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OPEN The post‑conflict expansion of coca

farming and illicit cattle ranching
in Colombia
Paulo J. Murillo‑Sandoval 1,2*, John Kilbride 1, Elizabeth Tellman 3, David Wrathall 1,
Jamon Van Den Hoek 1 & Robert E. Kennedy 1

Illicit cattle ranching and coca farming have serious negative consequences on the Colombian
Amazon’s land systems. The underlying causes of these land activities include historical processes of
colonization, armed conflict, and narco-trafficking. We aim to examine how illicit cattle ranching and
coca farming are driving forest cover change over the last 34 years (1985–2019). To achieve this aim,
we combine two pixel-based approaches to differentiate between coca farming and cattle ranching
using hypothetical observed patterns of illicit activities and a deep learning algorithm. We found
evidence that cattle ranching, not coca, is the main driver of forest loss outside the legal agricultural
frontier. There is evidence of a recent, explosive conversion of forests to cattle ranching outside the
agricultural frontier and within protected areas since the negotiation phase of the peace agreement.
In contrast, coca is remarkably persistent, suggesting that crop substitution programs have been
ineffective at stopping the expansion of coca farming deeper into protected areas. Countering
common narratives, we found very little evidence that coca farming precedes cattle ranching.
The spatiotemporal dynamics of the expansion of illicit land uses reflect the cumulative outcome
of agrarian policies, Colombia’s War on Drugs, and the 2016 peace accord. Our study enables the
differentiation of illicit land activities, which can be transferred to other regions where these activities
have been documented but poorly distinguished spatiotemporally. We provide an applied framework
that could be used elsewhere to disentangle other illicit land uses, track their causes, and develop
management options for forested land systems and people who depend on them.

More than 40% of deforestation worldwide is estimated to be tied to illegal a­ ctivities1, linked to illegal clearing
for commercial agriculture and agro-commodities such as b ­ eef2, tropical t­ imber3, oil ­palm4,5, ­soy6,7, as well as
cultivation of illicit crops such as ­coca8. Earth Observation technologies offer the capacity to monitor land-use
changes associated with these consequential activities. Still, it is difficult to clearly identify and characterize spe-
cific land-use changes as “illicit.” For instance, people engaged in illicit activities intentionally work to obscure
traces of their behavior. Subsequently, illicit activities are not well documented in publicly accessible data, mak-
ing it difficult to connect them with land cover changes observable from remote s­ ensing9–11. Illicit activities may
exhibit landscape patterns similar to those of legitimate activities, making it difficult to detect and differentiate
illicit activity from other land-use t­ ypes12. While causal relationships between illicit activities and land-use change
at broad spatial scales have been documented (e.g., for municipalities, departments)11,13 illicit activities often
produce localized, clustered, and context-dependent patterns. Although practical remote sensing applications
have facilitated the implementation of forest conservation ­policies14, the development of analytical frameworks
that identify distinct illicit land activities remains nascent in land system science. This limits the utility of many
remote sensing applications for decision-makers15–17. Here, we apply deep learning algorithms to satellite imagery
at 30 m resolution (1985–2019) to differentiate annual patterns of coca farming and cattle ranching, allowing
us to link land use changes to illicit activities. We analyze trajectories of illicit land-use change caused by policy
changes in Colombia regarding agrarian policies, the war on drugs, and the 2016 peace accord.
A complex interplay among poor land access regimes linked to weak institutions, narcotrafficking, and armed
conflict has shaped socio-ecological conditions in Colombia. Land access and landscape changes in Colombia
result from historical waves of spontaneous and state-sponsored colonization by landless farmers in peripheral

1
College of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA. 2Departamento
de Topografía, Facultad de Ciencias del Hábitat, Diseño e Infraestructura, Universidad del Tolima, Ibagué,
Colombia. 3School of Geography, Development, and Environment, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. *email:
pjmurillos@ut.edu.co

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­lands18. As farmers colonized these lands, disputes with large landholders increased, and rebel groups emerged
to engage in armed conflict. The conflict has determined how the land has been defined, occupied, and u ­ tilized19
under the umbrella of high economic returns from narcotrafficking and no other farming alternatives; the coca
surplus fed the conflict over decades. During the conflict, rebel groups created specific environmental rules that
shaped the landscape, such as limits on the number of clear-cuts within farms per year, constraints on agricultural
expansion, and fees for clearing forests in disallowed l­ocations20. Governmental policies emerged to promote
the transition from coca farming to the production of livestock ranching activity as a “licit” alternative to c­ oca21.
However, cattle promotion is not only a commercial business but served as a strategy for the consolidation of
“baldios” or empty forestlands by large landholders, encouraging forest clearing also inside Protected Areas (PAs).
While beef consumption in Colombia is stable and has no relation with the exponential land pasture increase,
people opt for cattle ranching to claim land titles and sell cattle during economic ­distress22. Weak institutions
and unbalanced power structures that benefit large landholders with the capital to invest in clearing lands have
characterized socio-ecological settings in Colombia. As a result, the main drivers of deforestation in the Amazon
are coca farming and cattle ­ranching23.
Coca farming is the largest illicit agribusiness in the world, and Colombia is the world’s leading coca
­producer24. By 2000, 60–80,000 Colombia’s cocalero families supplied two-thirds of the world’s coca and its end-
product, ­cocaine25. In 2017, Colombia had 170,000 ha under coca ­cultivation26 with 47% of cultivation within
areas designated for special management such as protected areas, areas occupied by indigenous groups, Afro-
descendent territories, and forest reserve ­areas26. Coca farming is not a dominant driver of deforestation at the
national level. However, it is locally important and can be embedded in the agricultural frontier associated with
large-scale agricultural ­projects13. In Colombia, coca farming has helped shape the agricultural frontier, defined
in 2018 as the boundary separating lands where agricultural activities are allowed from protected areas, areas
of special ecological importance, and other areas where agricultural activities are otherwise excluded by l­aw27.
Along with coca farming, illegal cattle ranching has been a significant threat to forest conservation in the agri-
cultural frontier, where the conversion of forest to cattle ranching is a major factor contributing to deforestation
in the Amazon r­ egion23,28. In Colombia, forest conversion to cattle ranching serves as a mechanism for legalizing
informal or illegal ­landholdings21. Farmers invest in cattle to secure claims to land speculatively connected to
laundering drug p ­ rofits8,29. Small farmers see cattle ranching as a safe investment that provides a quick return
or as a buffer during economic u ­ ncertainty22. During recent decades of the Colombian conflict (1984–2011)
between the Government of Colombia (GoC) and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejercito del
Pueblo (FARC-EP), illegal cattle ranching remained l­ow30. Since 2012, armed conflict intensity has declined
with a significant reduction in fatalities. Still, a rapid expansion of cattle lands has been widely d ­ ocumented31,
32
mainly linked to the peace agreement realization in ­2016 . The agreement indicated the end of FARC-led
gunpoint conservation. It signaled the beginning of new land use activities such as cattle ranching, promoted
by drug cartels and large landowners seeking to capitalize on more favorable land p ­ olicies31. A key challenge to
understanding drivers of deforestation is robustly mapping the conversion between forests, coca farms and cattle
ranches. Persistent coca farming may indicate that farmers are responding to high economic incentives from
coca cultivation or that coca control measures in specific locations are ineffective. In contrast, rapid cattle expan-
sion may support claims about the presence of illegal, speculative land markets in agricultural frontiers. While
detecting these conversion patterns and identifying drivers helps to prioritize conservation efforts, distinguishing
between conversion types (e.g., forest-to-coca and forest-to-cattle) is difficult because both land classifications
follow similar temporal and spectral trends in remotely sensed imagery. Previous research has relied on classi-
fied or partial observations of these land uses, i.e. aerial p ­ hotographs9. Using IKONOS imagery (1 m pixel size),
­Pesaresi33 discriminated coca from bare soil, forest, and shadows using textural metrics, but cattle ranching was
absent in that study. Currently, coca discrimination from other land uses is achieved through the Colombian
government’s visual interpretation of aerial imagery through the Integrated System for Illicit Crop Monitoring
(SIMCI). Omission errors have been reported by SIMCI caused by human interpretation in coca detection and
by persistent cloud c­ over34, as well as discrepancies with other data sources such as the Office of National Drug
Control ­Policy35. Consequently, identifying illicit cattle ranching and coca cultivation with available remote
sensing imagery remains a significant challenge across Latin A ­ merica9,36.
To link illicit coca farming and cattle ranching activities to observable land change patterns in the Colombian
Amazon, we overcome previous challenges with two complementary approaches. The first approach hypothesizes
that unique, observable patterns can be linked to known historical and institutional processes that drive them
(specifically the peace negotiation process for the Colombian civil war and significant anti-coca policies employed
during Colombia’s War on Drugs). The second approach leverages known observations of illicit activities to
classify pixel patterns or objects that exhibit statistically similar variables using a deep learning (DL) algorithm.
While both approaches have been used separately in remote ­sensing37, we show they can synergistically identify
specific landscape patterns associated with illicit land a­ ctivities12. Together, these two approaches explain and
quantify specific forest-coca-cattle change patterns and their associated drivers (e.g., historical agrarian policies).
To evaluate the role of illicit land activities on forest change, we answer two questions:

1. Do illicit activities (cattle ranching and coca farming) drive distinct, evolving land change patterns in the
Colombian Amazon?
2. How do policy regimes in the Colombian Amazon, such as agrarian policies, the War on Drugs (i.e., coca
substitution and aerial fumigation campaigns), and the recent peace agreement, relate to the expansion of
illicit land activities?

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Tracking illicit land activities in the Amazon

Our study uses two pixel-based approaches to understand how illicit land activities accelerate land-use change.
Figure 1 depicts a conceptual framework of process-based insights on hypothetical linkages between human-
­ atterns12. We summarized the role of illicit activities using the three
induced illicit activities and observed pixel p
most frequently documented forest-coca-cattle transition pathways A) stable coca, B) coca to cattle, and C) forest
to cattle (Fig. 1). Each of these pathways would leave a hypothetical pattern (Fig. 1(1)), which could be detected
empirically (Fig. 1(3)). This first approach is needed given the absence of sufficient on-the-ground records of
coca and cattle that would typically be required to classify remote sensing data directly.
Hypothesized spatiotemporal forest, coca, and cattle conversion pathways and their drivers in Colombia are
depicted in Fig. 1. Stable coca farming can be linked to agrarian policies that have promoted state-sponsored mass
migration since 1­ 95318,38. While these policies failed to promote effective legal incentives for agriculture, more
profitable alternatives than traditional agriculture resulted in booms of marijuana production in 1974, followed
by coca in 1­ 97839. These booms caused the expansion of small coca patches in clustered locations (Fig. 1A).
Coca is persistent because it is a cash economic alternative for farmers and also because the War on Drug poli-
cies created a "balloon effect"40,41 in which coca moved within ecologically sensitive zones (e.g. PAs) to avoid
aerial fumigation. This enabled FARC-EP institutional control over coca production, allowing FARC-EP to tax
coca growers and ­merchants18,39 and thus finance war-fighting c­ apabilities42. Because the coca economy funded
the armed conflict, the GoC and small farmers developed coca substitution programs (i.e., PNIS—Programa
Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos de Uso Ilícito) to enroll farmers into the legal ­economy43. However,
PNIS faces significant s­ etbacks44. Coca substitution for other crops within PAs is constitutionally i­ mpossible45,
technical assistance is ­delayed46, and many PNIS leaders have been ­killed47. Uncertainty about the PNIS and
the longevity of legal guarantees to support families specifically within PAs contribute to the persistence of coca
farming or the transition to cattle ranching.
Coca to cattle results from the progressive substitution of coca production with less "illicit" alternative
­activities21,48. Three possible causes of this transition have been noted. First, the expansion of the road network
by FARC-EP command (~ 200 km)49 led to an increase in commercializing land, and motivated actors to expand
forest ­clearing49,50. Second, agrarian policies that incentivized legal ownership were conditioned on ’land pro-
ductivity’, most efficiently demonstrated through cattle ­establishment21. Third, surplus profits from coca produc-
tion allowed farmers to acquire and gradually merge abandoned coca plots, eventually converting them into
­pasture29,51. This conversion is carried out by farmers who allow the transit of cattle from other non-state actors

Figure 1.  A conceptual framework describing hypothetical and empirical land change patterns arising from
different drivers of illicit land use activities. (1) Hypothetical patterns depend on historical institutional
processes: (A) The War on Drugs and perverse incentives for coca substitution promote coca stabilization within
PAs; (B) agrarian policies, such as the Integrated National Program for the Substitution of Illicitly Used Crops
(PNIS), that promote cattle as a strategy less "illicit" than coca farming promote conversion from coca to cattle;
(C) peace accord policies that enhanced land speculation for cattle ranching. (2) While drivers are not mutually
exclusive, places outside the agricultural frontier (PAs and deeper regions of the Amazon) provide incentives
for illicit activities that lead to consolidating coca and cattle to obtain rent and guaranteed economic returns for
small farmers. (3) Coca and cattle lands produce diverse land-use patterns in the observed Landsat time-series
(NIR, SWIR1, Red—false color combination). The areas reported refer to the mean and standard deviation area
of change during the 34-year study period in the Amazon.

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in their farms, returning economic incentives to both g­ roups29,38. This spatial pattern has been gradual and more
evident after 2­ 00830,52, and has led to large cattle farms being surrounded by remaining small coca plots (Fig. 1B).
Massive forest to cattle conversion is not driven by small f­ armers2. Rather, it is more often driven by non-state
actors who have capital to invest in forest clearing and who may be connected with coca ­profits8,53. This process
has been documented after the peace accord, when the vacuum produced by de facto FARC-EP demobilization
enabled the incursion of actors interested in expanding cattle ranching. This conversion pattern is presented
within PAs borders and deeper in the Amazon, with mean deforested patch size greater than 7­ ha31 (Fig. 1C).
While decreased coca cultivation coincides with reduced cattle ranching ­expansion29,38, the acute massive conver-
sion of forest to cattle since 2017 may be linked to external land speculators –investors–who see future oppor-
tunities to capitalize on land.
The second approach employs partially available records of coca and cattle to directly link remote sensing
data (empirical) with illicit land activities. Coca and illicit cattle ranching have distinct spatial patterns which
can be captured by convolutional DL algorithms with greater accuracy than conventional pixel-by-pixel or
object-based classification m ­ ethods54. While satellite representation indicates that distinguishing between coca
and cattle is very challenging, the capacity for pattern recognition in spatial, spectral, and temporal dimensions
of the image makes DL algorithms effective for classifying common and recurring p ­ atterns55. Leveraging these
two-based pixel approaches, we overcome the difficulty of studying the real impact of illicit land activities on
the landscape. Synergies between both approaches also support the creation of specific spatiotemporal linkages
between land uses that are lacking in land system science. Moreover, it opens new opportunities to examine the
role of other illicit activities on global environmental change.

Results
The vast majority of deforestation (~ 3Mha) is attributed to stable cattle ranching lands, whereas coca farm-
ing accounted for 1/60th of that area –less than ~ 45,000 ha (Fig. 3). We summarized the results based on the
agricultural frontier defined by the GoC in 2018. This frontier represents the boundary between areas in which
agricultural activities are considered legal (the northwestern area in Fig. 2, as well as Fig. 3A,B) and where activi-
ties are illegal, such as PAs and regions deep in the Amazon (the hatched southeastern area in Fig. 2, as well as
Fig. 3C,D). The forest to cattle conversion pattern was especially pronounced outside the agricultural frontier
(Fig. 3D). Meanwhile, stable coca farming contributed to ~ 35.000 ha of deforestation around 2003, but with
greater variation during conflict and eradication campaigns (Fig. 3A,C). The conversion of coca to cattle repre-
sents only a small fraction of total land use change within the agricultural frontier, outside it, and within PAs
(< 4000 ha), sharply challenging popular narratives that cattle ranching is a common strategy for legitimizing coca
plots. The performance of the DL model using the mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) was 0.62 (± 0.04), 0.92
(± 0.014), 0.92 (± 0.013) for coca, cattle, and forest areas respectively. A fully independent accuracy assessment
for the nine map change classes shows a global accuracy of 0.96 (± 0.04). Specific details for area estimation and
confidence intervals for each change class are included in the SI.
The scale of forest to cattle is unprecedented. This dramatic transition occurred outside of the agricultural
frontier following the peace accord. Although deforestation was expected after the ­accord19,56, the magnitude
of this outbreak has no precedent in our 34-year study. It illustrates a new cattle regime driven by speculative
illegal markets in which different actors have contributed to the massive clearing of forested l­ ands31. While for-
est to cattle conversion following the negotiation process was muted within the established agricultural frontier
(Fig. 3B), we detected a peak of remaining forest loss between 2016 and 2019. Within these three years, illegal
stable cattle rose by ~ 800,000 ha outside the frontier (Fig. 3D), roughly half the area of stable cattle within the
official frontier (~ 2 Mha) (Fig. 3B). Since at least the early 1990s, stable cattle has been progressively consolidating
outside the frontier, though the rate of expansion has greatly accelerated since the accord was signed (Fig. 3D).
Stable coca in 2018 is roughly 2.5 times more abundant outside the agricultural frontier than inside (Fig. 3A,C).
It also presented a spike with new cultivation increasing after the eradication campaign from ~ 50,000 ha in 2013
to ~ 15,000 ha in 2018 (Fig. 3C). The conversion of forest to coca within the agricultural frontier was much more
limited (~ 5500 ha, Fig. 3A). While the prevalence of coca outside the frontier reflects the imperative of coca
farmers to obscure their activities from authorities, coca has remained largely concentrated in the same hotspots
during the study period (Fig. 2). Coca increases outside the frontier also coincide with the timing of coca booms,
when coca prices increased in 1984–199018 and 1998–200229, which was also when FARC-EP was legally set-
tled in the region. The decrease in coca inside and outside the agricultural frontier coincided with eradication
campaigns (2003–2013), when coca decreased to its minimum levels until < 3000 ha in 2010 (Fig. 3A). As the
peace process advanced, beginning in about 2012, forest to coca conversions increased again, following a similar
pattern of expanding coca cultivation that occurred during demilitarization period 1998 to 2002.
Findings of smaller coca transitions run counter to the dominant popular narrative that the conversion from
coca to cattle is a relevant transition in the Amazon (Fig. 3A,C). Coca to cattle follows a similar trend of stable
coca within the frontier (Fig. 3A), but outside the frontier coca to cattle is less common than coca to forest and
forest to coca conversions (Fig. 3C). These results suggest that coca farming is a preferable option within and
outside the frontier, and also that coca is more commonly abandoned (i.e., leading to forest regrowth) rather
than converted to cattle lands. Despite the overwhelming influence of cattle ranching outside the agricultural
frontier, the average annual area of coca to cattle conversion is ~ 1000 ha, with a maximum value of 3000 ha in
2003 (Fig. 3C), representing the smallest conversion category. Interestingly, the cattle to forest conversion lead-
ing to secondary forest (Fig. 3B,D) is more prominent than other kinds of coca transition (Fig. 3A,C). While
this critical conversion was not included in our hypothesized patterns (Fig. 1), the gradual increase from 2000
to 2012 indicates the resilience of the Amazon forest e­ cosystem57.

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Figure 2.  Trends in land conversion in the Colombian Amazon. Mapped area of coca and cattle was aggregated
to 5 km cells, and trends in area were summarized using the Theil Sen slope calculation. (A) Region with
transition from coca to new large cattle lands. (B) Large-scale illegal conversion past the agricultural frontier,
deeper into the Amazon. (C) Coca plots expansion within the Nukak Makú indigenous reserve. Map created in
QuantumGIS 3.16 (https://​www.​qgis.​org/​en/​site/).

Protected Areas remain havens for both coca and new cattle consolidation lands, which are most heavily
concentrated in the Protected Areas of Macarena, Nukak, La Paya, and Tinigua (Fig. 2, see SI). The direct conver-
sion from forest to cattle has irreversible consequences for pristine forests in Tinigua and Macarena (SI Fig. S5C,
S5F). Patterns of forest to cattle in Tinigua show how old and new farmers have purposefully fragmented and
appropriated Tinigua with sponsorship by FARC-EP dissidents and larger ­ranchers58,59. Dissidents have territorial
control in Guaviare and Putumayo, encouraging coca ­production60,61 In Macarena, forest to cattle conversion has
been slower, confined mostly to the park’s borders and not in the core area. Coca farming is most abundant in
Macarena, where it has been persistent since 1985 and has moved ~ 5 km inside PA boundaries (see SI Fig. S5A,
S5D). The Nukak Makú Indigenous reserve has the second largest area affected by coca farming (see Fig. S5A,
S5D); this alarming increase puts Indigenous peoples at risk of conflict with outsiders and government inter-
diction forces. As with all other areas, in both PA buffer zones and in their core areas, forest to coca conversions
prevail over coca to cattle conversion (see Fig. S5B, S5E). All mapped area transitions within and outside the
agricultural frontier are included in the SI.

Discussion
We find illicit activities (cattle ranching and coca farming) drive diverse land change patterns during the last
34 years. Using DL algorithms, we confirm the presence of hypothesized conversion patterns between forest-coca-
cattle, and we disentangle heretofore indistinguishable land use changes and their trajectories by exploiting the
spatial context in optical imagery. Our findings show that under the high uncertainty of the peace negotiation
process, farmers prioritized coca farming. This is also linked to the long period when the GoC failed to create
real alternatives to coca farmers in the study a­ rea62,63. In contrast, the realization of the peace accord motivated
the consolidation of new cattle ranching (Fig. 3B,D). The proliferation of coca farming and illegal cattle ranch-
ing coincides with shifting land tenure policies associated with the demobilization of the FARC-EP and the
handover of the territory to the GoC. These changes influenced actors’ expectations for deriving short-term
profits from specific land ­uses31. Market liberalization has historically explained land use changes in Colombian

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Figure 3.  Mapped areas for the conversion patterns forest-coca-cattle. First row represents conversion patterns
within the legal agricultural frontier defined in 2018, second row shows the patterns outside the frontier, in
which agriculture is considered illegal.

­agribusinesses64, particularly during the coffee boom in the late 70’s. Our current analysis shows that illicit activi-
ties in peripheral regions have also responded to the land use liberalization that emerged in the post-conflict
period. Nevertheless, the increases in cattle ranching well beyond the agricultural frontier and coca cultivation
in protected areas during the last six years represent a new threat to forest conservation in the Amazon.
The temporal expansion of coca farming is cyclical but remains insignificant in terms of area (~ 37.000 ha).
Additionally, patterns of forest regeneration are more important than any other conversion associated with
coca. Forest regeneration patterns are essential to prioritizing conservation efforts where illegal cattle ranching
has not yet consolidated. While coca farming remains spatially concentrated, cattle ranching—the only viable
agricultural alternative—is widely distributed across the Amazon and, as we show, is now deeper into Amazon.
Explanations for cattle investment are multifaceted. A fundamental explanation for expanding cattle ranching lies
in the logic of settler colonialism as immigrants exploit newly available lands in the frontier, propelling short-term
economic ­booms65. A second explanation is the historical role that landownership and ranching play in upward
social mobility and political p ­ ower66. Ranchers acquire pasture lands to enhance political participation, as well
as to guarantee control over territory and resources. While profits and control are underlying elements to explain
cattle dynamics, it is the land policies that make the consolidation of cattle ranching p ­ ossible8.
We identify three land policies that accelerate forest loss from coca and cattle in the Colombian Amazon:
(1) titling laws requiring agricultural productivity which favor large landowners and consolidation, (2) coca
eradication programs that push production deeper into protected areas, and (3) insufficient implementation
of peace accord elements to improve local forest governance. Land concentration by ranchers and elites confer
disproportionate power over their surrounding local c­ ommunities67. Under diverse legal or illegal mechanisms,
the main aim is to acquire control over local governments and institutions that perpetuate land accumulation.
Consequently, land policies have commonly privileged large landowners over smallholders. Land policies create
legal opportunities for legal titling if landholders could provide evidence of land possession and agricultural land
productivity on 75% of total f­ arms21,39. The most straightforward way to claim productivity on large landhold-
ings is cattle ranching. However, cattle ranching requires clearing significant forest areas and planting pasture to
prevent secondary forest regeneration, neither of which are inexpensive ­activities65. Forest to cattle conversion
thus requires an initial investment that farmers can only undertake with access to capital. While poor landless
farmers also take advantage of this process, it is only temporary. A common economic strategy for landless
farmers is clearing forested land, converting it to pasture, and "flipping" it for sale to better capitalized buyers.
Well-capitalized landholders then buy farms from smallholders that cannot demonstrate land productivity. After
selling lands in informal land markets, with no other local agricultural opportunities, landless farmers move from
relatively consolidated areas deeper into the forest. Consequently, any attempt by the government to provide
land to landless farmers is quickly repressed by powerful landowners. Taken together, in the peripheral lands
of the Amazon, the aim of land acquisition by large landowners is not profiting from cattle ranching but rather
securing expectations about the future value of land and speculating through illegal land m ­ arkets68,69. Our results
support this explanation, with a gradual linear increase in cattle ranching (Fig. 3B) until the signing of the peace
accord in 2016 when both forest to cattle and cattle consolidation grew rapidly (Fig. 3D).

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In contrast to land policies that accelerate cattle expansion, billions of dollars have been invested to stop coca
farming over the last 40 ­years70. However, our findings indicate that coca farming continues to expand. Our
time-series analysis reveals that the timing of coca farming adds weight to the claim that eradication programs
have only locally attenuated coca cultivation, even while displacing it deeper into PAs and outside the frontier
(Fig. 3A,C). Likewise, we show that coca farming persists even after coca substitution programs have imple-
mented agriculture alternatives and—similar to what is observed in Central America—interdiction also displaces
narcotrafficking deeper into ­PAs71,72. New land use policies associated with the peace accord such as PNIS, still do
not address the land claims and needs of small coca farmers. PNIS provides assistance to farmers outside PAs to
establish agricultural projects and for farmers living within PAs, economic incentives for restoration. However,
the Colombian Constitution restricts any agriculture activities within PAs, and the restoration itself does not
solve the livelihood issue of the families living in PAs. At the end of 2019, only 1% of the campesino families had
an agricultural p ­ roject46. While the GoC continues focused on eradication policies rather than the recognition
of legal titles, the permanence of families within PAs, and long-term goals for improving socio-economic condi-
tions, coca cultivation will likely follow the same spatio-temporal dynamics because it still provides high, steady,
short-term economic r­ eturns40,73.
The GoC began the negotiation process by recognizing that peace was necessary for continued economic
growth: by 2010, legally available land within the agricultural frontier was already occupied and consolidated.
The next frontier included territory held by FARC-EP. The explosion of illegal cattle ranching that we docu-
ment should come as no surprise. It was the next logical step for Colombia’s economy. The recent conversion
patterns tell us about local priorities in the Amazon: coca farming, cattle ranching, and the land markets that
support them coincide with local livelihood needs and large landowners’ interests. While cattle and coca are
not mutually exclusive activities during armed conflict, the narco-cattle ranching link is a common strategy for
territorial control and money ­laundering9. Recent efforts by the Colombian land agency established new norms
to develop a set of forest reserves that guarantee forest sustainability and low-impact activities with management
conditions by the local communities. Additionally, a conceptual change in forest conservation recognizes the
role of the community in the management and building strategies for their well-being. Practical examples of
success in other armed conflictive regions, such as the Peten in Guatemala, showed promising regional success.
Through forest concessions and product diversification, suitable economic returns to community members and
the protection of natural resources have been ­achieved74. In Colombia, key aspects of the peace accords have been
poorly implemented, but could directly contribute to halting narco-cattle46. The agreement includes strengthen-
ing governance at the local level through community-based land management, local political participation, and
serious alternatives to coca farming. For instance, VisionAmazonia, an initiative to reduce deforestation, has
promoted agro-environmental development through several pathways. VisionAmazonia aims to prioritize value
chains for sustainable non-timber products, promote ecotourism, and support the conversion of pastureland back
to forest (i.e., rastrojo). Practical examples in Guaviare are protecting ~ 30.000 ha through forest conservation
and ecotourism ­strategies61. In Putumayo, farmers have also begun to plant native timber-yielding varieties to
gradually recuperate diverse vegetation, soils, insects, microbial life, and watershed a­ reas60,75. While rastrojo is
viable for the natural recovery of soils and the environment, funding has yet to reach large areas and communities.
Instead, remaining rebel groups continue to pressure farmers to farm coca, and the common promotion of cattle
expansion as a unique agricultural alternative has posed daily persistent challenges for forest conservation during
this post-conflict period. Illicit cattle ranching is responsible for most of the deforestation, and while coca has
expanded deeper into PAs, it remains a small fraction of total deforestation. To better capture the individual driv-
ers of forest loss, future work should focus on improving coca farming accuracy because it may be confounded
with small subsistence agriculture in some regions. Additional field data at forested sites cleared for pasture as
well as forests cleared for a land grab should be collected to support improved discrimination of these distinct
drivers that have different ecological and policy implications. To account for the plurality of factors contribut-
ing to forest loss dynamics, we recommend blending academic and local knowledge to build a near-real-time
remote sensing system to monitor landscape change, create awareness, and expand "satellite activism"76 for forest
­conservation77. Detailed land censuses and significant tax payments for larger landholders are also necessary to
help stem the risk of illicit land markets appearing in post-conflict territories. This case study provides an applied
framework that could be used elsewhere to disentangle illicit land uses, quantify their presence, understand their
causes, and develop policies to manage them for the well-being of people and the environment. The availability
of frequent Earth Observation data resolves a key challenge of examining the role of historical and institutional
processes in the expansion of illicit land activities. This framework could shed light on emerging thorny issues
in land system science, including expansion of informal urban p ­ eripheries78,79, illegal commercial a­ griculture80,
illegal lumber h ­ arvesting3, illegal fishing and a­ quaculture81, and oil exploration leading to d­ eforestation82.

Methods
All available Landsat Collection 1 surface reflectance images from 1984 to 2019 were used in the analysis. The
satellite image dataset was then used to produce a time-series of radiometrically consistent, annual composites
using the LandTrendr algorithm (e.g., 83,84). Reference data for coca, cattle, and forest plots come from official
and published sources on an annual basis from 2009 to 2018. Coca patches were partially obtained only within
Protected Areas from SIMCI. Coca plots are visually delineated using high-resolution imagery and confirmed
by aerial i­ nspection34. Cattle and forest plots were obtained through the combination of land cover maps within
and outside ­PAs30 and Corine Land Cover (CLC) ­data85. The study area was spatially stratified into ~ 20 ­km2
blocks. Inside each spatial partition, we extracted overlapping 128-by-128 pixel subsets of Landsat imagery and
the reference labels. The model dataset consisted of 329,804 examples. More details about the image processing,
reference generation, and accuracy assessment are included in the SI.

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Coca and cattle ranching lands were classified using the UNet deep learning a­ rchitecture86. UNet resembles a
traditional convolutional autoencoder architecture (e.g., Vincent et al.87), but has additional "skip-connections"
(i.e., feature maps produced by the encoder are concatenated with feature maps produced by the decoder)
which improves the accuracy of the segmentation. The encoder network in the UNet architecture was replaced
with the MobileNetV3 ­encoder88. Hyperparameters were selected using 25 iterations of a random search over
the parameter space using an 80–20%, spatially stratified, train-test split of the modeling d­ ataset89. The model’s
90
weights were optimized using A ­ DAM . Model validation was conducted using a spatially-stratified fivefold
cross-validation ­procedure91. Each model developed during cross validation was applied to the time series of
Landsat composited imagery. The five separate classification time series were then merged into a final classified
time-series by taking the mode of the five predicted values at each pixel location for each year of the time series.
For more details on model development, validation, and inference, see the SI. A website with land transitions
maps is available: https://​muril​lop.​users.​earth​engine.​app/​view/​cocac​attle.

Data availability
The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the sensitivity of
the population affected including small farmers and the potential harm that could arise from sharing the specific
location of illicit land activities. However, the dataset is available from the corresponding author on reasonable
request. A website with land transition maps is available: https://m ​ urill​ op.u
​ sers.e​ arthe​ ngine.a​ pp/v​ iew/c​ ocaca​ ttle.

Received: 29 July 2022; Accepted: 27 January 2023

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Author contributions
P.J.M.-S. conceptualization, methodology, writing-original draft; and J.K. design of deep learning structure, con-
ceptualization, and writing of the paper. E.T. conceptualization, writing, and review of the paper. D.W. writing
and review of the paper; J.V.D.H. review and writing; and R.E.K. conceptualization, supervision, and writing of
the article. All authors approved the submitted version.

Funding
This work was performed at Oregon State University, partially funded by the Google Earth Engine grant (PI.
Robert E. Kennedy).

Competing interests 
The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://​doi.​org/​
10.​1038/​s41598-​023-​28918-0.
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to P.J.M.-S.
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