Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jul 2000
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2000 Chicago Tribune Company
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Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/
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Author: Tim Golden, New York Times News Service

COLOMBIA AGREES TO TEST HERBICIDE ON COCA

Pressure From U.S. Overcomes Environmental Damage Concerns

Under pressure from the United States, Colombia reluctantly has agreed to 
take the first step toward developing a powerful biological herbicide 
against the coca and heroin-poppy fields that are spreading almost 
unchecked across its countryside, Colombian and U.S. officials said Wednesday.

For years, U.S. officials have been quietly debating ways to conduct field 
tests of such an herbicide, developed from a fungus that occurs naturally 
in many types of coca and other plants.

Now, Colombian officials say they are completing a proposal to the United 
Nations that would include testing for the presence of the fungus, Fusarium 
oxysporum, in coca, the raw material of cocaine.

If the fungus is found in Colombian varieties of coca, Colombian scientists 
would go on to evaluate its effectiveness, safety and environmental impact 
as an herbicide.

"What we want is a program of research--and only research--on the use of 
biological controls against these crops," the Colombian environment 
minister, Juan Mayr, said Wednesday.

The Colombian government's uneasy support for the project comes as 
President Clinton is about to sign a bill providing $1.3 billion in aid to 
Colombia to fight drug traffickers and the insurgents who protect their trade.

Some powerful Republicans in Congress told Colombian officials that they 
were supporting the spending on the expectation that Colombia would agree 
to explore the use of Fusarium fungus in its coca fields.

Within the Clinton administration, officials said, the testing of fungal 
herbicides was also pushed by the White House drug policy adviser, Gen. 
Barry McCaffrey, and by officials of the U.S. Southern Command, which is 
overseeing the U.S. overhaul of Colombia's armed forces.

Environmentalists and other activists in both countries are raising a din 
of objections to any field tests of the fungus, arguing that it is 
virtually a biological weapon--one that might upset Colombia's ecology or 
endanger farmers, animals and food crops.

Last year, similar complaints by environmentalists in Florida prompted 
state officials there to put aside plans to test a variant of Fusarium for 
possible use against marijuana fields.

Several plant pathologists who have studied the fungus extensively said 
there is relatively little scientific basis for the assertions about its 
danger. They acknowledged that a great deal of testing still needs to be 
done, but they added that the most significant unanswered questions might 
have less to do with the safety of the fungus than with its effectiveness 
and cost.

"If they're looking at local strains of the fungus, then I can't see 
something scientifically dangerous about it," said Jonathan Gressel, a 
professor of plant sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 
Rehovot, Israel. "What you're doing is taking a disease that is already 
present and putting on more of it."

"But they'll be lucky if it works," Gressel added. "Because typically this 
inundative strategy isn't good enough in commercial agriculture, and I'm 
sure the narcos have been planning ahead. They'll probably go to fungicides 
or breed their coca to be resistant to the fungus. It's relatively easy to do."

The concerns about Fusarium's proposed use as a mycoherbicide, or fungal 
herbicide, have been heightened by the shadowy history of research into its 
impact on drug crops. Indeed, the proposed Colombian study comes after 
years of often-secret investigation by scientists in the United States and 
the former Soviet Union.

Officials said Fusarium, a naturally occurring fungus with variants that 
can cause wilt in everything from tomatoes and grain to marijuana, was 
identified as a possible weapon in the drug fight by CIA scientists in the 
early 1980s. The U.S. Agriculture Department began more extensive research 
into its use on coca in 1988 and continued the work for nearly a decade.

At roughly the same time, Soviet biological weapons scientists at the 
Institute of Plant Genetics in Uzbekistan were working to develop Fusarium 
fungus, plant bacteria and other pathogens to destroy opium poppies.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States continued to pay 
for research at the laboratory as part of an effort to keep its 
impoverished scientists from joining the biological weapons programs of 
countries such as Iraq and Iran.

Some of the same research now continues under the auspices of the United 
Nations Drug Control Program, with has quietly supported the use of 
biological controls against drug crops since 1976.

"Whatever happened in the past, the work has to be redone now in an open 
environment," said Eric Rosenquist, one of the officials who has worked 
longest on the fungus. "Only then can you debate it on its merits."

"I don't see this as some horrible thing that's going to mutate and kill 
people--that's science fiction," added Rosenquist, a program leader for 
international programs at the Agriculture Department's Research Service in 
Beltsville, Md. "But you have to demonstrate that it is going to be 
effective, and that hasn't been done yet."
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