Colombia Scorns Plan For Coca-Killing Fungus

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The Colombian government says it has no intention
of testing or even further studying a fungus promoted by the United
Nations and the United States as a potential "silver bullet" for
killing coca plants.

Environment Minister Juan Mayr said the U.S. State Department "told
lies" when it reported last week that Colombia had agreed to
field-test the fungus before deciding whether to it use in a campaign
against the cocaine-producing plants.

"We will not accept the introduction of any foreign element, which is
what they have offered us under the name Fusarium oxysporum," Mayr
said in an interview Friday. "We have told them to forget it."

Mayr said a team of scientists from the government, Bogota's National
University and several prestigious private institutes examined the
plan presented several months ago under U.N. auspices and rejected
it.

They warned of possible mutations by the fungus and adverse effects on
people and the environment.

Based on expert opinions, "I think it makes no sense to permit the
entry of an external biological agent that can have an adverse effect
on our ecosystems," said Mayr, who has the authority to reject the use
of any herbicide based on the fungus in Colombia.

Mayr said the government would welcome money for research into
alternative biological controls based on "blights" or insects already
present in the coca-growing areas.

He said there was no evidence that Fusarium oxysporum -- an outbreak
of which ravaged coca in Peru in the early 1990s -- naturally exists
in the southern states where most of the nearly 300,000 acres of coca
are grown.

U.S. anti-drug aid -- President Clinton on Thursday approved a $1.3
billion aid package, much of it for military helicopters -- would
permit increased aerial eradication of coca crops using chemical
herbicides already approved by Mayr's ministry.

Leftist rebels have impeded fumigation, often firing on crop-dusting
planes. The rebels and the peasant coca farmers contend that chemical
spraying causes illnesses and kills food crops as well as coca.

The development of a safe, nontoxic, Fusarium-based herbicide that
kills only the coca would "obviate these concerns," argued the spurned
U.N. proposal, which was to be financed with a $300,000 grant from the
U.S. Department of Agriculture.

According to Mayr, many of the complaints about the approved
herbicide, glyphosate, are exaggerated.

Amid complaints from U.S. environmentalists, Florida last year ditched
a plan to test a strain of Fusarium against marijuana crops.

And Colombians question why the U.S. government is so eager to use the
fungus in their country.

"Why apply it, even in a test, on Colombian territory and not in the
United States?" Bogota's leading El Tiempo newspaper said in an
editorial Saturday. "Is destroying coca a mission to be carried out at
any cost, without any considerations?"