Coca growers in Colombia should be flying high, as the cultivation of the leaf used to make cocaine greatly increased in 2014.

As detailed in an Associated Press article, the Office of National Drug Control Policy has stated the amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia went up 39 percent in 2014 to about 276,000 acres. This increase comes after six straight years of declining or steady coca production.

The data for the new findings was gathered by satellites, which the U.S. government annually uses to survey land where coca is known to grow.

The release of this report has taken place at a time when Colombians have shown an increasing disdain towards the U.S.-led aerial program that has been blamed for spraying over 4 million acres of coca crops in the last 20 years.

In April, Colombia's Health Ministry recommended the suspension of a fumigation program after the World Health Organization's research arm found the herbicide glyphosate, which is used to spray coca, to be a carcinogen.

Regarding the timing of the information released, Adam Isacson, a veteran analyst of Colombia's troubled history at the Washington Office on Latin America, told the AP: "It's no accident this was released just as the fumigation program is on the edge of being suspended."

Yesid Reyes, Colombia's Justice Minister, has stated that the newly released report should lead to some deep reflection, saying: "Although we've had a lot of success, the anti-drug policy needs to change because it's demonstrated not to be as efficient as we'd like."

The President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, has for some time been trying to reconfigure current drug laws regarding cocaine.

A 2011 piece in the Guardian quoted him on the failures of the war on drugs, stating: "The world needs to discuss new approaches… we are basically still thinking within the same framework as we have done for the last 40 years."