The purpose of this article is to discuss initiatives and programmes put in place in certain countries to eradicate illegal cultivation, as well as their negative consequences for the farmers who participate in them and those who do not, particularly in Latin America, especially Brazil. The article tackles the question of the cultivation of plants such as cannabis, considered to have rather a different illegality. Such cultivation includes a considerable quantity of people in an activity which, in the drug production chain, is not violent crime in the way criminology would normally consider it, though there is work exploitation outside regulatory limits.