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WORD COUNT
588
JUNE 24, 2009
HEY
CONGRESS: NEED TO CUT $150 MILLION? – by Jess Hunter-Bowman
Let me go
over my “this one has got to go” checklist one more time. Costly? Some
in Washington will disagree, but $150 million is still a lot of money to
me. Ineffective? The goal was a 50 percent reduction in drug crop
production and seven years later we have a 23 percent increase, so I’d
say” ineffective” is on taget. Unethical? Even the most stone-faced on
Capitol Hill would have to admit that spraying an untested chemical
mixture over innocent civilians despite the U.N.’s claim that there is
“credible and trustworthy evidence” suggesting human health impacts
would qualify as unethical.
In 2000,
President Clinton and Congress decided to try something new in the Drug
War. Colombia produced 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S.
and, despite years of anti-drug efforts, there was no reduction in the
flow of drugs north. Thus a $1.3 billion dollar emergency supplemental
appropriation to fight drug production in Colombia was born. The primary
tool contemplated was a controversial chemical spray program using crop
dusters to target coca—the raw material for cocaine.
Nearly
$500 million was spent on an exponential growth in the spray program,
from 43,246 hectares sprayed in 2000 to 133,496 hectares in 2008.
Yet
despite spraying 2.6 million acres in Colombia from 2000 through 2007,
coca production actually increased by 23 percent and today Colombia
still produces 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. Maybe
there is a reason no other country in the world employs an aerial spray
program for counter-narcotics purposes.
But to
suggest that this policy has simply been ineffective would ignore the
devastating impact it has had on Colombian’s. An untold number of family
farmers have been wrongly targeted. According to the State Department,
7,750 of them have filed official complaints for wrongful fumigation
since 2001. Thousands who turned to coca production to make a modest
living—experts estimate an average coca farmer has a gross annual income
of $7,000—responded to calls to leave behind coca production and join
alternative development programs, only to see those new crops destroyed
when the fumigation planes mistakenly targeted them.
Colombians
were told that spraying an untested chemical mixture over farms (and
homes) from planes in the second-most bio-diverse country in the world
would not cause human health or environmental problems. Today early
evidence suggests that both human health and the environment were indeed
put at risk by this program.
Thousands
of health complaints reported in recently sprayed communities were
corroborated when the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Health conducted a
field visit and determined that there is “credible and trustworthy
evidence” that fumigations are harmful to human health.
New
reports suggest disturbing environmental impacts of the spray program in
the Amazon basin region as well. A recent scientific study revealed that
50 percent of amphibians were killed in less than 96 hours by exposure
to the spray program’s chemical mixture. And the U.N. Office on Drugs
and Crime further indicated that fumigation leads to deforestation as
coca farmers move deeper into virgin forest to avoid being sprayed. The
U.N. estimates nearly 400,000 acres of virgin forests were razed by such
farmers between 2001 and 2007.
Given the
horrendous decade-long track record of this counter-narcotics spray
program in Colombia—no reduction in drug production, wrongfully sprayed
farmers combined with human health and environmental impacts—Congress
needs to send it to the trash bin. Cutting the bankrupt aerial spray
program could save taxpayers $150 million dollars next year, still a lot
of money where I’m from.
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Jess
Hunter-Bowman is Bogotá-based Andean Region Director for Witness for
Peace, a nonprofit organization with 26 years of experience monitoring
U.S. policy in Latin America.
www.witnessforpeace.org
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