Pubdate: Thu, 02 Aug 2001
Source: Economist, The (UK)
Copyright: 2001 The Economist Newspaper Limited
Contact:  http://www.economist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/132

FAIRY DUST

Many Americans and Colombians are losing faith in a scheme to eradicate 
drug crops by aerial spraying. But America's anti-drug strategy depends on it

The crop-dusting planes of the Colombian police were back in the air this 
week, dumping clouds of weedkiller on drug crops after a judge softened a 
ban that had grounded the flights for several days. But opposition to the 
crop-spraying programme is growing in Colombia, the source of most of 
America's cocaine and some of its heroin.

In America, too, doubts are growing about paying for such a controversial 
scheme.

Congress is currently considering next year's aid budget for the Andean 
countries, including follow-up funding for Plan Colombia, an 
American-inspired against both drug crops and the guerrillas in whose 
territory a lot of them are grown.

The problems with spraying--the central pillar of Plan Colombia--call into 
question America's main tactic in its war on illegal drugs.

Last week, the Colombian judge found in favour of a group of Amazonian 
Indians, who argued that the government had not given enough study to the 
impact of the weedkiller on health and the environment, and had not 
bothered to consult them before the spraying began.

This week the judge clarified his ruling, saying that it applied only to 
"indigenous reserves" in the Amazon region.

The police say they will carry on spraying everywhere else.The crop-dusters 
are currently concentrating on some 14,000 hectares (35,000 acres) of coca 
in the departments of Narino and Cauca.

Officials insist that, because of the scale of Colombia's coca crop and 
because some of it is in guerrilla areas, aerial spraying is the only way 
to eradicate it. Coca eradication, along with police action against 
drug-processing laboratories and development programmes for alternative 
crops, lies at the heart of the increasingly elaborate American effort to 
cut the flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States. As part of $1.3 
billion in mainly military aid approved last year, the United States is 
providing the Colombian police with more crop-dusters and helicopters for a 
stepped-up eradication campaign.

This has seen 52,000 hectares sprayed since December, half of them in Putumayo.

Opponents claim that the spraying damages food crops and human health. 
American and Colombian officials insist that Roundup, the glyphosate-based 
weedkiller made by Monsanto that they spray, is harmless and is widely used 
on American farms.

But there have been no studies of its effect when applied from the air in 
concentrated form in the tropics.

Colombia's human-rights ombudsman claims that additives in Roundup designed 
to make it stick to plants are damaging to health.

They include polyoxyethyleneamines, which irritate the respiratory tract, 
eyes and skin, and dioxane, a suspected carcinogen.

As well as the ombudsman, opponents of spraying include the elected 
governors of six southern departments where much of the coca and opium 
poppies is grown.

This week some of them lobbied America's Congress, which is contemplating 
forking out another $676m in anti-drug aid to Colombia and its neighbours. 
The European Union has called for less use of the stick against coca 
farmers, and further carrots, in the form of funding for crop substitution 
programmes and rural development schemes.

Even the UN Drug-Control Programme (UNDCP) recently expressed misgivings 
about the spraying.

A second objection to the spraying programme is that, as long as demand for 
cocaine remains strong, eradication will be ineffective. Indeed, critics 
say that it encourages coca farmers to move into remote jungle, and to 
plant twice as much, as an insurance policy.

Anne Patterson, the United States' ambassador in Bogota, recently admitted 
that coca cultivation in Colombia has been rising, despite the eradication 
campaign.

According to the Americans' latest estimate, there were 136,200 hectares of 
coca in Colombia last December, up from 122,500 a year before, although 
58,000 hectares were eradicated in that period.

Mrs Patterson also said that coca had appeared for the first time in the 
departments of Arauca and Vichada.

The same pattern is played out on a grander scale throughout the region. 
Coca cultivation only really took off in Colombia in the mid-1990s, as a 
result of American-backed campaigns against the crop in Peru and Bolivia. 
But America's heavy-handed intervention is unpopular in those countries 
too. In Bolivia, where eradication and alternative development have gone 
furthest, unemployed former coca farmers have swelled protests against the 
government. In Peru as well, coca farmers have demonstrated, most recently 
against forced eradication of coca in national parks.

Coca production has been rising again there since 1999, according to the 
UNDCP. The Apurimac valley, where there have been many efforts at 
alternative development since the mid-1990s, is once again "a sea of coca", 
according to Hugo Cabieses, an adviser to coca farmers.

With most Andean economies in the doldrums, and with the price of coffee 
(an alternative crop) in a deep slump, local farmers are more desperate 
than usual.

Americans, too, are getting edgy about their country's policy.

There was uproar in April when a Peruvian jet, alerted by an American 
surveillance aircraft, mistook missionaries for drug smugglers and shot 
their light plane down, killing an American mother and her baby. On August 
2nd, the United States' government was due to release the report of an 
investigation into the incident, which was expected to blame sloppy 
procedures by both Peruvian and American operatives. The deaths brought 
home to ordinary Americans just how much their country's "war on drugs" in 
the Andes has come to resemble a real war, complete with civilian 
casualties and some less-than-attractive allies, such as Vladimiro 
Montesinos, Peru's jailed former intelligence chief who first put the 
shoot-down policy into practice. By the same token, American commentators 
worry about backing a war against left-wing guerrillas in Colombia, 
especially given the Colombian army's spotty human-rights record.

But John Walters, who has been nominated as America's "drug tsar", is a 
strong supporter of such "supply-side" anti-drug programmes. Like 
first-world-war generals, the drug warriors' response to setbacks has 
typically been to throw more resources into the breach.

The police crop-duster fleet is due to expand from 12 to 26 aircraft over 
the next nine months.

Mrs Patterson says that the spraying programme is only now getting up to 
full speed and that Plan Colombia will stem the rise in coca cultivation 
within 18 months.

Maybe, but American officials have been chasing the mirage of victory in 
the Andean coca war for two decades now.
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