The Drug War's Fungal "Solution" in Latin America
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"Andean Seminar"  Lecture Series sponsored by GWU and WOLA
Friday, December 8

Jeremy Bigwood

During the late 1980s, Peruvian investigator Enrique Arévalo finished a 6-month investigation of the fungus for the Upper Huallaga Agrarian Cooperative in Uchiza, and later a series of other research funded by USDA and the "Peruvian" government agency, CORAH (actually completely beholden to the US). He wrote that the Huallaga Fusarium attacked up to 70% of the coca plots in some areas. He also noted that it attacked other plants. He and his colleagues followed the epidemic’s course, and worked rather secretively at the Jungle University in Tingo María, Peru, which eventually led to him being run out of town, charged by the local farmers with spreading the epidemic, and rescued by the US Embassy, which provided a plane and paid for moving expenses.

On June 2, 1991, the Miami Herald published Sharon Stevenson's article entitled: "Peru farmers blame U.S. for coca-killing fungus." This was the first article in the non-Peruvian press on the issue of Fusarium in Peru.

A Congressional document titled the "Potential for Biological Control of Coca" was printed in November of 1991.  To give some idea of the politics of the researchers, Dr. David Rosen, Prof of Entomology, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel argues: 

Peruvian Coca Chewers: targets of the epidemic?

"Finally, efforts should be made to persuade local populations to abandon coca-chewing as a way of life." This anti-coca attitude on the part of US, British, and Israeli researchers, and government agents is correctly perceived as cultural genocide by Andean residents.  Is this the real end-goal of these governments, including ours?

In the spring of 1998, the Drug War's Fungal Solution? was published by Jim Hogshire in Covert Action Quarterly.  This ground-breaking article from CAQ (edited by Sanho Tree) was considered such a threat to the established order that ONDCP gave David Sands a copy, and Sands wrote up a rejoinder to it, which the ONDCP circulated. While the Hogshire article was mistaken about a genetically-engineered fungal product, it was correct about the intent of the US government’s plans to use mycoherbicides.

1998 brought the passage of Senate bill S.2522, the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, authorizing $23 million for three-year "Master Plan for Mycoherbicides to Control Narcotic Crops." A year later, "Plan Colombia" is framed, largely through State Department response to the many letters from the Right on the Hill to the Executive. There is no evidence for the myth being foisted by the State Department that the plan was Colombian in origin. An integral part of Plan Colombia is that the Colombians would use mycoherbicides, this was tied to $1.6 billion in emergency bailout funds for the "Plan Colombia" antidrug/counterinsurgency strategy.  It was a simple deal: Colombia uses mycoherbicides and would be rewarded with US funds.

The US scientist, Dr. David Sands, who had earlier isolated strain EN-4 from coca for the USDA, and now with his own company, Ag/Bio Con, with a retired Air Force General at the helm, started to sell selected Congressmen the concept of using his company to supply the Fusarium for Colombia. No doubt the several million dollars that Plan Colombia was offering to pay for the mycoherbicide development and application was a factor in the creation of this company.

In the spring of 1999, the US decided that it would look better for US policy if the UN handled the mycoherbicide program in Colombia. The first US approach was through the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) in which they got UNDCP to propose a project to establish a research station to conduct field trials for eventual large-scale application of the fungus. Although the UN representative in Colombia, Klaus Nyholm, said the draft agreement was "not what the Colombians want...It was an American interest...it wasn't my idea,"  it certainly reflected what the US State Department wanted. The proposed agreement turned over results of at least 12 years of mycoherbicide research by the US Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service (ARS). The agreement openly took political cover under the UN umbrella. A May 1999 Action Request by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pushed the UNDCP to get other countries to ante up "in order to avoid a perception that this is solely a [US government] initiative," in a very similar, and equally unsuccessful US ploy to foist a large part of Plan Colombia funding on the European Community several months later.

There were many troubling aspects to the UN proposal. It maintained that Sands’ strain of EN-4 already existed in Colombia, which is convenient since introducing a foreign pathogen to the country could present a problem under international law. UN representative Nyholm, however, said there was no EN-4 in Colombia, and there was no evidence of any Fusarium epidemic on coca there. The UN proposal admitted that fungus development, large-scale production, storage, and application techniques for Fusarium already exist; and now, it said, all that was needed were "large-scale" field trials to compare different formulations and application rates, and assess the environmental impact. Yet it didn't specify how they would have measured the safety of these trials. Nowhere in the draft is any noninvolved monitor established to oversee research and development in Colombia.

This is no small matter in Colombia, home to the world's second most diverse biosystem -- one that is uniquely vulnerable to the potential threat posed by the massive spraying of a toxic, mutative fungus in vast swathes of jungle characterized by very sensitive and poor soil.

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