TROUBLE FOR PLAN COLOMBIA

Opposition Mounts To The Aerial Spraying Of Coca Fields

Bogota -- 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 among both Colombian and American politicians opposition is
growing to the controversial crop-spraying programme-the central
pillar of Plan Colombia, an attempt, backed by the United States, to
tackle drugs and guerrillas.

On July 27th the judge had 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 that
they had not been consulted 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
Nari o 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 a byproduct, 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 are grown. This week some of them lobbied the United States
Congress, which is currently considering a request for a further $676m
in anti-drug aid to Colombia and its neighbours. The Bogota office of
the UN Drug-Control Programme recently called for international
monitoring of 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.

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.