For the last forty years, a civil war has raged in Columbia, South America. The winner will control Columbia’s rich natural resources, including large tracts of Amazon rainforest. Both sides - grass roots-based left-wing guerillas and Government and US-backed right-wing paramilitaries - have received significant funding from the coca crops grown in the areas they control. More recently the rights and wrongs of the situation were complicated by the ‘War on Drugs’ declared by the US Government, who apparently believe that they can significantly reduce the availability of cocaine in the US and “protect their children” by destroying the entire Columbian coca crop with pesticides. (At present, Columbian coca plantations provide 75% of the world’s cocaine.)

Some in Columbia, however, suggested that this was simply a way of legitimising US involvement in an internal war to protect America's interests in Central and South America. They asked, for instance, why coca crops in Government/paramilitary-controlled areas were rarely fumigated (the pesticide used is Monsanto’s Roundup - the chemical glyphosate), whilst coca and even Government-sponsored ‘replacement crops’ (e.g. rubber) in guerilla-controlled areas were consistently fumigated.

Fumigation using Roundup by aircraft flying high enough to avoid the guerilla’s bullets has been an unmitigated disaster. Not only can the coca plants resprout from the base only weeks after being sprayed. Spraying from that height is inevitably indiscriminate and has poisoned the environment and villages for miles around, killing other crops, livestock and wildlife and creating illness and high levels of birth defects in human and animal populations alike.
It is not surprising then many of the critics of fumigation in Columbia suspect that the ‘War on Drugs’ is actually a war on local people who live, inconveniently, on top of a lot of valuable resources. They are now concerned that is about to become, perhaps unintentionally, a war on the Amazon rainforest itself. The US wants to try a genetically modified form of the fungus fusarium (called fusarium EN-4) which, it is claimed, has been engineered to attack only the Erythroxylum genus in a coca plant. This sounds a lot more targeted and safe (which is probably why the United Nations are supporting the project) until one remembers:

• the intense fragility of the Amazon rainforest combined with its critical role in the global climate

• the reckless way the US introduced GM crops into their own environment

• the growing evidence of GM crops contaminating other plant life and even insect life

• the growing acceptance that no-one has a clue as to what the long term implications of GM crops will be

• that proposals to spray Florida’s copious marijuana crops with fusarium EN-4 were rejected when Dr. David Struhs, head of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection wrote of its ability to mutate and attack other species. “It is difficult if not impossible to control the spread of the fusarium species. The mutated fungi can cause disease in a large number of crops including tomatoes, peppers, corn, flowers and vines”. There are 200 other plant species within that genus which could be affected or destroyed

President of the Columbian Center for International Physics, Eduardo Posada, is concerned as much about damage to humans as damage to the Amazon rainforest. He has documented a 76% mortality rate for humans infected by natural fusilium. He believes that “to apply (fusarium EN-4) from the air that has been associated with a 76% kill rate of hospitalised human patients would be tantamount to biological warfare”.

Critics of the ‘War on Drugs’ suggest that, rather than attack the effects - the crops themselves - it would be far more effective to address the three principal causes which have combined to make cocaine so available in the US: the deep alienation (including boredom) across all sections of US society engendered by its vacuous consumer culture; the US Military’s easy access to coca-growing areas; the poverty of the Columbian campesinos (subsistence farmers) for whom coca is almost the only profitable cash crop.