Investment decisions are powered by fear and greed. Prodigious risk can be mirrored by enormous reward, and few markets exemplify this more dramatically than the illicit cocaine trade.

The drug starts out as leaves of the coca plant, of which around 530 kilograms are needed as the agricultural input for a kilogram of cocaine. For this quantity of leaves the farmers of Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Peru are paid around A$950. It’s a pragmatic crop for poor farmers; for example in Peru it is more than twice as profitable as cacao or coffee.