Colombia boasts a dizzying array of landscapes: from high Andean páramos to the tropical Amazon, from arid deserts to the rainiest forests in the world in the lowlands along the Pacific Ocean. This variety makes the country one of the world’s most ecologically diverse and species-rich: Some 1,800 bird species have been observed in Colombia; by comparison, the contiguous United States, though considerably larger, has no more than 800. An estimated 10% of all plant and animal species of the world are found in Colombia, and many of them live nowhere else on earth.
Expanding production of coca, opium poppy and marijuana, eradication of these illegal crops, armed conflict, and even development programs aimed at giving poor farmers alternatives to growing illicit crops are now threatening these unique ecosystems. Luis Naranjo, the director of international programs for the American Bird Conservancy, believes that “unless the current policies against the drug problem in the country are revised, we will be facing the extinction of many of the organisms that make the country’s biota so distinctive.”[1]
Colombia was one of the world’s largest producers of marijuana in the 1970s, and with the growth and specialization of criminal organizations, by the 1990s it had become a large-scale producer of coca for cocaine and of opium poppies used to make heroin. Whether it’s coca in the foothills of the East Andes, marijuana in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta or poppy in the Macizo Colombiano, illicit crops are irreversibly affecting the forests that contain large numbers of unique and imperiled plant and animal species. Growers clear forests in remote locations for their illegal crops, for food, and for airstrips and roads to facilitate trafficking. Were it not for the distorted price incentives created by high illegal drug prices, many of these areas might not be used for any kind of agriculture. If current estimates are correct, illicit crops are expanding by more than 20% per year; they account for half the annual deforestation of Colombia and now occupy almost 5% of the surface of some protected areas. In illicitly cultivated areas, only tiny patches of forest vegetation are left in a matrix of coca and poppy fields and thickets.
Plan Colombia aims to eradicate about half the existing area of illicit crops by 2003 through a combination of aerial spraying, armed law enforcement, and alternative development projects. Destruction of illegal crops will add to the ecological damage, however, both by moving illegal production into previously uncultivated regions and as a direct result of the substances used for eradication.
The chemical herbicide glyphosate is currently—and has long been—the mainstay of U.S.-funded aerial eradication programs in Colombia. It was first used in the 1980s to destroy Colombian marijuana fields. Today it is being heavily applied in both coca and poppy-growing areas.[2] Glyphosate kills a wide range of plants. Manufactured by Monsanto and used worldwide as an herbicide, it is sold in the United States—and most of the world—under the brand name “Roundup.” An Environmental Protection Agency-mandated label cautions against direct contact with the chemical, and advises those who apply it to use protective gear—advice that the residents of eradication zones can hardly heed when the herbicide rains down on their villages and fields from low-flying planes.
Much of the glyphosate used in the Colombian eradication program is being applied at a higher concentration than its standard commercial formulation, and contains additives that may increase its toxicity to humans and animals. A coalition of human rights and environmental groups monitoring the program reports that local and national ombudsman offices in Colombia have “registered hundreds of complaints from peasants throughout Colombia that aerial eradication has caused eye, respiratory, skin, and digestive ailments, destroyed subsistence crops, sickened domesticated animals, and contaminated water supplies.”[3] Governors of the coca-producing provinces of southern Colombia have officially protested the eradication program for these reasons. These complaints are consistent with experiments showing that inhaled glyphosate may quickly lead to death in mammals.[4]
The American Bird Conservancy’s Naranjo says that glyphosate can be toxic to wildlife, including birds, while even greater threats to bird life stem from the indiscriminate destruction of vegetation, reducing forest cover. He reports an estimate that for every acre of coca fumigated, two acres of surrounding forest may be affected as the herbicide drifts away from its intended targets. The Conservancy’s “priority areas for bird conservation” overlap with several illicit crop production zones, in the foothills of the East Andes in Putumayo, for example, because all lie at the forest frontier. Linda Farley, the Conservancy’s Science Officer, thinks that “glyphosate spraying is already having a significant detrimental effect on the endemic and threatened birds of Colombia, as 95% of the 75 plus threatened species are forest-dependent.”[5] Most of these threatened birds are concentrated in mountains of the three Cordilleras of the Andes that make Colombia the bird paradise that it is. Naranjo notes that nearly 500 bird species were recorded recently during a brief scientific survey of the Serranía de los Churumbelos of Putumayo, “a region that is now the main target of the largest campaign to eradicate illegal crops by means of aerial spraying of glyphosate.”
Aquatic life is also threatened by the eradication campaign: According to Farley, glyphosate is acutely toxic to fish, which might explain the reports of fish kills in ponds and streams in the department of Putumayo.[6] Rivers in this southern province are part of the larger Amazon system, and flow directly into Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil.
Glyphosate’s overall effects on local ecosystems are unknown. “Much of the U.S. testing of these products has been performed in Hawaii and other places that are very ecologically distinct from the rivulet-laden, acidic, sensitive, nutrient-poor soil found in the jungle basins that empty into the Amazon,” says Jeremy Bigwood, an independent researcher and herbicide expert. Both Bigwood and Farley believe glyphosate can cause long-term changes in soil by affecting the balance of soil micro-organisms.[7]
The combined effects of the growth of illicit trade and efforts to eliminate it are already vividly on display in Munchique, in southwest Colombia. In 1977 the Colombian government set aside over 100,000 acres for a natural park to protect the Golden-Headed Quetzals that are abundant there. Today we know the Munchique park is home to hundreds of species of birds, several dozen different mammals, and hundreds of species of trees, some of which are found nowhere else in the world. The park and its environs have the highest number of threatened bird species in Colombia: 137 by the latest count, 28 of which are endemic to the region.[8]
Over the last ten years, however, coca farmers began production in areas surrounding the park, felling trees with chainsaws to make room for their plots. Cocaine traffickers, says the park’s director, had been “building a pipeline right through the park so they could process the coca harvest in the lowlands” and avoid carrying in “by car, mule, or on people’s backs,” the sulfuric acid and ammonia needed for turning coca into cocaine. And then came the defoliants. “They sprayed the coca, the plantains, the cassava, and every area that seemed inhabited,” said a local botanist last September of the myriad plots scattered throughout the park’s buffer zone. “There is even talk of famine.” But then he lightened up and in a chuckle concluded: “In any case, lots of people are just moving along, you know, finding a new plot. They are not stupid.”[9]
The same trend has been evident all over Colombia. The governor of Nariño, for instance, reported that coca eradication in Putumayo has encouraged farmers to begin coca farming in his province. Much the same has been true for poppy producers. Overall, it seems, the Colombian eradication program has succeeded only in turning larger and larger parts of the country to illicit crop production. According to the monitoring coalition, “Coca and opium poppy production in Colombia tripled from 1994 to 1999, despite the fumigation of over 240,000 hectares of illicit crops with more than two million liters of glyphosate,” an 80-fold increase in the use of herbicide since 1986. Despite this poor track record, U.S. and Colombian officials are forging ahead with eradication. The United States has even upped the ante with a proposal to use a coca-killing fungus, though Colombian environmental authorities have so far refused to approve the application of this biological herbicide (see “A Killer Fungus Waits in the Wings,” this issue).
Eradication is accompanied by declarations about the “alternative development” of drug-producing zones. Plan Colombia assumes that all poppy-growing and about a third of coca-growing lands can be productive if planted with other crops, if only campesinos are given the right mix of incentives such as education and health services, improved infrastructure, and guaranteed personal safety.[10] What alternative development is, what crops are going to be introduced as alternatives for small holders, what global market exists for them, what kind of infrastructure development will take place, and what employment alternatives will become available in both rural and urban areas are all unclear. This much is clear: Prospects for economic success of alternative development programs are daunting.
What’s more, many alternative development programs would have to be carried out in an exceptionally rich, fragile habitat. In the poppy-growing region in the highlands known as the Macizo Colombiano, for example, USAID has proposed forestry, grazing, and ecotourism projects. To avoid harming the region’s diverse wildlife and bird populations, grazing and forest harvesting would have to be minimal, and ecotourism will only be possible if peace negotiations prosper and generate safe conditions for prospective visitors.
As bad as illicit crops are for the forests, it is possible that a switch to other crops, legal but less profitable, could increase deforestation. Even a former Minister of the Environment, Manuel Rodríguez, readily acknowledges that coca may be partly responsible for partially slowing the push into new areas by making the current agrarian small holder economy viable.[11] And for all the enthusiasm for alternative development, there are no detailed analyses examining land-use options after crop eradication, assuming the soil is not irreparably poisoned with chemical or biological herbicides.
An estimated two-thirds of coca growers are currently farming lands considered unsuitable for other crops. The government promises to set them up in micro-businesses in urban areas, or to relocate them to lands provided by the agrarian reform agency or seized from traffickers. Traffickers, aided by paramilitaries, have consolidated five to ten million acres of productive land over the last decade, much of it in the Guaviare basin and the Llanos. As the thousands of campesinos who have seen their fields eradicated in Putumayo can easily confirm, the reality of eviction is much more substantive than the fantasy of relocating to ranches as yet not wrested from paramilitaries and traffickers.
For current illicit growers to survive, productivity and market prices of alternative crops—or any resources—that replace illicit ones need to be sufficiently high to support growers with little or no further land clearing and without direct government assistance. Otherwise, the productive system is sustainable only as long the alternative development project and subsidies continue. If market prices fail to provide living wages after assistance stops, there would doubtless be further encroachment into the frontier facilitated by infrastructure—i.e., roads—built with money from donor agencies and government programs.
The success of any development initiative, however, is only partially contingent on local conditions. The domestic and global economic landscape limit the success of marketing strategies attached to alternative crops. The current economic outlook for agricultural production in Colombia is bleak at best. Between 1992 and 1999 annual crops on over two million acres were abandoned, and agriculture’s contribution to GNP fell 4%. Traditional farming by small-to-medium landholders has been replaced with extensive cattle ranching on almost 1.2 million acres. Agricultural imports have jumped from 800,000 tons in 1990 to 3,000,000 in 1995, to 7,000,000 in 1999. This increase is due partly to the need to replace food formerly grown on lands converted to annual crops, and partly to liberalization policies promoted by the World Trade Organization. At the same time, unemployment has risen from 8% to 20%, and rural poverty indices grew from 65% in 1991 to 72% in 1995.[12]
The peace process, if successful, could increase the prospects for improvement in both the economic situation of rural residents and in conservation efforts. About a third of the forests of Colombia lie in municipalities currently under pressure from armed groups. At present, ecotourism is impossible given the high probability of kidnapping or confrontation, and environmental activists have become military targets of both guerrillas and paramilitaries. Even hiking in state-protected areas has become a dangerous activity, as shown by the recent murder of students in Puracé, eastern Cauca. The flip side, however, is more challenging: Many forests that are currently inaccessible to settlers and to agriculture, mining and logging companies would be ripe for the taking in a safe Colombia.
In any case, the current government appears to have little commitment to conservation: The Pastrana Administration, which modernized the management of protected areas via decentralization, has delivered some significant setbacks to environmental legislation and enforcement by, for example, weakening regulations by presidential decree to attract multinationals. If things continue this way in the next administration, areas that the war has partially conserved could become wastelands with the advent of peace. In fact, presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Vélez, campaigning among Colombians in Queens, N.Y., recently pitched plans to “develop” the Pacific coast by selling the remaining hardwoods in the international marketplace.
Even now, as peace talks with the country’s second guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), founder in a paramilitary bloodbath, the government has released a mining prospectus aimed at international investors highlighting the gold deposits in the Serranía de San Lucas.[13] Local residents are now exploiting the mines there, causing significant environmental damage while the ELN and the paramilitaries fight for control. Given the value of the resources involved and weak enforcement of environmental regulations, access to the frontiers could result in the wholesale rapid destruction of what forest remains in San Lucas.
The Serranía de la Macarena, adjacent to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) demilitarized zone, may well be the first victim of the changes in environmental management caused in part by the peace process. Despite the inclusion of environmental issues in the government peace talks with the FARC, the guerrilla group did not hesitate to build a 125-mile road right through two protected areas in the region.
In any case, environmental conservation will have to play a role in the peace efforts of both the government and the guerrillas, as well as in the international eradication effort. The long-term success of illicit crop eradication depends on the socioeconomic stability of the rural population. This, in turn, requires sustainable management of natural resources. If forest conservation is not made a priority in policy, some of the astonishingly rich forests that have managed to survive the war may not survive the kind of exploitation that Colombia’s unlikely peace can afford.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
María D. Álvarez is a student at the School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. Her work on the environment in Colombia is in press in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry, Conservation Biology, and The Environmentalist.
NOTES
1. Luis Naranjo, “Bird Conservation and the Control of Illegal Crops in Colombia,” Press Conference, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2000. http://usfumigation.org/NovPressConfSpeakers/LuisNaranjo/LuisNaranjo.htm....
2. Juan Gabriel Tokatlián, “Estados Unidos y los cultivos iliícitos en Colombia: Los trágicos equívocos de una fumigacíon fútil,” is a parallel history of illegal drug crop production and eradication programs in Colombia. Working paper presented at “Colombia in Context,” conference held March 2, 2001, Berkeley, CA. http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/colombia/workingpapers/working_paper_t....
3. Amazon Alliance press release, November 16, 2001, http://usfumigation.org/Literature/PressReleases/news_realease.htm.
4. Elsa Nivia, “Effects on health and environment of glyphosate-containing herbicides,” Press Conference, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2000. http://usfumigation.org/NovPressConfSpeakers/ElsaNivia/ElsaNivia.htm.
5. Linda Farley, “Pesticides and Birds Campaign of the American Birds Conservancy,” Press Conference, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2000. http://usfumigation.org/NovPressConfSpeakers/lindafarley/lindafarley.htm.
6. Adam Isacson and Ingrid Vaicius, “Plan Colombia’s Ground Zero,” A Report from Center for International Policy’s trip to Putumayo, Colombia, March 9-12, 2001. http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/0401putu.pdf.
7. Jeremy Bigwood, “Problems with the Chemical Herbicide Program in Colombia,” Press Conference, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2000. http://usfumigation.org/NovPressConfSpeakers/JeremyBigwood/JeremyBigwood....
8. Thomas M. Donegan and Liliana M. Dávalos, “Ornithological Observations from Reserva Natural Tambito, Cauca, Southwest Colombia,” Cotinga, No. 12, 1999, pp. 48-55. See also María D. Álvarez, “Illicit crops and bird conservation priorities in Colombia,” unpublished ms.
9. Author interviews with C. González and I. Bedoya, Popayán, September 2000. See also: Juan Forero, “No Crops Spared in Colombia’s Coca War,” New York Times, January 31, 2001, p. A1.
10. See Presidencia de la Republica, “Plan Colombia,” 2000. http://www.presidencia.gov.co/webpresi/plancolo/index.htm.
11. Manuel Rodríguez, “Forests and Conflict: the Colombian Case,” Journal of Sustainable Forestry, forthcoming. See also Francisco E. Thoumi, Political Economy and Illegal Drugs in Colombia (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995).
12. Jorge Robledo-Castillo, “Neoliberalismo y desastre agropecuario,” Deslinde, No. 25 (1999), pp. 32-49; Rafael Vásquez-Ordoñez, “La agricultura colombiana en 1996,” Agronomía Colombiana, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1997), pp. 158-181.
13. Julian Villaruel, Jorge H. Ochoa, Jorge M. Molina, Liliana Alvarado, Jose L. Navarro, Luis Bernal, Luis E. Jaramillo, Rosalba Salinas, Carlos Sánchez, Hector Castro, and Joaquin Buenaventura, Minerales estratégicos para el desarrollo de Colombia. (Bogotá: UPME, Minercol, Ingeominas, 2000). See also Juan G. Londoño, “Yacimientos de oro en zona de guerra,” El Tiempo (Bogotá), March 12, 2001.
