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Cocaine is poised to overtake oil as Colombia’s main export as soon as this year — partly thanks to the South American country’s efforts to legalize the cocaine trade, according to Bloomberg Economics’ estimates.

Colombia’s cocaine output surged to a record 1,738 tons last year — nearly double the 972 tons it produced in 2021, according to Bloomberg. Oil exports, meanwhile, have plunged 30% during the first half of this year.

Bloomberg economist Felipe Hernandez said the increase in coca production could mean cocaine export revenues will “jump to $18.2 billion in 2022 — not far behind oil exports of $19.1 billion last year.”

“The government is destroying laboratories where coca leaves are manufactured into cocaine, but that hasn’t prevented production from expanding,” the economist added.

Cocaine’s expansion comes as Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the country’s first leftist leader, has been pursuing a new strategy to combat the US-led war on drugs, seeking to hit drug lords who benefit more from the sale of narcotics overseas rather than targeting coca leaf producers,

As a result, the land in Colombia used to grow coca plants — whose leaves are used to make the highly addictive narcotic — increased by 13% last year, a report from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime published on Monday showed.

In 2022, Colombia reserved the most land it ever has to plant coca — a staggering 230,000 hectares, or 570,000 acres, the UNODC said. The global anti-drugs group said that the increase has contributed to more than 1.4 million tons of fresh coca leaf being produced — a 24% increase from 2021.

Petro had advocated for investing in rural communities so that coca leaf producers could plant legal crops over engaging in illicit coca farming. The initiative is a tough sell because of how lucrative coca leaves are, especially in poor, rural areas.

Though Colombia also produces cash crops like pineapple and coffee, they take 16 months and four years, respectively, to harvest, and are far more susceptible to climate challenges than coca plants, which can be harvested every seven months.

Coca plants are also widely grown in Bolivia — the world’s second-biggest cocaine supplier. However, despite coca plant farming being legal in regions of Bolivia and entirely illegal in Colombia, Colombia has the largest cultivation of coca plants, according to the UNODC.

Petro’s approach to snuffing out illegal cocaine production hasn’t done much to stem the drug trade.

Just last month, Spanish authorities found a record-breaking 9.5 tons of cocaine in a shipment from Ecuador — which borders Colombia — that was meant to go to 30 European drug rings.

The large shipment was discovered in a refrigerated banana container in the southern port of Algeciras in late August.

The boxes were marked with 30 logos that correlated with different European criminal rings that were expected to get the coveted drug.

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