Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Maryam Aslany "Cocaine: The Illicit Peasant"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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Abstract: This chapter forms part of Peasants (Bloomsbury; Knopf, 2026), a book offering an empirically grounded portrait of the global peasantry in the neoliberal era through the lens of four key commodities: rice, sugarcane, cocoa, and coca. Drawing on extensive fieldwork across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the book provides an intimate account of the crisis affecting the world’s largest – and most invisible – constituency.

This chapter, Cocaine: The Illicit Peasant, offers an empirical account of coca farmers in Peru’s VRAEM region (Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro River Valleys), one of the world’s most significant centres of cocaine production. Based on fieldwork in this remote Andean territory, it examines the lives of peasant farmers who cultivate coca as both a subsistence crop and a commodity deeply embedded in transnational narco-economies. It situates coca within a longue durée history: farmed in the Andes for at least 5,000 years, revered for its spiritual and medicinal uses, yet transformed by colonial exploitation, militarisation, and the global drug trade. Against the backdrop of state absence, environmental devastation, and the legacies of insurgency, the chapter explores how peasants navigate precarious worlds of criminality and survival, even as the value of their labour is realised far beyond their reach. It interrogates the intersections of legality, marginality, and peasant agency in one of the most fraught agrarian frontiers of the neoliberal era.