COLOMBIA COCA CROPS STILL THRIVING

RIO NEGRO, Colombia (AP) - In nearly a decade of U.S.-sponsored fumigation,
planes have sprayed hundreds of thousands of gallons of herbicide on
illicit drug crops in vast expanses of Colombia's highlands and rainforests.

Yet drug cultivation in the world's No. 1 cocaine-producing nation is at a
record high and climbing. Crop yields are also improving as traffickers
plant more potent strains of coca and opium poppy, the sources of cocaine
and heroin.

The stubbornness of the plants seems matched only by the determination of
U.S. and Colombian officials to continue the chemical counterattack.

As President Andres Pastrana awaits action in the U.S. Congress on a $1.6
billion aid package that would fund an accelerated spraying effort, new
estimates show coca cultivation up by 20 to 30 percent last year. Since
1995, it has more than doubled, according to the Colombian and U.S. figures.

Pastrana, who expressed serious reservations about fumigation's
effectiveness during his first months in office, has toned down the
criticism and now welcomes the U.S. assistance.

"If anyone has been tough on drug trafficking it's me," he told The
Associated Press earlier this month.

Colombian and U.S. officials including White House drug czar Barry
McCaffrey, who arrives Tuesday for a three-day visit, argue that drug crops
would be expanding even more rapidly if there wasn't any attempt to halt
their proliferation.

But even a recent effort to showcase the spraying effort ended up
highlighting the many questions surrounding it, including its distressing
impact on this Andean nation's diverse and fragile ecosystem.

Flying with anti-narcotics police to an opium poppy field in the
southwestern state of Huila, the view out the Bell 212 helicopter window is
one of huge scars in the forests, of valleys denuded by clear-cutting.

"That's the ecological crime of the narcos," national police spokesman
Carlos Perdomo says, gesturing at the deforested ridges around Rio Negro.

It is a crime that critics say is only aggravated by fumigation.

Coca- and opium-growers who've had their crops destroyed rarely quit.
Either they fell more trees elsewhere to plant or they wait until soil
microbes have decomposed the herbicide - typically a year - and reseed the
same plot.

"We've noted about a 40 to 50 percent replanting rate" of opium poppy
fields, admits Col. Edgar Orlando Barrero, the police eradication program
director.

Since the mid-1990s, coca growers have pushed ever deeper into the Amazon
basin to evade the crop-dusters, clearing tens of thousands of acres of
virgin rainforest. Every new acre planted requires that three be cleared.

More than two-fifths of Colombia's coca, or about 210 square miles' worth,
is grown in the rebel-dominated southern state of Putumayo. Pastrana plans
a major eradication effort there this year spearheaded by a new
U.S.-trained counternarcotics battalion.

The effort is likely to be opposed by the leftist insurgents who guard drug
crops and processing laboratories in Putumayo. Government officials also
expect violent protests by poor coca-growers.

The U.S. aid plan includes $145 million for alternative development --
programs to give peasants legal alternatives to making their living by
growing drug plants. Nonetheless, skeptics expect most of the poor coca
growers to simply continue their cat-and-mouse game with the spray planes.

Field studies by Ricardo Vargas, a sociologist and eradication researcher,
show that when coca areas are detected and sprayed, growers simply migrate
to other regions where drug mafias can offer the chemicals, labs and
clandestine air strips needed to process and transport cocaine.

Government figures bear out this argument. An explosion in coca cultivation
in Putumayo coincided with its near elimination in the eastern state of
Guaviare, where nearly 245 square miles were sprayed with herbicide in
1997-98.

"Coca has a behavior completely independent of eradication," Vargas said.

With tens of thousands of Colombian peasants making a living off coca, some
analysts fear stepped-up spraying will only increase their support for the
guerrillas who have been fighting the Colombian government for more than
three decades.

Because of rebel resistance, the eradication business has become
increasingly militarized. Spray aircraft were hit by gunfire on 35
occasions last year alone and a key counterdrug base was overrun by rebels
the week Pastrana took office in August 1998.

The United States has already donated six Black Hawk UH-60 helicopters,
equipped with miniguns that fire 1,200 rounds per minute, to the Colombian
police to protect the eight spray planes now in action. The proposed U.S.
aid package calls for 30 more Black Hawks, for the air force and army, and
15 more spray planes.

"I don't think we will ever solve this problem without an end to the armed
conflict," says Klaus Nyholm, director for Colombia of the U.N. Drug
Control Program.