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

In the spring and summer of 1999, Sands received nationwide attention for Ag/Bio Con, when he -- along with Colonel Jim McDonough, a former top aide to US drug czar General McCaffrey, who had taken a new job as Florida's top drug official -- tried to sell another strain of Fusarium oxysporum to control Florida's burgeoning marijuana industry. The concept was not well-received, as Florida has a history of imported organisms taking over the environment. David Struhs, the head of Florida's Department of Environmental Protection, reacted with a strongly cautionary letter saying: "Fusarium species are capable of evolving rapidly ... Mutagenicity is by far the most disturbing factor in attempting to use a Fusarium species as a bioherbicide. It is difficult, if not impossible, to control the spread of Fusarium species. The mutated fungi can cause disease in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn and vines, and are normally considered a threat to farmers as a pest, rather than as a pesticide. Fusarium species are more active in warm soils and can stay resident in the soil for years. Their longevity and enhanced activity under Florida conditions are of concern, as this could lead to an increased risk of mutagenicity." 

And it is this ability to mutate that causes so much concern. Promoters of mycoherbicides state that a forma specialis - or a special form of the fungus - can only attack a certain species - or in the case of this one, a certain genus. But, here is the rub: if the same forma specialis organism mutates and attacks another species or genus, it becomes another forma specialis (its name just changes), even though it is the same organism, just attacking a different plant. 

And there is another rule of thumb in mycology that should be taken into account by those who would consider applying massive doses of Fusarium or other mycoherbicides to wide swathes of our planet:  the more fungal material applied, the greater the level of mutation!

To be fair, I should also mention that most mutations go nowhere - they are dead-ends, it is only the .1% that are aggressive that need concern us.

But it is not only mutation that is a problem. Fusarium can absorb snippets of DNA from other organisms. These are called transposons and could be used to synthesize novel mycotoxins or unpredictably change the behavior of the fungus.

Having been rebuffed by the state of Florida mainly on the mutation issue - failing even to convince the state authorities to initiate a simple experiment in a quarantined test site, Dr. Sands and his small company apparently set his sights on Colombia.

January 2000: Sharon and I received our Research & Writing grant from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which we had applied for a year earlier. At the time, an NGO called the Sunshine Project appeared and  started to lobby on this issue.

Around this time, NGOs opposed to mycoherbicides started to use the misnomer "Agent Green" for mycoherbicides in general. Unfortunately, "Agent Green" was the name of a real herbicide applied in Vietnam before Agent Orange came into use. As such, the use of this term muddies the water.  

Through his Congressional connections, Dr. Sands arranged a January, 2000 face-to-face meeting with President Andrés Pastrana in Washington. Just as he had sold the concept to the Congressmen – whose aides could not correctly pronounce the word "mycoherbicide" and definitely not "Fusarium oxysporum"– sold Pastrana on it. Pastrana then set up meetings to clinch the deal in Colombia.

Colombian Environmental Vice Minister Claudia Martínez was ordered by the Colombian ambassador in Washington to receive Dr. Sands as the vice president of Ag/Bio Con, a company that he had hoped to market the fungus. In Colombia, he seemed to be more appropriately classified as a free-lance businessman, hawking his company's version of a fully developed fungus field-ready for "precision delivery from high altitude" application by large C-130 cargo planes -- as the following illustration, from his literature, shows.  

Massive birdseed-like grass seed Fusarium application from high-flying C-130 cargo planes:  Sands' prescription for Colombia.

This only frightened the Colombians more. One scientist who was present at the meeting said that this reminded him of "Dr. Strangelove." Indeed, when one looks at what this is – grass seed– one wonders how far and wide migratory birds would distribute it. Birds migrate from Colombia to the US through the target area. And, what of the effects on these birds? Two Colombian scientists who attended Sands' Bogotá presentation said he first presented himself only as a scientist, not mentioning Ag/Bio Con. When asked about aerial application, they said he got flustered seeing they already had his sales literature. His goal seemed to be to find four hectares anywhere to use for a field trial. The State Department here in Washington was less than pleased at his freelancing as they correctly thought it would blow their own UNDCP "cover" program.

I should point out here that I have asked USDA for a sample of the EN-4 strain which was to be used to inundate southern Colombia. USDA would not give it to me, stating that only an "institution" could receive it. If it is so safe, why can’t anyone be able to receive it?

In March of 2000, Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, tacked on an amendment to the pending aid bill requiring President Clinton to certify that the Colombian government "has agreed to and is implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia's total coca and opium poppy production" using, among other means "tested, environmentally safe mycoherbicides."  Arm-twisting by the US Congress to make Colombia use the fungus even before it has been tested for environmental and human safety raises the fundamental issue of informed consent by the Colombian people. The program could easily be construed as having a non-peaceful purpose - after all, there is a war in Colombia, thus contravening the international Biological Weapons Convention and morphing it from "biocontrol" into "biowarfare." While both the US and UN stridently object to the latter term, the secrecy surrounding the project -- the lack of independent monitoring of the US fungus development, the lack of media exposure to the project, and the classified nature of the development program in its early years -- leave serious questions unanswered.

When Sharon Stevenson and I visited Colombia in late March to early April, 2000, the UN proposal had already landed in the Ministry of Environment, which was to approve its use. At a meeting with ranking officials, however, it became clear that the Ministry had little information to go on in making their decision. The vice minister of the environment and her aides, gathered around the conference table, were asking us to supply them with information. Neither the US government nor the UN agency pushing the plan had given the Ministry the detailed documentation available on the genesis and development of Fusarium oxysporum that they would need to help decide if it was safe to apply. Ministry staffers were reduced to trying to cull information from the Internet. What they had found there was evidence that Fusarium oxysporum could mutate to attack other plants and could be dangerous to animal and human health.

In response to the pressures, the Ministry of Environment came up with a series of three counterproposal, calling for back-to-basic research on "native micro-organisms with biocontrol potential" in the coca zones. The final proposal ruled out the use of the unpredictable and dangerous Fusarium as a biocontrol agent.  As one USG official said: "They'll just study the whole thing to death...They won't come up with anything...at best, some good science will come out of it."

During the first months of 2000, a US Nobel laureate (who has asked to remian unnamed) wrote Bill Clinton raising concerns about the relationship between mycoherbicides and biological warfare, and its implications in Foreign Policy.

June, 2000: Plan Colombia passes Senate. House language wins out over the more environmentally-friendly Senate language.  At this point it looks like the mycoherbicide program is "on" for Colombia.

But, also last June, mycoherbicides were the subject of at least two National Security Council (NSC) meetings here in DC, prompted by a letter to Clinton by the US Nobel laureate we mentioned earlier. Concern was raised because mycoherbicides would be viewed in some quarters as biological warfare, and there was fear of retaliation. Not much later, decisions were made to terminate the US pressure for the Fusarium project for Colombia.

The BBC interviewed Rand Beers and Dr. David Sands here in Washington, during mid-August, 2000. Here are some selections from the Sands interview:

SANDS: This fungus is the closest thing I've ever seen to a silver bullet ... I have seen it take out 99% of plants in a field. I think that's incredible and I think people should know that this technology exists ... This would be a green kind of warfare ...

BBC: Okay, but we're talking semantics here. You call it green warfare. Other people call it biological warfare. That is semantically correct, it is biological warfare.

SANDS: That can be right. It's biological warfare or green warfare. I just want you to understand my opinion is it's a good thing if it's done to eradicate something that the entire world feels is noxious.

BBC: What happens if consent is not forthcoming ... I put to you a hypothetical - you never get consent - what should happen then?

SANDS: You're saying that two countries [Colombia and Afghanistan] that knowingly are unleashing a chemical, a drug, on our children, an addictive drug, that they are consenting to do that and they are not consenting to do biological control, I think they should suffer the consequences of that decision.

BBC: Which means that we should go in without consent.

SANDS: I think somebody should.

BBC: And it should be treated as an act of counter-terrorism?

SANDS: Well it's a pretty-high stakes game. Just go to any rehab clinic and check it out yourself.

BBC: You're saying yes?

SANDS: Yes.

An August 22, memo justifying President Clinton's grant of a waiver for the congressional human rights conditions, stated the United States will not support the use of mycoherbicides against the Colombian coca crop unless "...a broader national security assessment, including consideration of the potential impact on biological weapons proliferation and terrorism, provides a solid foundation for concluding that the use of this particular drug control tool is in our national interest..."

Reports of Fusarium spraying emanating from the Sucumbíos region of Ecuador on the Colombian border appear, but we investigated these by telephone and later by an on-site visit and determined these to be untrue, but based on rumors being spread about the possibility of Fusarium being used across the border in Colombia.

On September 5 and 6, I was a member of the Ecuadoran delegation to the Andean Committee of Environmental Authorities (CAAAM) in Lima, Peru.  CAAAM is part of the structure of the Comunidad Andina, a multinational organization comprised of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.  After two days of considerable debate, CAAAM declared its "rejection of the use of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum as a tool for the eradication of illicit crops in the territory of the Member countries of the Andean Community."

A few days later, when I talked to US officials, who brought up the CAAAM statement in the La Paz US embassy, they acknowledged that Fusarium was definitely now off the table for Colombia or anywhere else in the Americas.

Epilogue (12/19/2000)

Since the December 8, 2000 lecture, a few relevant events have happened.  Immediately after the lecture, one of the attendees, Richard Baum of the ONDCP "Supply Reduction Office," responded to the speaker.  He said that the mycoherbicide program was not over, but was merely "on hold."  In a lecture at SAIS at John Hopkins University in October, a Mr. Brad Hittle of the ONDCP also indicated that ONDCP had not yet thrown in the towel on the Fusarium issue.

Other government sources have told me that the mycoherbicide program will be "revisited" under the Bush regime.  Another source has also told me that Dr. Sands has already invested greatly in mycoherbicides and will continue to push for their use.

And, it is still unclear what the Colombians will come up with.  Will they study coca diseases "to death," as one official predicted, or will they develop an organism just as toxic as Fusarium?  

However the pro-mycoherbicide lobbyists try to revive Fusarium, they will have to face an even greater public awareness of the issue than there was at the beginning of this year.  Already Florida and the Andean countries have rejected this concept, and the UNDCP has backed out of pushing it in Latin America.  Still, we must wait and see what happens under Bush.

Jeremy Bigwood

Thursday, December 21, 2000

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