COLOMBIA AGREES TO TEST HERBICIDE ON COCA

Pressure From U.S. Overcomes Environmental Damage Concerns

Under pressure from the United States, Colombia reluctantly has agreed to
take the first step toward developing a powerful biological herbicide
against the coca and heroin-poppy fields that are spreading almost
unchecked across its countryside, Colombian and U.S. officials said Wednesday.

For years, U.S. officials have been quietly debating ways to conduct field
tests of such an herbicide, developed from a fungus that occurs naturally
in many types of coca and other plants.

Now, Colombian officials say they are completing a proposal to the United
Nations that would include testing for the presence of the fungus, Fusarium
oxysporum, in coca, the raw material of cocaine.

If the fungus is found in Colombian varieties of coca, Colombian scientists
would go on to evaluate its effectiveness, safety and environmental impact
as an herbicide.

"What we want is a program of research--and only research--on the use of
biological controls against these crops," the Colombian environment
minister, Juan Mayr, said Wednesday.

The Colombian government's uneasy support for the project comes as
President Clinton is about to sign a bill providing $1.3 billion in aid to
Colombia to fight drug traffickers and the insurgents who protect their trade.

Some powerful Republicans in Congress told Colombian officials that they
were supporting the spending on the expectation that Colombia would agree
to explore the use of Fusarium fungus in its coca fields.

Within the Clinton administration, officials said, the testing of fungal
herbicides was also pushed by the White House drug policy adviser, Gen.
Barry McCaffrey, and by officials of the U.S. Southern Command, which is
overseeing the U.S. overhaul of Colombia's armed forces.

Environmentalists and other activists in both countries are raising a din
of objections to any field tests of the fungus, arguing that it is
virtually a biological weapon--one that might upset Colombia's ecology or
endanger farmers, animals and food crops.

Last year, similar complaints by environmentalists in Florida prompted
state officials there to put aside plans to test a variant of Fusarium for
possible use against marijuana fields.

Several plant pathologists who have studied the fungus extensively said
there is relatively little scientific basis for the assertions about its
danger. They acknowledged that a great deal of testing still needs to be
done, but they added that the most significant unanswered questions might
have less to do with the safety of the fungus than with its effectiveness
and cost.

"If they're looking at local strains of the fungus, then I can't see
something scientifically dangerous about it," said Jonathan Gressel, a
professor of plant sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in
Rehovot, Israel. "What you're doing is taking a disease that is already
present and putting on more of it."

"But they'll be lucky if it works," Gressel added. "Because typically this
inundative strategy isn't good enough in commercial agriculture, and I'm
sure the narcos have been planning ahead. They'll probably go to fungicides
or breed their coca to be resistant to the fungus. It's relatively easy to do."

The concerns about Fusarium's proposed use as a mycoherbicide, or fungal
herbicide, have been heightened by the shadowy history of research into its
impact on drug crops. Indeed, the proposed Colombian study comes after
years of often-secret investigation by scientists in the United States and
the former Soviet Union.

Officials said Fusarium, a naturally occurring fungus with variants that
can cause wilt in everything from tomatoes and grain to marijuana, was
identified as a possible weapon in the drug fight by CIA scientists in the
early 1980s. The U.S. Agriculture Department began more extensive research
into its use on coca in 1988 and continued the work for nearly a decade.

At roughly the same time, Soviet biological weapons scientists at the
Institute of Plant Genetics in Uzbekistan were working to develop Fusarium
fungus, plant bacteria and other pathogens to destroy opium poppies.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States continued to pay
for research at the laboratory as part of an effort to keep its
impoverished scientists from joining the biological weapons programs of
countries such as Iraq and Iran.

Some of the same research now continues under the auspices of the United
Nations Drug Control Program, with has quietly supported the use of
biological controls against drug crops since 1976.

"Whatever happened in the past, the work has to be redone now in an open
environment," said Eric Rosenquist, one of the officials who has worked
longest on the fungus. "Only then can you debate it on its merits."

"I don't see this as some horrible thing that's going to mutate and kill
people--that's science fiction," added Rosenquist, a program leader for
international programs at the Agriculture Department's Research Service in
Beltsville, Md. "But you have to demonstrate that it is going to be
effective, and that hasn't been done yet."