US SPRAYS POISON IN DRUGS WAR

Colombia Aid Includes Plan To Target Coca Fields With GM Herbicide Which
Kills Other Crops And Threatens Humans

A torrent of potentially lethal herbicide is set to be unleashed across
great swaths of Colombia as part of a new US aid package which was finally
approved by Congress last week.

A hidden and undebated condition of the $1.6 billion package - meant to
finance the Colombian government's fight against the now overlapping forces
of guerrilla rebels and narco-cartels - is a plan for military aircraft to
spray the country's coca-growing areas.

The scheme echoes the infamous defoliation of Vietnam because the plan
involves a mycoherbicide called Fusarium EN-4. The Fusarium fungus is the
root for many of the chemical weapons developed by the US, the Soviet
Union, Britain, Israel, France and Iraq.

Mycotoxicologist Jeremy Bigwood - working with a fellowship grant to carry
out research into Fusarium derivatives used in biological warfare - told
The Observer that the use of the fungus in Colombia would damage crops
other than cocaine, and develop mutations that could lethally affect humans
with immune deficiencies.

Fusarium works by infecting crops with a soil-borne mould which secretes
toxins into their roots, which then putrefy and dissolve the plants' cells,
killing them or - worse still - affecting the animals or humans who feed
off them. During the late 1980s, a mystery epidemic of Fusarium suddenly
attacked a coca-growing area of Peru. Bigwood was working as a
photo-journalist and teamed up with a Latin American expert, Sharon
Stevenson, to publish an article in the Miami Herald detailing extensive
damage to other crops than coca in the Peruvian valley.

Ruined peasants said they had seen helicopters spraying a brownish smoke
across the fields, but it remains a mystery whether the Fusarium epidemic
was an experiment by the US and Peruvian authorities, as Bigwood and
Stevenson suspected.

Fusarium next emerged in 1999 when Colonel Jim McDonough - a former
colleague of White House drug czar General Barry McCaffrey, now in charge
of the present Colombian operation - was hired by Governor Jeb Bush to run
the Florida anti-drug office. He proposed to spray the fungus's EN-4 strain
on the state's copious marijuana crops. His adviser in the scheme was Dr
David Sands, now a professor at the University of Montana in Bozeman, who
had extracted the strain for the US Department of Agriculture.

The plan was scotched when the head of Florida's Department of
Environmental Protection, Dr David Struhs, wrote a letter to the colonel
dated 6 April 1999, saying that the 'mutagenicity' of the fungus 'was by
far the most disturbing factor in attempting to use a Fusarium species as a
herbicide. It is difficult if not impossible to control the spread of the
Fusarium species,' he wrote. 'The mutated fungi can cause disease in a
large number of crops including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn and
vines'. He added that the mutated genus could stay in the ground for 40 years.

During research for his lecture, Bigwood traced Sands to Colombia where he
was an executive with Agricultural and Biological Control, a company which
markets the fungus. He visited scientists to tell them about EN-4, and -
according to the same scientists' accounts to Bigwood - instructed them not
to talk to the press.

The government's 'fumigation' of coca-growing areas of Colombia had been
continuing for some time on a small scale, with Indians in the high Andean
villages complaining of nausea, rashes and stomach problems after the
spray-planes had swooped over. They have also damaged legitimate crops,
thereby undermining government efforts to support farmers who have
renounced poppy and coca growing.

The agent used in these cases was Glyphosate, marketed by the Monsanto
company (famous for GM foods) as 'Roundup'. Monsanto had been forced by a
court case in New York to withdraw claims that the product was 'safe,
non-toxic and harmless'.

The limited spraying programme did nothing to curb the mass production of
either cocaine or heroin. Official sources fear even if the forthcoming
programme were to wipe out a third of the drug, that would send the price
of the remaining two-thirds 'through the ceiling'.

US government researchers, says Bigwood, initially insisted that the EN-4
strain was 'species specific', designed to attack only the Erythroxylum
genus in a coca plant. But, he says, there are 200 other plant species
within that genus which do not contain coca and could therefore be affected
and destroyed. Even this does not fully define the threat to other crops
because, says Bigwood, 'it mutates into another organism, capable of
attacking another plant. The protagonists of Fusarium can then hide behind
the fact that when it attacks something else, it has become something else.'

Bigwood's greatest concern is with the potential effect not on other crops
than coca, but on humans. Among the Colombian scientists who met with Sands
was Eduardo Posada, president of the Colombian Centre for International
Physics, who found Fusarium to be 'highly toxic'. His data found that that
the mortality rate among hospital patients who were immune-deficient and
in-fected by the fungus was 76 per cent.

'To apply a mycoherbicide from the air that has been associated with a 76
per cent kill rate of hospitalised human patients would be tantamount to
biological warfare', he said.