By Hugh Bronstein

BOGOTA, March 27 (Reuters) - The number of Colombians who are poor dropped by two million in the past four years but people living in the countryside saw little of that improvement, the government said on Tuesday.

Helped by a strong economic expansion, the percentage of poor Colombians fell to 45 percent in June 2006 from 56 percent in 2002, said Colombia's Planning Department.

Economic growth was a healthy 6.8 percent last year, the best since 1978, fueled by foreign investors who bought into President Alvaro Uribe's U.S.-backed crackdown on left-wing rebels fighting a four-decade-old insurgency.

Uribe also struck a peace deal with right-wing paramilitaries under which more than 31,000 fighters have turned in their arms since he took power in 2002.

But it is mostly urban Colombians who are benefiting from the boom. Rural poverty fell but remains above 62 percent, the Planning Department report says.

This is a concern for Colombians who have been riveted by a television news series and newspaper articles this week about malnutrition afflicting indigenous children in the western Colombian jungle province of Choco.

News programs have been filled with images of emaciated children in Choco, where cocaine traffickers battle over lucrative drug smuggling routes, often displacing entire villages. Colombia is the world's largest cocaine producer.

Authorities said they seized 6.5 tonnes of the drug worth $150 million in Choco on Tuesday while officials warned of a humanitarian crisis in areas without hospitals or clean water.

"It is enormously worrying," said Volmar Perez, Colombia's human rights ombudsman.

Uribe won re-election by a landslide last year and remains popular despite a scandal in which eight of his congressional allies have been jailed and are awaiting trial for colluding with the paramilitaries, who have carried out some of the worst massacres and other atrocities of the war.

Thousands of Colombians are killed in the conflict and tens of thousands are forced from their homes by violence every year.

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