COLOMBIAN GOVERNORS SLAM U.S.-BACKED COCA SPRAYING

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four Colombian governors pressed the United States
on Tuesday to stop use of a herbicide on drug plantations in their country,
charging the U.S.-funded Plan Colombia had destroyed food crops and hurt
the health of peasants.

The governors of the four most affected provinces Putumayo, Narino, Cauca
and Tolima, called for an end to the aerial spraying and more funding for
social programs to encourage farmers to turn to legal crops.

Complaints of stomach upsets and skin rashes have increased 60 percent in
Putumayo since spraying of plantations with the herbicide glyphosate began
on Dec. 22, said Gov. Ivan Gerardo Guerrero, whose province grows 60
percent of Colombia's coca.

``Even though they tell us we can bathe in glyphosate, and that an American
drank a whole glass of it and nothing happened to him, we do not believe
that glyphosate is harmless to human beings'', he told a news conference.

Deformed babies have been born in the rural municipality of Puerto Guzman,
where spraying with the defoliant took place in 1999 and no other chemicals
are used in farming, he said.

The governors said they had no scientific proof of the health hazards and
it was hard to gather data from families who had to walk up to 12 hours to
the nearest medical center.

But they said there was evidence of glyphosate being blown into the water
used by fish farms and charged that spraying by crop duster had been based
solely on satellite photographs without taking into account the local
population.

U.S. officials said glyphosate was the most widely used herbicide in the
world, commonly sprayed in gardens in the United States to kill weeds.

They said there was no serious evidence of any impact on human health. The
State Department said, however, that it has agreed with the U.S. Congress
to study whether the recent spraying in southern Colombia has had a health
impact.

U.S. Defends Herbicide

The U.S. government acknowledged that farm crops may have been damaged by
the aerial spraying of 62,000 acres (25,000 hectares) with glyphosate
through Feb 5, mainly in Putumayo.

William Brownfield, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Western
Hemisphere Affairs, told journalists on Monday that drug crops were often
camouflaged among legal crops.

``In those situations, there is little remedy for the affected grower,
because the presumption is that he or she did it intentionally for the
purpose of protecting the illegal crop,'' Brownfield said.

The United States last year committed $1 billion to funding a military and
police offensive to stamp out cocaine output in southern Colombia, the
world's largest producer of the drug.

The U.S. aid is mostly military training and helicopters to deploy army
battalions to guard police on anti-drug mission in areas run by entrenched
Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries.

The governors said the large military component of Plan Colombia was only
serving to deepen the spiral of violence that was destroyed their societies.

``We are looking for an alternative strategy, one based on real social
justice that does not label us as delinquents,'' Guerrero said, speaking in
name of small farmers who have turned to drug crops for a livelihood.

The governors said they were all for the eradication of industrial
plantations, but insisted on the mechanical rather than chemical
destruction of the coca shrubs, followed by the handing of land to peasants
for legal farming.

``The fumigation arrived in 30 days in enormous quantities, but the social
aid has only begun to arrive drop by drop'', said Guerrero, who is
proposing drawing 27,000 peasant families into alternative crop programs
funded by Plan Colombia.

Senators Help Andean Trade

The governors met with U.S. legislators in their bid to lobby against the
herbicide spraying and for $600 million in U.S. aid next year to fund
social programs in six provinces where drugs are grown.

In a bid to help Colombia's economy, U.S. senators introduced legislation
on Tuesday to renew and expand U.S. trade benefits for four nations of the
Andean region.

The bill would extend the Andean Trade Preferences Act (ATPA), which
expires on Dec. 4, to September 2005 and provide the same duty-free access
for certain apparel products that Caribbean Basin countries already enjoy.