SELDOM can such a laborious public policy have been devoted to such a futile end. For the past 15 years or so Colombia has used crop-dusting planes operated by American contractors to spray around 130,000 hectares (321,000 acres) a year of its land with glyphosate, a powerful weedkiller, in an attempt to wipe out the coca crop that provides the raw material for cocaine. Put all that land together, and it amounts to an area almost as big as the state of New Jersey.
The defenders of spraying, who include the drug warriors in Washington, DC, claim that it has played a vital role in cutting coca cultivation in Colombia to a third of its peak of the late 1990s, and with it the output of cocaine (though by less). But studies have linked the spraying to increased rates of skin and respiratory diseases, and of miscarriages among farmers’ families. In March a research arm of the World Health Organisation reclassified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic”. The finding is rejected by Monsanto, its manufacturer, and some independent scientists. But it prompted Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s president, to ask his officials this week to halt aerial spraying by...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1RJZnW6
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