From here, they are transported by armoured truck to the small town of Maywood in New Jersey, to facilities owned by the Chicago-based company, Stepan.

According to Davis’ book, the leaves are processed at a Stepan site with the rather ordinary title of ‘Building Two’ which boasts thick steel walls, hair-trigger alarms, barbed-wire fences, and round-the-clock armed guards.

A team of chemists converts the coca leaves into high quality cocaine, which is distributed to pharmaceutical companies for use in the making of painkillers. What remains is then processed to make a special additive for Coca-Cola, according to the book.

Stepan is the only company that is licensed to bring coca into the United States – an honour that company officials are hesitant to discuss.

“We make surfactants, a chemical used to make detergents, and we make polymer plastics,” spokeswoman Joan Kusher told IPS. “That makes up 99 percent of our business. I’m not at liberty to discuss anything else.”

Nor does Coca-Cola like to discuss the subject. But in an article published in the New York Times in 1988, company officials admitted that a non-hallucinogenic component of coca leaves is used in the preparation of its famous product.

The original Coca-Cola recipe, concocted by chemist John “Doc” Pemberton in Atlanta in 1886, contained a minuscule portion of cocaine. But soon after, when the more dangerous side effects of the drug became known, the company stopped using the substance.

Instead company officials went to their cocaine supplier – Louis Schaefer, a German immigrant in Maywood – and asked him to brew another extract of the leaves for flavouring that would not contain the drug. In 1898, Schaefer concocted a new extract from the de- cocainised plant, which is still only made in Maywood.

Here in Peru, there is much less secrecy and security involved in the preparation of coca. The leaves can be purchased openly in this and other highland towns and author Davis says in his book that coca helps alleviate altitude sickness and may also help diners digest potatoes, the stodgy mainstay of most meals in the mountains.

Davis points out that studies conducted by Jim Duke, a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, show that 100 grammes of coca (the typical daily consumption of people in the Andes) provides more than the amount of calcium, iron, phosphorus, riboflavin, and vitamins A and E required by the average adult.

Davis’ book describes how coca has been chewed with lime by a number of indigenous groups throughout the Amazon for centuries.

The Peruvians of the Andes mix their coca with lime derived from burnt haba beans and cactus roots. At dawn, they add dew, potato water, and a sprinkling of human urine. In Peru’s coastal plains, people obtain their lime by burning banana roots or cacao and corn pods.

The Kogi peoples of the coastal mountains of Santa Marta in Colombia make their lime, or ‘impusi’ by burning seashells. Only men are allowed to chew the mixture. And in southern Colombia, the Paez peoples also chew their coca with lime which they prepare by heating black or red limestone, known as “kuetan ch’ijme” or “kuetan kutchi.”