WEANING THE YANKS OFF THE DRUG WAR

U.S. Prefers Military Offensive To Peaceful Alternative Crop Strategies

Vietnam had Agent Orange. Colombia may soon be getting something called
fusarium oxysporum, a fungus that the Yanks are considering unleashing on
the coca and opium fields of Colombia in the name of its ever-growing and
obsessive war on drugs.

As plant-killers go, fusarium's toxic, root-eating properties carry
potentially devastating environmental and health side effects.

A proposal to use a strain of the fungus on illegal pot operations in
Florida was killed after the head of that state's environmental protection
branch warned that the fungus is difficult to control and can cause disease
in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn and
vines.

When it comes to the U.S. war on drugs in Colombia, it seems anything goes.

But all the spraying the Yanks have done thus far hasn't slowed drug
production any. Colombia currently accounts for 80 per cent of the world's
cocaine and 70 per cent of all the heroin sold in the eastern U.S.

And because the U.S. agencies driving the counter-narcotics agenda abroad
are dominated by the military, the idea of putting money into education,
health, housing, electricity and agro-industry as a way of moving Colombian
peasants away from coca and opium farming is getting short shrift.

Such alternative development is working well but slowly in Bolivia and Peru.

Won't Allow

And time is what the Americans won't allow. Under Plan Colombia, the $1.6
million aid package winding its way through Congress, the Yanks are
mandating that all coca and opium crops be eradicated by 2005.

So, while some $90 million has been tabbed for development programs,
millions of dollars more have been earmarked for manual eradication, aerial
spraying, destruction of narco laboratories and strengthening of the
Colombian army.

Complicating the issue is the fact that FARC guerrillas waging war against
the government depend on the drug trade to fuel their military machine.

Winifred Tate, a spokesperson for the Washington Center on Latin America,
says the U.S. is obsessed with wiping out drugs to the detriment of social
programs

"The logic behind these efforts tends to be one of repression, force and
criminalization," says Tate. "Not, 'How do we meet the needs of rural
communities involved in drug production?'"

If history's any clue, this approach will do more to exacerbate the volatile
political and social climate than stem the drug flow.

As Aldo Lale-Demoz, the United Nations' chief of programs in Latin America,
tells NOW over the phone from Vienna: "For the longest time the attitude has
been that the only thing we can do in Colombia is spray our way out of the
problem. That has shown not to be very productive in the long term."

The cultivation of coca, opium and marijuana for medicinal and traditional
uses among indigenous populations is actually legal in Colombia on plots up
to three hectares.

The law, however, is often applied arbitrarily, and the police do not
distinguish between peasants' plots and those run by drug traffickers.

The problem confronting peasants who have lost their crops to spraying is
how to survive. Often, they turn to picking coca at plantations run by
traffickers, who may also stake the peasants to their own crop in still
remoter areas.

The coca and poppy frontier expands. The dynamic also creates sympathy for
the FARC and a deep animosity for a government the peasants view as being
hostile.

The massive eradication campaign envisioned by Plan Colombia raises the
spectre not only of massive social unrest, but the potential for thousands
of peasant refugees.

Here, Lale-Demoz says development programs like the kind the UN has
sponsored in drug trouble spots like Bolivia and Peru would go further
toward stemming drug production.

"It's always been our policy to diversify economies and reduce dependence on
illicit crops," he says. "Unfortunately, because of the situation in
Colombia, it is very difficult to find major sponsors for (similar) more
ambitious projects."

In Bolivia, "legal space" legislation that divides the country into
traditional zones (where coca can be grown in defined amounts), transition
zones (where peasants are given financial incentives to change to food
crops) and illicit zones (where coca is illegal) has helped gradually cut
the coca and opium-poppy dependency.

In Peru, the government went a step further and removed coca cultivation
from the penal code, resulting in a 56-per-cent decline in the area planted
with coca since 1995.

It's true that Colombian president Andres Pastrana has launched a small and
largely unsuccessful alternative development pilot project -- in the
FARC-held demilitarized zone.

Among other things, it focuses on strengthening local farmers' organizations
and producing peach palm, rubber, cattle, fish, coffee and fruit.

But lack of infrastructure is a major impediment. Trails exist where roads
need to be built. In some areas, extensive pesticides and fertilizer
applications have rendered the soil nearly unusable, so that any long term
development program would require the relocation of large numbers of
peasants, a very tricky proposition that brings up the issue of land reform.

Seize Land

James Jones, the United Nations Drug Control Program's (UNDCP) former
Colombia adviser, says the U.S. government tried to get Colombia to seize
land owned by narco traffickers and turn it over to peasants as part of a
land reform proposal. But nothing ever came of it.

"It's a dire situation," Jones says. "You have an enormous number of peasant
farmers who basically don't have any way of making a living."

Time, meanwhile, is not on Pastrana's side. The U.S. State Department is
intent on pushing its chemical fusarium solution.

"The highest priority," the U.S. State Department calls the effort in an
unclassified, May 99 "action request" released through freedom of
information channels in the U.S.

The State Department has set aside $400,000 for a research station to
conduct similar trials in Colombia.

Use of the fungus is also being made a condition of U.S. military aid to
Colombia.

One State Department official is quoted in a U.S. magazine as saying
fusarium is the preferred option because it's "more cost effective and more
environmentally friendly" than chemical herbicides.

The same official, who asked not to be named when reached by NOW, tries to
downplay the State Department's fusarium push, but also acknowledges that,
at some point, testing will have to be moved out of the laboratory and into
the field.

"We're willing to let the science determine whether it's something we should
favour," he says.

Closer to the ground in Bogota, Colombia, the UNDCP's representative Klaus
Nyholm says that despite the ecological concerns, fusarium is still very
much an option.

Is the State Department using the UN as a cover to wage its biological war,
as is being suggested in some quarters?

"You'll have to ask the State Department about that," says Nyholm. "We
haven't made up our mind yet. If we do get into this, we would do it in a
very controlled way. We don't want nasty surprises."