The United States is putting strong pressure on the Afghan government to officially adopt the strategy of eradicating the opium poppy through aerial spraying of the crops with the herbicide glyphosate.
Under the guise of the war on drugs and terror, the way is being cleared for major economic interests in the Lower Putumayo (Colombia). This paper examines the impact of coca cultivation, petroleum activity and the armed conflict on the ancestral territory of the Cofán community.
Despite 2006 witnessing the most intensive use of fumigation in the country’s history, some 157,200 hectares of cultivation areas were detected, 13,200 hectares more than in 2005. Is the fumigation strategy failing?
The insistence on fumigation, despite its undeniable failure in practice, is a sign that fumigation involves interests that go beyond antinarcotics and represent what are essentially political interests, to justify the US military and law enforcement presence in such a sensitive region.
Re-establishing fumigation is not going to legitimise or win acceptance of the State's activities in the territory of the Park. It is not going to protect the Park from the environmental deterioration generated by the critical interventions of social and military actors in the war. It is also...
In this briefing the Transnational Institute explains why the Colombian government has been unwilling to give ground on this minimal demand, which the Ecuadorians have been making since 2001, shortly after the aerial spraying began as part of Plan Colombia.
Unfortunately, the mycoherbicide scheme was only derailed temporarily. It has arisen again in recent months. While US-funded research on these biological agents dropped out of public view for a time, it was never suspended, and the investigation was completed in 2002.
Aerial fumigations with herbicides of drug crops in Colomba set in motion a vicious circle of human, social and environmental destruction. A worldwide campaign calls for the end of these harmful and inefficient forced eradication practices.
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