Fentanyl, cartels or simple market glut: what’s behind collapse of Colombia’s coca market?

A worker holds shredded coca leaves at a cocaine lab in Colombia’s Putumayo department. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Noralba Galvis usually returns home to her village in the Colombian jungle with fresh supplies of rice, meat, salt and other foods stuffed into bags. But today, as the 40-year-old steps onboard a boat for the two-hour journey home along the Putumayo River, she carries just a single cardboard box.

“My mother gave me these chicks,” she says. “Chickens are great in times of emergency like these, when there is nothing else left to eat.”