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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Colombia Court Suspends Spraying of Drug Crops |
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by news wire
(No verified email address) |
27 Jul 2001
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A Colombian court on Friday ordered the government to suspend immediately aerial spraying of drug crops with the herbicide glyphosate, a potential blow to President Andres Pastrana's anti-cocaine offensive. |
July 27, 2001
Colombia Court Suspends Spraying of Drug Crops
By REUTERS
Filed at 9:37 p.m. ET
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - A Colombian court on Friday ordered the government to suspend immediately aerial spraying of drug crops with the herbicide glyphosate, a potential blow to President Andres Pastrana's anti-cocaine offensive.
Bogota Judge Gilberto Reyes Delgado, ruling in favor of indigenous groups that had protested the spraying program, said he had asked the government to provide studies on glyphosate's effects on the environment and human health.
Pastrana, who has counted on U.S. support for the spraying, said the government was reviewing the court's decision.
``We are studying the ruling,'' Pastrana told reporters.
Glyphosate is commonly used as a weed killer by farmers throughout the world and U.S. biotechnology giant Monsanto Co. supplied the herbicide to Colombia. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto's popular Roundup herbicide.
The judge's decision came just days after the United Nations asked Colombia to accept an international audit of its anti-cocaine crop-spraying program. Colombia has been spraying glyphosate for years but vastly increased the effort in 2000 with the launch of the anti-cocaine offensive ``Plan Colombia.''
The program has caused increasing controversy, with growing protests by peasant growers, many of them Indians.
The judge did not give reasons for his decision and did not say whether another chemical could be substituted for glyphosate in the spraying effort. The Indians had argued the spraying was killing legitimate crops, making people sick and damaging the environment.
Pastrana's government says it only sprays plantations of at least 25 acres. But small peasant growers, who often bunch their crops together with other families', say they have been hit.
Colombia's anti-drug struggle is complicated by involvement in the narcotics trade of leftist rebels and far-right paramilitaries, who use illicit proceeds to fund a bloody, 37-year-old war, that has claimed 40,000 lives in the past decade.
Colombia is the largest producer of cocaine in the world and recent satellite data suggested there is more of the drug's raw material -- coca leaf -- in the country than previously thought.
A recent U.N. study showed there were 402,000 acres of coca in all of Colombia as of late last year, well above earlier U.S. estimates of about 340,000 acres.
Ecuador recently asked Colombia to stop aerial crop spraying near the border the two nations share over fears glyphosate could harm Ecuadoreans' health and damage subsistence crops in the region's jungle towns |
