- I've got 23 ziplock bags filled with coca leaves laid
out on the rickety table in front of me. It's been seven hours since the
leaves were picked, and they're already secreting the raw alkaloid that
gives cocaine its kick. The smell is pungently woody, but that may just
be the mold growing on the walls of this dingy hotel room in the southern
Colombian jungle. Somewhere down the hall, a woman is moaning with
increasing
urgency. I've barricaded the door in case the paramilitaries arrive.
-
- I drop half a milliliter of water into a plastic test
tube and mash a piece of a leaf inside. As the water tints green, I notice
that my hands are shaking. I haven't slept for two days, and the Marxist
guerrillas have this town encircled. But what's really making me nervous
is the green liquid in the tube.
-
- Over the past three years, rumors of a new strain of
coca have circulated in the Colombian military. The new plant, samples
of which are spread out on this table, goes by different names: supercoca,
la millonaria. Here in the southern region it's known as Boliviana negra.
The most impressive characteristic is not that it produces more leaves
- though it does - but that it is resistant to glyphosate. The herbicide,
known by its brand name, Roundup, is the key ingredient in the US-financed,
billion-dollar aerial coca fumigation campaign that is a cornerstone of
America's war on drugs.
-
- One possible explanation: The farmers of the region may
have used selective breeding to develop a hardier strain of coca. If a
plant happened to demonstrate herbicide resistance, it would be more widely
cultivated, and clippings would be either sold or, in many cases, given
away or even stolen by other farmers. Such a peer-to-peer network could,
over time, result in a coca crop that can withstand large-scale aerial
spraying campaigns.
-
- But experts in herbicide resistance suspect that there
is another, more intriguing possibility: The coca plant may have been
genetically
modified in a lab. The technology is fairly trivial. In 1996, Monsanto
commercialized its patented Roundup Ready soybean - a genetically modified
plant impervious to glyphosate. The innovation ushered in an era of
hyperefficient
soybean production: Farmers were able to spray entire fields, killing all
the weeds and leaving behind a thriving soybean crop. The arrival of
Roundup
Ready coca would have a similar effect - except that in this case, it would
be the US doing the weed killing for the drug lords.
-
- Whether its resistance came from selective breeding or
genetic modification, the new strain poses a significant foreign-policy
challenge to the US. How Washington responds depends on how the plant
became
glyphosate resistant. That's why I'm here in the jungle - to test for the
new coca. I've brought along a mobile kit used to detect the presence of
the Roundup Ready gene in soybean samples. If the tests are inconclusive,
my backup plan is to smuggle the leaves to Colombia's capital, Bogota,
and have their DNA sequenced in a lab.
-
- In my hotel room, I put the swizzle stick-sized test
strip into the tube filled with mashed Boliviana negra. The green water
snakes up the strip. If the midsection turns red, I'll know that the drug
lords have genetically engineered the plant and beaten the US at its own
game. If it doesn't, it'll mean that Colombia's farmers have outwitted
21st-century technology with an agricultural technique that's been around
for 10,000 years.
-
- I first learned about the possibility of
herbicide-resistant
cocaine eight weeks before I arrived in South America. I was having a quiet
Sunday brunch at home in California with a few friends and their Colombian
guest. It was a beautiful day; we sat on the deck and chatted about
upcoming
vacation plans over waffles and grapefruit juice.
-
- The conversation changed when the guest began talking
about how he'd spent three years working in the military intelligence
branch
of the Colombian army, which has been waging a civil war against the
guerrillas
for four decades. His main assignment was to prevent insurgents from
importing
weapons and military technology.
-
- After the US helped the Colombian military dismantle
the MedellÌn and Cali cocaine cartels in the '90s, the guerrillas
moved in and took over much of the drug trade. By the late '90s, rebels
controlled more than a third of the country and had the financial clout
to intensify the war and protect their newfound position as
narcotraffickers.
It's an extremely lucrative business. The coke habit in the US alone was
worth $35 billion in 2000 - about $10 billion more than Microsoft brought
in that year.
-
- But the most intriguing development he mentioned was
regular reports of Roundup Ready coca. "We started to hear about this
plant three years ago," he said. "We understood then that the
spraying was not killing it, but nobody wants to talk about it because
it might put an end to American aid money."
-
- US aid to Colombia totaled more than $750 million last
year and has been flooding in since 2000, when Congress approved the
Clinton
administration's Plan Colombia, a regional anti-narcotics package. About
20 percent of the money was devoted to maintaining a fleet of crop dusters
and support planes that make almost daily sorties over the Colombian
countryside.
(The rest of the money went to economic support, military aid, and police
training.) The crop dusters fly high, out of artillery range, until they
reach a designated coca field, and then descend to spray the plants with
a coating of Roundup. The concept is simple: Kill the coca and there will
be no cocaine.
-
- The day after our brunch, I looked up the Herbicide
Resistance
Action Committee and spoke with Ian Heap, the committee's chair. Heap is
a global herbicide watchdog. If a farmer in Thailand notes that a certain
weed is surviving repeated herbicide applications, local scientists will
collect a sample and ship it to Corvallis, Oregon, where Heap runs a
private
laboratory. He is funded primarily by herbicide manufacturers who want
to know how effective their products are. I figured he would know something
about the reported resistance in coca. "So they've finally done
it,"
he said with a breezy Australian accent. "I've been waiting for a
call like this for a long time."
-
- Heap explained that few people knew how to genetically
manipulate plants until the early '90s. Then suddenly, even undergraduates
were learning the techniques. At the same time, scientific papers were
published that identified CP4, a gene responsible for glyphosate
resistance.
By the late '90s, it's easy to imagine the narcos hiring one unscrupulous
scientist to tinker with coca. "Cocaine dealers have a lot of money
to do the convincing," Heap said. "Genetically modifying the
coca plant is the most obvious defense against fumigation. If I were a
drug lord, it's what I would do."
-
- Heap suspects that the US government might keep such
a development quiet. The herbicide would still be effective against older,
more widely planted coca strains, and, for a while at least, Colombia's
eradication campaign would continue to show impressive results. But
eventually,
as the modified strain spread, coca cultivation would rise again, and
spraying
would have no effect. In the interim, farmers growing the new strain would
get free weeding. "It's critical for the war on drugs that this gets
independently checked out," Heap concluded. "But I'm sure as
hell not going down there."
-
- To get another view, I called Jonathan Gressel, one of
the world's foremost experts on herbicide resistance and a professor of
plant science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "The
only surprise is that the drug mafia didn't do it sooner," Gressel
said when I told him about reports of glyphosate-resistant coca.
"Privately,
my colleagues and I have been predicting this for years."
-
- Another way to explain the reported resistance, he said,
was that over time the plants developed it naturally after repeated
exposure.
But in the case of coca, he estimated that it would take 20 years of
constant
spraying before a naturally resistant strain of the plant would establish
itself. It was possible that farmers beat the odds and got lucky in the
four years of intensive spraying. "But the most reasonable
explanation,"
Gressel told me, "is that the illicit narcotics world has genetically
engineered the coca plant to be resistant to glyphosate."
-
- The only way to know for sure was to find the plant and
test it.
-
- The early evening air at the El Dorado Airport in
Bogot·
is thin and rain-scrubbed fresh. Outside, at the curb along the arrivals
exit, throngs of people silently hold signs with names on them, but in
the murky light it's hard to see. I file quickly past, heading for a line
of taxis, until one sign makes me stop. It has my name on it.
-
- Three days earlier, I'd placed a call to a Colombian
geneticist. I explained that I was going to be arriving in Colombia in
a few days and would like to talk to him about possible alterations to
coca DNA. He cut the conversation short and asked for my flight
information,
saying he would meet me at the airport. I told him that wasn't necessary,
figuring I'd call him when I got settled in my hotel.
-
- Now he steps out of the shadows and introduces himself.
"In Colombia, it is always better to talk in person," he says.
He is a bookish, bespectacled man and seems distracted. "I'll drive
you into town and we can talk."
-
- We head for the city's central district in his old, messy
car. The streets are narrow, and some of the once-grand stuccoed buildings
are graffitied over with guerrilla slogans. He's either nervous or doesn't
know how to drive, because he keeps stalling at stop signs. The
flak-jacketed
police that stand on almost every corner swivel their automatic rifles
toward us as we lurch past.
-
- We come to a stop in a historic section of Bogot·,
and the scientist leads me into an empty, cavelike bar. He chooses a table
in the farthest corner. A soccer game plays on a small TV by the entrance.
We get two beers, and the scientist waits for the barkeep to go back to
the other end of the bar.
-
- "I would prefer it if you don't mention that we
met," he begins.
-
- He then asks me what I know. I tell him I'm just trying
to figure out if this resistant strain exists, and if so, how it came into
being. The scientist pauses.
-
- "Nine years ago," he says, "a friend came
to me. He told me that the traffickers wanted someone to modify the DNA.
They wanted a glyphosate-resistant plant. The offer was 10 billion pesos.
About $10 million."
-
- "That's a lot of money," I say. "Did you
do it?"
-
- He smiles wanly. "No, I did not do it. I didn't
want to invite that trouble into my life. These are not people you want
to know. They are not good people. And if this fumigation benefits only
them, I think that should be known."
-
- He takes a sip of his beer. "So listen to me. If
you can get me samples of the plant, I will extract the DNA and tell you
if they have gotten inside the genetic code. If there are no signs of
manipulation,
then we will know that the farmers have done it on their own."
-
- We look at each other for a second. It crosses my mind
that he might be working for traffickers and will simply destroy the
samples
and lie about having done tests. If the local kingpins have created a
Roundup
Ready coca plant, they have a real interest in keeping that quiet. After
all, they would be getting a guarantee that farmers will have no choice
but to grow their new plant. The scientist's eagerness to help me and his
surprising appearance at the airport make me consider this
possibility.
-
- But my guess is that he's genuinely curious to know the
answer himself. I decide to trust him. I stick out my hand and we shake.
Five minutes later, we leave the bar separately.
-
- The next morning, I board a DeHavilland twin-engine plane
for the two-hour flight into Putumayo province, the country's main
coca-growing
region. Colombia produces two-thirds of the world's cocaine, and most of
it has historically come from this southern jungle. Over the past decade,
tens of thousands of spraying missions have been flown here. US and
Colombian
officials insist that 92 percent of the plants sprayed in the region last
year have now died. As a result, they say, the guerrillas have been
weakened
and will soon have to negotiate a surrender.
-
- But the guerrillas aren't ready to be counted out yet.
Just before we board the plane, they announce a paro armado - an armed
shutdown of the southern region. If anybody travels, they will likely be
shot. It's meant to be a show of force, a sign the guerrillas can still
go on the offensive whenever they choose.
-
- Our pilots don't think much of it. Puerto AsÌs,
the region's capital, is heavily guarded by the military. Two years ago,
the guerrillas laid siege to the town for nine months - everything had
to be airlifted in, and the pilots became accustomed to running the
blockade.
Now, with the rebels pushed back into the jungle, our pilots calmly
throttle
up, and 90 minutes later we bounce to a stop on a jungle tarmac. A phalanx
of heavily armed soldiers guards the perimeter, and two men with sawed-off
shotguns stand beside a cagelike room that serves as the arrivals
lounge.
-
- The soldiers don't hassle me; one of them unlocks the
far side of the cage and lets me out onto a partially paved road. A group
of men across the street stop talking and watch me until a stocky man with
a lazy eye introduces himself as Campo, the driver I had arranged in
Bogot·.
We get into his bright-red Toyota pickup, and before accelerating out of
town he touches a picture of the Virgin Mary glued to a shiny blank CD
dangling from the rearview mirror. On the map at the Bogot· airport,
Puerto AsÌs was the last dot at the end of the last road. I watch
the town fade behind us as we enter the jungle.
-
- We drive for an hour before we come across the first
evidence of violence. An oil pipeline alongside the road has been bombed,
and flaming black sludge oozes out of a twisted metal pipe, sending
swirling
cumulus clouds of smoke half a mile above the forest. The grass below
sizzles
loudly. Campo keeps the car in the middle of the road. The guerrillas may
have booby-trapped the far side with mines - better to stay closer to the
flames, which sting my face like a sunburn.
-
- Our destination, La Hormiga, is a jungle outpost of
15,000.
It was carved out of the forest 40 years ago to house oil workers but in
the '80s was transformed into a coca-farming boomtown. As we crest a ridge,
the town appears below, bounded by a sharply defined line of trees that
tower over ramshackle two-story cinder block and concrete buildings.
-
- As we drive down the main drag, I see that one of those
shoddy roofs covers a faux marble-floored, air-conditioned shopping palace
selling imitation Versace jeans. A lady in red hot pants and a halter top
window-shops pulling a pet lamb on a pink leash. A casino with rows of
slot machines stands next to a dentist's office that doubles as a jewelry
shop. Over the din from a half-dozen roadside discos, a man with a
3-foot-long
megaphone meanders down the middle of the road reading the local news -
an amplified town crier.
-
- I spend a sleepless night at the inappropriately named
5-Stars Hotel and rise early to meet Miguel Lucero (aka Don Miguel), the
local leader of the National Association of Peasant Land Users, a large
farmers union. Don Miguel is a short, quiet man with a distinguished,
furrowed
face. Before he became a peasant leader he farmed coca, and he knows the
region's farms well. I ask him if he has heard of Roundup-resistant
coca.
-
- "Yes," he says simply. "It is called
Boliviana
negra."
-
- "Can you show me some?"
-
- "Yes."
-
- "Right now?"
-
- "Yes."
-
- We are hiking through the jungle. The path is narrow,
overgrown, and muddy. The knee-high rubber boots I just bought keep getting
stuck in the muck, and I have to pull them out with my hands. Don Miguel
walks fast and confidently. He has assured me that we are well within the
government-controlled territory. The guerrillas, he says, haven't been
here during daylight hours for at least a couple of years.
-
- We come to a makeshift bridge. Two slender tree trunks
are suspended over a flooding river the color of milky tea. Thin steel
cables run above them to give you something to hold on to. Miguel says
that the land on the far side belongs to a coca farmer who now grows
Boliviana
negra. "Everybody is planting negra now," he says and steps
catlike
over the bridge.
-
- I follow, trying not to slip into the river 5 feet below.
After climbing a small incline, we come upon an arresting sight: 300 yards
of devastation. An entire slope of hillside vegetation has disappeared.
There's only brown-gray dirt, a half-dead tree, and withered coca plants,
which I recognize from photographs. "Peruviana blanca," Don
Miguel
says, pointing at the dead plants. "Not resistant. This slope was
sprayed last year."
-
- We hike up the ridge, and suddenly there are healthy
coca plants stretching to the horizon. On one side of an imaginary line,
devastation. On the other, billowing, neck-high coca plants dotting
hillsides
that are denuded of all other vegetation. "Boliviana negra,"
Don Miguel says, pointing at the large bushes. "They were sprayed
as well."
-
- Over a lunch of pounded chicken and french fries back
in La Hormiga, Don Miguel tells me that Boliviana negra appeared in the
region three years ago and is now spreading rapidly across the countryside
- just as the herbicide experts told me it might. The new strain is
disseminated
via cuttings; farmers cut off stems and sell them. Some farmers, looking
to make more money, travel with their cuttings and peddle them around the
region. And once a farmer grows a new plant, he can sell his own cuttings.
It's file-swapping brought to the jungle - a highly efficient decentralized
distribution chain.
-
- Don Miguel doesn't know where the strain originated.
He has heard rumors of a group of mysterious agronomists who develop better
coca plants for the traffickers, but he doesn't know where they are or
anything about them.
-
- He does have a clear sense of how the new plant is
affecting
his region. At first, he says, the aerial spraying was successful, but
now, with the arrival of Boliviana negra, it's affecting only those who
are growing lawful crops. "The truth is that the fumigation drives
us to the one thing that will survive - and that is Boliviana negra,"
he says. "Not bananas, not yucca, not maize."
-
- The Colombian and US governments want farmers to grow
legal crops, he explains, and in the past have paid them to eradicate coca.
But though American embassy officials insist that the spraying campaign
is more than 99 percent accurate, Don Miguel says that almost all the
farmers
he knows and represents report that legal crops are sprayed as well. He
says that his own tree farm was sprayed, pushing him to the edge of
bankruptcy.
If Boliviana negra will guarantee income for farmers, Don Miguel says,
they will grow it and have less incentive to discuss eradication with the
government.
-
- Not to mention the financial benefits. One hectare of
land in Putumayo will produce $100 of corn. The same plot will produce
$1,000 of coca. Plus you don't have to transport the coca - the guerrillas
will come to your farm and collect it. So why would anyone grow corn?
"Because
if you grow coca," Don Miguel says, "you deal with the guerrillas
or the paramilitaries or both, and they kill whenever they
want."
-
- Don Miguel has another fear. He doesn't believe that
the US will tolerate the existence of glyphosate-resistant coca. When the
authorities find out that farmers are growing the new coca, he fears it
will be only a matter of time before they switch to a new herbicide.
-
- He has reason for concern. Last summer, documents show,
anti-narcotics officials at the US embassy in Bogot· quietly
approached
Colombia's president, ¡lvaro Uribe, and asked him if he'd consider
switching from Roundup to Fusarium oxysporum, a plant-killing fungus
classified
as a mycoherbicide. Some species are known to attack coca; in the early
'90s, a natural Fusarium outbreak decimated the Peruvian coca crop.
-
- But Fusarium is not a chemical - it's a fungus, and it
can live on in the soil. A proposal to consider using it in Florida in
1999 was rejected after the head of the state's Department of Environmental
Protection found that it was "difficult, if not impossible, to control
[Fusarium's] spread" and that the "mutated fungi can cause
disease
in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn,
and vines." A switch to Fusarium would, at the least, be an escalation
in the herbicide war and a tacit acknowledgment of glyphosate's failure.
It could also turn out to be the A-bomb of herbicides.
-
- Still, according to a letter sent from the State
Department
to Colombia's US ambassador, Uribe was "ready to learn more."
The letter, dated October 3, 2003, laid out steps for moving this plan
forward, but when I spoke to officials at the embassy, they vehemently
denied they are considering a herbicide switch. They stated that they are
thrilled with the success of Roundup.
-
- Don Miguel admits that on one level, the spraying has
been highly effective. Almost all the old strains of coca have been
eradicated.
What's left are small plots of Boliviana negra, but these have become more
productive, in part because the spraying has killed all the other plants
competing for nutrients.
-
- US officials point to the eradication results of the
past three years and argue that the plant could not possibly be resistant.
A high-ranking US anti-narcotics official who declined to be identified
told me that she had never heard of Boliviana negra, la millonaria, or
any Roundup Ready coca plant. Another American official began our
conversation
by saying, "So you're here to talk about the nonexistent
glyphosate-resistant
coca?" And then, more forcefully, "These campesinos have zero
education. They can't be trusted to know whether a plant is resistant to
glyphosate." Nonetheless, I was assured that a helicopter would be
dispatched to Putumayo to search for samples. Even amid increasing reports
of resistant superstrains, officials have yet to find any evidence of
them.
-
- Perhaps they haven't been to La Hormiga. Everyone I talk
to here knows about the resistant plant. Three hours after leaving the
coca fields, I attend a meeting of two dozen heads of local farmer
cooperatives
- they represent more than 5,000 farmers in Putumayo - and they nod
knowingly
when asked about the new breed. "Nobody listens to us because they
think we are dumb farmers," says one man. "The Americans are
arrogant. They don't talk to the people who live here. We are the ones
who are sprayed. We are the ones who live with the plants."
-
- That evening, I meet Fabio Paz, the energetic mayor of
La Hormiga, at his simple concrete house. Paz is 32 and excited to be
mayor,
despite the fact that in the past three years guerrillas have assassinated
more than 30 mayors. He wears jeans and a baggy shirt and does not look
like an important man. But two plainclothes guards stand outside while
we talk, and his armor-plated SUV is parked in front of the window,
presumably
to deflect any gunfire or bomb blasts.
-
- "Boliviana negra is like goaaaal for the coca
farmers,"
the mayor shouts, jumping to his feet and yelling "goal" like
a crazed Latin American soccer announcer. "Maybe the narcos bought
someone off at Monsanto. There would be poetic justice in
that."
-
- Paz doesn't know where the strain came from, though he
assumes Bolivia, because of the name. He also believes that once refined,
it produces a different high than older strains. Either way, he says,
farmers
are now planting only Boliviana negra: "You can't give away the other
types of coca now."
-
- When I tell him that I am having trouble getting more
than a handful of negra samples because of the guerrilla clampdown, he
calls in Chucky, one of his bodyguards. Chucky is short and baby-faced,
with an emotionless gaze and a handgun tucked in the waistband of his
jeans.
The mayor tells me that his name isn't really Chucky; they just started
calling him that after they saw Child's Play, the horror movie about a
child's doll possessed by a serial killer named Chucky. Paz pronounces
it "Shooky."
-
- "Chucky can collect samples for you," Paz
offers.
-
- Chucky stares at me blankly and nods. I ask if he can
identify the strain, and he nods again. Chucky, the mayor explains, was
a coca leaf picker before he became a bodyguard.
-
- Twenty hours later, Chucky knocks on my hotel room door.
From under his shirt, he pulls out a stack of ziplock bags filled with
coca leaves. "Boliviana negra," he says and points at some of
the leaves that have yellow blotches on them. He says those were sprayed
a couple of weeks ago. In some cases, he says, the leaves fall off and
then regrow after spraying. In other plants, the leaves stay on. This is
an important piece of information. A genetically modified plant would be
impervious to glyphosate.
-
- It takes me a few minutes to arrange a mobile laboratory
on the simple wooden table in my room. When placed in water with macerated
soybean and canola, a chemical in the plastic test strip will bond with
CP4 ESPS, a protein produced by the Roundup Ready gene. If the protein
is present, the chemical turns a section of the strip red.
-
- The problem is, the strips were made specifically to
test soybean and canola, not coca. I would rather not travel to
Bogot·
with a backpack full of coca leaves, but after a series of the tests fail
to detect the gene, I realize I have no choice.
-
- By the time I get back to the airport in Puerto
AsÌs,
the leaves are giving off a pungent odor of broken twigs even though
they're
wrapped in a combination of dirty socks and ziplock bags at the bottom
of my backpack. Security at the airstrip is almost nonexistent. A stout,
mustachioed woman in olive-green fatigues rifles through my bag. No x-rays,
metal detector, or even a pat-down. But at the last minute, she demands
that my bag be placed in the hold underneath the plane to better balance
the plane's weight.
-
- I am nervous about landing in Bogota and dealing with
internal customs agents. But before we reach the capital, the plane stops
in a city called Neiva to pick up more passengers. While we're sitting
on the runway, the hold is opened and a group of soldiers with a German
shepherd approaches. A wave of nausea hits me.
-
- The dog puts two paws up on a trolley carrying the new
passengers' luggage. It sniffs around and then drops back down. I watch
with terror as the soldiers stand around chatting for a few minutes. I
imagine scenes from Midnight Express, where the dumb American drug smuggler
wastes away in a Turkish prison. I promise myself that if I make it out
of this, I'll never smuggle anything again. The dog casually sniffs the
wheels of the trolley, and then the group turns and walks away. The hold
is closed and we take off again.
-
- We land in Bogot·. There are no internal customs
officers at the arrivals terminal. I catch a cab and sink into the
backseat.
The ride into town is blissful.
-
- The next morning, I take a taxi to the laboratory of
the scientist I met on my first night in Colombia. The leaves spent the
night jammed among tiny bottles of Chivas Regal in my hotel minibar, and
some have turned black. But the scientist assures me that this is not a
problem. He smells them and his eyebrows go up. "Very good,"
he says and locks the door to the lab. It will take him a month to complete
the tests.
-
- Four weeks later, the scientist sends me an email saying
that he has completed the DNA analysis and found no evidence of
modification.
He tested specifically for the presence of CP4 - a telltale indicator of
the Roundup Ready modification - as well as for the cauliflower mosaic
virus, the gene most commonly used to insert foreign DNA into a plant.
It is still possible that the plant has been genetically modified using
other genes, but not likely. Discovering new methods of engineering
glyphosate
resistance would require the best scientific minds and years of organized
research. And given that there is already a published methodology, there
would be little reason to duplicate the effort.
-
- Which points back to selective breeding. The implication
is that the farmers' decentralized system of disseminating coca cuttings
has been amazingly effective - more so than genetic engineering could hope
to be. When one plant somewhere in the country demonstrated tolerance to
glyphosate, cuttings were made and passed on to dealers and farmers, who
could sell them quickly to farmers hoping to withstand the spraying. The
best of the next generation was once again used for cuttings and
distributed.
-
- This technique - applied over four years - is now the
most likely explanation for the arrival of Boliviana negra. By spraying
so much territory, the US significantly increased the odds of generating
beneficial mutations. There are numerous species of coca, further
increasing
the diversity of possible mutations. And in the Amazonian region, nature
is particularly adaptive and resilient.
-
- "I thought it was unlikely," says Gressel,
the plant scientist at the Weizmann Institute. "But farmers aren't
dumb. They obviously spotted a lucky mutation and propagated the hell out
of it."
-
- The effects of this are far-reaching for American
policymakers:
A new herbicide would work only for a limited time against such a simple
but effective ad hoc network. The coca-growing community is clearly primed
to take advantage of any mutations.
-
- A genetic laboratory is not as nimble. A lab is limited
by research that is publicly available. In the case of Fusarium, the
coca-killing
fungus and likely successor to glyphosate, there is no body of work
discussing
genetically induced resistance. If the government switched to Fusarium,
a scientist would have to perform groundbreaking genetic research to
fashion
a Fusarium-resistant coca plant.
-
- The reality is that a smoothly functioning
selective-breeding
system is a greater threat to US antidrug efforts. Certainly government
agents can switch to Fusarium and enjoy some short-term results. But after
a few years - during which legal crops could be devastated - a new strain
of Fusarium-resistant coca would likely emerge, one just as robust as the
glyphosate-resistant strain.
-
- The drug war in Colombia presupposes that it's eventually
possible to destroy cocaine at its source. But the facts on the ground
suggest this is no longer possible. In this war, it's hard to beat
technology
developed 10,000 years ago.
-
- © Copyright© 1993-2004 The CondÈ Nast
Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
-
- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights
Reserved.
-
- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive
- /12.11/columbia.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
|
