ECOLOGICAL HOTSPOTS NAMED AS LATEST CASUALTIES IN COLOMBIA'S DRUGS WAR

CULTIVATING crops of illegal drugs in Colombia is threatening some of the
world's rarest birds and plants. Half the forest cleared in the country
each year is being lost to the burgeoning number of coca and poppy fields,
says a Colombian scientist working in the US.

And drug eradication programmes sponsored by the US are making the problem
worse, says Maria Alvarez of Columbia University in New York. Rather than
stamping out the drugs trade, the programmes are simply forcing growers to
move into more inaccessible regions such as the Colombian highlands - which
are home to some of the world's most diverse and fragile ecosystems.

Ecological "hotspots" containing a unique blend of species pepper the
country I s highlands. "Some are extremely localised to one valley or
mountain top," says Norman Myers of Oxford University. Two years ago, Myers
urged conservation groups to prioritise safeguarding biodiversity hotspots
around the world (Nature, vol 403, p 6772).

But Colombia is a hotbed of civil unrest and illicit drugs cultivation.
Guerrillas control much of the countryside and the acreage devoted to coca
and poppy growing has risen by an average 21 per cent a year, says Alvarez.
In Conservation Biology (vol 16, p 1086 she has mapped out the extent to
which drugs crops are spreading into ecologically sensitive areas.

But some doubt that the drugs trade is the real problem. "Coca is no more a
threat to conservation or threatened species than infrastructure projects,
mining, logging and especially cattle farming," says Paul Salaman, a bird
specialist at the Natural History Museum, who has worked in Colombia for 12
years.

But Alvarez says that, like subsistence farmers, drugs growers clear the
forest, plant their crops, then move on to clear more forest. "What matters
is not the bulk of the deforestation, [but] where it is happening," she
told New Scientist. So far, drug cultivation has been concentrated in the
Amazonian forests of southern Colombia, which the government says is a low
conservation priority.

But this is also where the Colombian government has focused its drug
eradication efforts, sending out US-sponsored planes to spray herbicide on
coca and poppy fields. The bad news is that drugs growers escape this
attention by moving to highland forests, often outside government control.
Coca production has increased five times since small-scale government
spraying started 16 years ago, despite an So-fold increase in herbicide
applications (see Graph).

Alvarez says there is now significant deforestation in several hotspots
identified by Myers, including the Dorien lowlands near Panama and the
north-west Andean mountain forests near Ecuador. One threatened area covers
the entire range of Eriocnemis mirabilis, the colourful puffleg
hummingbird. Because the number of rare species is highly concentrated in
these areas, clearing creates far more irreversible damage.

Most of the drug acreage is planted with coca, which grows below 700
metres. Poppies, introduced in the 1990s are grown above 2000 metres,
creating "a new threat to higher elevations, which are critical for
biodiversity", Alvarez says.