Help Colombia's Farmers Develop Alternatives: Voice Your Concerns About Continued Fumigation in Putumayo

The aerial fumigation campaign in Colombia is an attempt by the U.S. government to fight the U.S. drug problem by targeting the supply: coca and opium poppy, grown on small and large farms in the south. But the current fumigation campaign in Putumayo defies the intent of the U.S. Congress and violates the pacts signed by coca growing communities. It threatens the effort to eradicate illegal crops by increasing farmers' lack of trust in the Colombian government and in the pact program. The fumigation provisions in the 2002 foreign aid bill must be respected in the coming year, and we must also push for an end to fumigation of small farmers' plots, seeking instead a comprehensive alternative development plan that will help them support their families in legal ways.

In the 2002 Foreign Operations bill (which contains next year's money for Colombia and surrounding countries), the U.S. Senate included helpful language on fumigation. They ordered that a study of the human health impact of fumigation be carried out before any money could be used to purchase new chemicals. They mandated that starting in six months, alternative development programs must be in place before fumigation could be carried out. And they pressed for a compensation mechanism for farmers whose legal crops were fumigated. However, the Bush Administration has gone ahead and supported continued spraying in Putumayo, and sources say that the spraying has hit legal crops and farms involved in the alternative development program.

Please call your representative and senators and voice these concerns. Urge them to contact the State Department (202-647-6575 -comments) and ask officials to halt the fumigation campaign, speed the delivery of alternative development aid, and respect the pacts. To contact your members of Congress, call the congressional switchboard at 202/224-3121 and ask to be connected with their offices.

In the summer of 2000, the United States Congress passed a $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia. Mainly military aid, the package was passed in the name of fighting drugs by targeting the supply: coca, used to make cocaine, and opium poppy, grown by small farmers and on industrial plantations in the southern region of the country. This fall, Congress passed yet another counternarcotics bill, which totals close to $700 million in additional funds for Colombia and surrounding countries.

To combat the cultivation of coca and poppy, both U.S. aid packages contained money for an aerial fumigation campaign, in which an herbicide called Roundup Ultra is dropped by planes on fields that produce the illicit crops. The hope, said Bush Administration officials, was that the threat of fumigation would push local farmers to pull up their coca and poppy and switch to legal crops. The 'stick' half of a 'carrot-and-stick' policy, fumigation would be balanced by alternative development programs aimed at helping farmers make the switch. Communities would be given the opportunity to sign pacts in which they agreed to manually eradicate their illegal crops in exchange for alternative development aid, and the pacts would give the communities one year to eradicate their drug crops before they would be fumigated.

Unfortunately, communities saw fumigation long before they saw alternative development aid or a pact to sign. Last winter, fumigation began in the southern state of Putumayo. Almost immediately, complaints of health problems-including nausea, vomiting, and skin rashes-began to be registered in communities where fumigation was taking place. Farmers and local government officials documented that schools, homes, and fields of legal crops had been sprayed; that many of the farm animals, who grazed in the sprayed fields, had died; and that fish in local streams had been killed when the herbicide contaminated the water sources. As both their illegal source of income and their legal food crops withered and died, many farming families were forced to move further into the rainforest to plant, leave for other areas within Colombia, or cross the border into Ecuador.

Other families stayed, signed pacts in June 2001 agreeing to pull up their coca and poppy, and waited for the alternative development aid to arrive. In Putumayo, more than 37,000 families signed the pacts. Four months later, only 586 of them had received aid, according to the Colombian development program PLANTE.

On November 13, U.S.-supported fumigation began again in Putumayo. Though the pact signers' 12-month period had not expired - and in most cases, aid had not begun to arrive - many of these families' crops were fumigated again. That morning, Colombian daily El Tiempo quoted government officials as saying that families had begun to cultivate new coca crops, and were being punished. However, local government officials countered that it was large industrial producers, and not the small farmers, who had done most of the new planting. Nonetheless, the fumigation targeted small farmers indiscriminately.

In late November, staff from the U.S. organization Witness for Peace traveled to Putumayo to take stock of the situation, and stopped in a cluster of communities called El Paraíso. Families in El Paraíso had signed a pact with the government on June 1, 2001 to manually eradicate their coca in exchange for aid, and stated on October 22 that they intended to sign an additional, optional pact. According to accounts documented by the Witness for Peace staff, four crop duster planes flew over El Paraíso three times on November 13, spraying throughout the communities. The staff found no evidence to suggest that the Colombian National Police-who coordinate the spraying-had researched which communities had social pacts underway before they began to fumigate the fields.

While the Colombian and U.S. governments tout the accuracy of the spray planes, reports from Putumayo document that the herbicide hit subsistence food crops, including plantains, yucca, and beans, as well as people's houses and local schools. In El Paraíso, rice fields-which had just been planted as part of an alternative development project-were also sprayed.

General Assembly
Efforts to stamp out Colombian drug operations by destroying coca crops are ineffective. Colombian Christian sources report that in 1999, 16,000 hectares of coca were destroyed by herbicides-but the estimated area of total plantings increased to 22,000 hectares in 2000. This statistic illustrates a cruel irony of the Colombian "war on drugs'-that crop destruction does not reduce the coca supply, but merely disperses coca growing into increasingly remote areas. In addition to the war's human rights abuses, this raises concerns about rainforest destruction and spread of the problem to neighboring countries. Furthermore, military aid does nothing to alleviate the problems of poverty and social injustice that encourage peasants to resort to coca growing in the first place. (From "Peaceful Alternatives to the U.S. "War on Drugs" in Colombia," Church & Society, July/August 2001, p.80)

The 213th General Assembly (2001) of the Presbyterian Church (USA):

• Calls for the demilitarization of U.S. anti-drug policies in foreign countries, in particular Colombia.
• Urges that money spent on anti-drug efforts in Colombia should be part of a long-term effort to eliminate the reasons why Colombians turn to the cultivation of illegal crops in the first place. These include a state neglect of rural areas, a nonexistent rule of law, and a lack of economic infrastructure and opportunity.
• Laments the July 2000 "Plan Colombia" grant of $1.3 billion in predominantly military aid to Colombia and calls on the U.S. and other nations to shift future aid grants from Colombia's military to debt relief for impoverished nations, humanitarian and self-development aid for the people of Colombia, and drug prevention treatment programs in the United States. (Minutes, p. 471)