COCA DEFOLIATION WORRIES CONSERVATIONISTS

WASHINGTON -- One of the world's largest environmental groups is
calling on the U.S. government to cease aerial spraying of herbicide
on coca crops in Colombia until it can be determined that the
eradication effort won't devastate the nation's fragile tropics.

The U.S. branch of the World Wildlife Fund made the plea in letters
sent to Capitol Hill and the State Department.

Washington has made aerial eradication a key part of a massive aid
program to Colombia designed to cripple the illicit drug trade and
undercut the finances of several guerrilla groups seriously
destabilizing the nation.

"We remain alarmed about the potential long-term devastating
consequences on the Colombian environment, one of (the) most
biologically rich places on the planet," World Wildlife Fund vice
president William Eichbaum said in a letter dated Nov. 21 to U.S.
Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis. The letter was made public last week.

"We're reviewing the letter from the World Wildlife Fund, and we take
their concerns very seriously," said a State Department official who
asked not to be identified. "We haven't seen any evidence up to now
that demonstrates definitively that the mixture we spray, under the
conditions that we spray it, causes significant damage to human
health or the environment."

Through Nov. 22, pilots had dropped herbicide on 190,504 acres of
coca bushes in Colombia's lowland regions this year, she said.

In his letter, Eichbaum voiced concern that winds would cause the
herbicide, glyphosate, to drift away from coca fields, or wash into
nearby streams and rivers.

"Defoliated areas will be subject to increased erosion under the
heavy rainfall conditions common to the sprayed areas, and river
systems may carry glyphosate to non-target regions, even neighboring
countries," Eichbaum wrote.

U.S. officials frequently argue that damage caused by the herbicide
is far less than devastation provoked by drug traffickers and coca
growers themselves.

"Over the past 20 years, coca cultivation in the Andean region has
resulted in the destruction of at least 5.9 million acres of
rainforest -- an area larger than ... Maryland and Massachusetts
combined," a State Department fact sheet states.

It adds that traffickers have dumped "more than one million tons" of
chemicals into Colombia's ecosystems since the mid-1980s. The
chemicals are used to process coca leaves into cocaine.