29 January 2002

Large Amounts of Amazon Rainforest Being Lost to Illegal Drug Production

By Eric Green
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- Illegal drug cultivation in South America is destroying large amounts of the Amazon region's rainforest, a State Department official says.

About 2.3 million hectares of rainforest have been destroyed over the last 20 years in the Amazon basin due to the cultivation of coca, the crop used to make cocaine. This figure amounts to about one-quarter of all the deforestation that occurred in the area during the 20th century, said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.

Briefing reporters January 28, Beers said the evidence shows that an "enormous amount of cutting" is occurring "for no other purpose than illegal drugs."

Speaking at the State Department's Foreign Press Center on the environmental damage caused by the drug trade, Beers said that in Bolivia "slash-and-burn" clearing of new coca fields resulted in the destruction of nearly 40,000 hectares of forest land in that country's Chapare region in the 1980s and '90s, while in Peru the amount lost was even larger.

Another problem caused by the drug trade, said Beers, is the large amount of toxic pesticides that coca growers put in their fields to get a higher return on their coca crop. Beers said that in Peru, for example, 346 metric tons of pesticides are used annually. These substances are then washed down by rain into the watershed, damaging plants and animals directly or indirectly via the food chain.

Beers charged that coca producers have no conscience in terms of how they are ruining the rainforest. For instance, coca growers cut down forests to grow their illegal crop, and then abandon these areas after only two to five years. They then move on to other areas, cutting down even more of the rainforest.

Beers indicated that because of the "clear-cutting" of forests, "quite significant" amounts of toxic runoff end up in the Amazon and Orinoco river basins. As evidence of this environmental damage, he said illicit crop cultivators cut down four hectares of forest for each hectare of coca planted, and two and a half hectares for each hectare of opium poppy.

Reporters asked Beers to compare the pesticides used by the coca growers to those used by the United States in its aerial drug eradication campaign in Colombia. He pointed out that "cocalleros" (coca growers) use a herbicide called glyphosate in much larger quantities than is used in the U.S. program. The coca growers also use far more toxic chemicals, such as paraquat and parathion, which he said are "sprayed indiscriminately" on the fields in order to kill weeds and thus allow coca bushes to grow more rapidly.

By contrast, he said, all the independent studies conducted so far suggest no health risk to humans from the amount of glyphosate used in the U.S. spraying campaign.

"It is certainly true that the herbicide [glyphosate] itself, if taken in a significantly concentrated fashion, just like baby shampoo, will kill you. But we don't spray it at that level," Beers said. "We spray it at something considerably less than that kind of toxicity, and we do not believe and have not seen evidence that it is harmful either to the environment or individuals, despite the numerous press reports to the contrary."

Beers said the United States, in partnership with the governments of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, seeks to raise the issue of how coca production is hurting the Amazon region "so that people understand the seriousness of it." Beers referred to a pamphlet produced by the State Department, called "The Andes Under Siege: Environmental Consequences of the Drug Trade," which offers detailed information about the problem. The pamphlet is available on the Internet in English and in Spanish at http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/andes.

Another speaker, Luis Alberto Moreno, Colombia's ambassador to the United States, said the U.S. aerial drug eradication campaign and his own government's social development programs are beginning to achieve success in bringing more stability to his beleaguered nation.

Moreno declared that the long-standing internal conflict in Colombia "must be resolved by Colombians," and added that this view is wholeheartedly supported by the United States.