The government of Colombia has agreed, under US pressure, to test a disease-causing fungus against Colombian coca plantations, according to the New York Times. This would add biological warfare to the arsenal of President Andres Pastrana's controversial peace and counter-narcotics campaign, the US-backed "Plan Colombia".
This plan, which proposes a big military element in the war against Colombian drug cultivation, was under discussion by EU and other industrialised nations yesterday in Madrid.
Many European countries are concerned about this military emphasis, and the news that an environmentally questionable element is also involved will add to their concerns.
The US State Department confirmed on Thursday that the Colombian government had agreed to test the plant-eating fungus known as fusarium oxysporum.
It was recently rejected as being too dangerous to use against marijuana plantations in the US.
From Madrid, the Colombian Environmental Minister, Mr Juan Mayr, denied that Colombia had agreed to test the fungus. In a letter to the New York Times, Mr Mayr claimed he had been misunderstood by a journalist.
However, critics charge that the US has made its $1.3 billion military aid contribution to Plan Colombia conditional on agreement to the tests. Opponents of the US aid package have noted that, in the final version of the legislation, the US Congress eliminated earlier Senate restrictions on the use of pesticides.
Last March, Congressman Ben Gilman, one of the leading promoters of Plan Colombia in the US Congress, tacked an amendment onto the aid bill that required the Colombian government to agree to implement a strategy to eliminate total coca and poppy production within five years using, "tested, environmentally safe" fungal plant killers, namely fusarium oxysporum.
The bill, signed last week by President Clinton, seeks to commit the Colombians to proceed with a two-year research programme that will introduce the fungus into the fragile ecosystem of the Colombian Amazon.
Representatives from the 26 countries and seven international organisations meeting in Madrid handed over a first payment of $871 million in aid to help fund the peace plan drawn up by Mr Pastrana. The donors, who are officially backing the peace process in Colombia under the auspices of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), expressed their "firm political, financial and humanitarian support" for the plan.