Asia Times: Southeast Asia


	June 26, 2002	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Kill or cure: Bio-weapons in the war on drugs
By Tom Fawthrop

The war on drugs is taking a dangerous new turn, as drug-enforcement agencies desperate for results look increasingly to biological weapons as their silver bullet.

The failure of international drug-enforcement agencies to curb the global narcotics trade has prompted many critics and governments to question the US policy of an all-out "war on drugs". The United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), rocked by a mismanagement scandal and several program fiascoes last year, has also come under attack for its controversial involvement in biological-warfare research driven by Washington's anti-narcotics agenda.

The budgets for Western governments fighting the global narcotics trade have ballooned over the years, but heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines continue to flood the lucrative markets of the United States, Europe and Australia.

The world of drug-enforcement agencies, global drug strategy and the UNDCP have all failed to stem the tide. In spite of massive aerial spraying of chemical herbicides on the coca-cultivated lands of Bolivia and Colombia, for instance, everything indicates that the repressive strategy of forced eradication has succeeded only in inflicting misery and hardship on poor farmers.

The opium and heroin trade in Asia still thrives in spite of glowing reports coming from the UNDCP and the ruling generals in Myanmar that claim massive reduction of opium cultivation during the past five years, and repeated declarations from Yangon that their ethnic-Wa allies are phasing themselves out of the drug trade.

The growing realization that enforcement agencies are losing the war against drugs has fueled an increasingly desperate effort to mobilize science in the search for a final solution. Biological research has been harnessed to develop toxic fungi that would attack the narcotic plants and prevent regrowth.

According to the plan, mass aerial spraying would unleash the toxic fungi over areas of coca or opium, provoking outbreaks of mycotoxin disease that would spread over vast swaths of jungle.

US biological research identified the fungus Fusarium oxysporum as a new weapon in the drug war that could be used in aerial spraying to attack the coca plant. Pleospora papaveracea, a fungus identified in Central Asia, attacks the opium poppy in a similar fashion.

According to Washington's global drug strategy, in 1998 two countries were viewed as the prime targets of fungal crop warfare: Colombia, the biggest exporter of cocaine, and Afghanistan, which at that time grew 75 percent of the world's opium. Thanks to the Taliban's crackdown on opium, Myanmar regained the top spot as the world's No 1 source of opium and its derivative, heroin.

One British scientist, Michael Greaves, claims that fungi are selective killers, and do not harm other crops. The US State Department's narcotics department liked his credentials and influenced the UNDCP to hire him as its top consultant to the UN program's three-year research project carried out in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which included several field tests.

Greaves was also hired recently by the State Department to assist it on Plan Colombia, a US$1 billion combined economic and military aid package that has been offered to the Colombian government in exchange for an agreement to accept field-testing of Fusarium as a prelude to mass aerial spraying.

The research and development of another biological weapon, Pleospora, designed to wipe out opium in Asia, was located in the laboratories of the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent. Ironically, these are the same labs once used in the former Soviet Union's chemical and biological warfare program. By 1998 former Soviet scientists had been recruited by the UNDCP to develop the toxic Pleospora papaveracea fungus under a three-year, $200,000 program funded mostly by the US government.

The UNDCP project, called "research and development of an environmentally safe and reliable biological control agent for the opium poppy", was not popular with other governments. In spite of intense lobbying by Madeleine Albright, the US secretary of state at the time, other major UNDCP donors - except for ever-compliant ally the UK - significantly declined to contribute.

UNDCP driven by a US agenda?
The driving force behind the UNDCP's gung-ho pursuit of total crop eradication by the 2008, and especially the search for a biological solution, has been Washington's global war on narcotics.

A leaked memo from the State Department in 1998 leaves little doubt about the extent to which the UN drug agency has been viewed as an essential international cover for what in reality are US anti-narcotic policies. The memo urged the UNDCP to "solicit funds from other governments, in order to avoid a perception that this is solely a [US government] initiative".

Edward Hammond, a scientist with the Sunshine Project, a US-based non-governmental organization (NGO) opposed to biological warfare, maintains: "There is no consensus [among UN member states] on the UNDCP's mandate to go on with forced eradication with aerial fumigation and biological agents."

Forced eradication and aerial spraying of chemical herbicides have provoked angry protests from farmers in several Latin American countries, often accompanied by brutal military suppression, especially in Colombia. Farmers' organizations have accused the UNDCP in the Colombian courts of human-rights violations, and recently one judge ordered the suspension of chemical fumigation.

On the consumption side, there is a clear tendency - at least in most European Union countries and others such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Brazil - toward more lenient, rational and pragmatic drug policies; on the production side, to the contrary, there is an escalation of repressive approaches strongly favored by Washington’s all-out-war-on-drugs lobby.

The appointment of Pino Arlacchi as the UN drug czar in 1997 strengthened US influence over the UNDCP. Arlacchi would never have been assigned to the post, according to his colleagues in Vienna, without Washington's blessings. However, a UN internal investigation that confirmed reports of mismanagement, a series of aborted programs and corruption in the Vienna-based UN drug agency forced Arlacchi to resign last December.

Countries that question the wisdom of the current global drug strategy, known as the "reassess" and liberal-minded states, tend to adopt a low profile. Washington, the leader of the "reaffirm" school, continues to hold sway in determining UNDCP policy directions and operations in the developing world.

According to the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI), "The UNDCP these past years has suffocated attempts to open up the debate, censored critical remarks in its own publications, trumpeted doubtful success stories, and punished dissenting views among its staff."

Mycotoxins: Bio-control, or biological warfare?
The UNDCP and Washington soon ran into opposition from environmentalists and politicians in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru alarmed at the prospect of potentially dangerous mycotoxins being unleashed on the rich biodiversity of the Andean region. Eventually the key target country, Colombia, also refused UNDCP proposals to conduct field-testing of Fusarium during the course of the year 2000.

However, the UNDCP, under the direction of Pino Arlacchi, brushed aside all criticisms. His spokesman, Sandro Tucchi, responded to critics by saying that, "We wish to strongly emphasize that UNDCP is not developing and testing 'biological weapons', or engaging in 'biological warfare', for use against illicit narcotic crops."

According to the UNDCP regional chief in Bangkok, Dr Sandro Calvani, "Bio-control is not new. Protecting crops from pests is long-established practice, and the fungus is a selective agent that will only attack the opium poppy without harming other crops."

Susana Pimiento, a founding member of the Sunshine Project, an international NGO of scientists committed to averting the dangers of new weapons stemming from advances in biotechnology, argues that the language of "bio-control" is misleading. Pimiento states that "to expose a crop to a lethal dose and deliberately provoking a massive epidemic in farmers' fields is fundamentally different from protecting a crop from disease".

After an outbreak of a Fusarium epidemic in a coca-growing area in Peru in the late 1980s, thousands of families could not grow food. A proposal to deploy the same Fusarium-EN4 fungus against marijuana plantations in the US state of Florida was strongly opposed by Dr David Struhs, head of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. In April 1999, he wrote: "It is difficult if not impossible to control the spread of the Fusarium species as a herbicide. The mutated fungi can cause disease in a large number of crops, including tomatoes, peppers, flowers, corn and vines."

Other critics warn that the fungus will kill food crops, destroy the environment and endanger human life. They say it will have little impact on the global drug trade, which will simply move production elsewhere. However, UNDCP regional chief Calvani denied in an interview with this reporter all knowledge of these negative scientific findings.

The same dangers apply to the Pleospora deployed as "biological control" agent. UNDCP officials have claimed that they will not engage in fungus mutations. Yet the man the UNDCP has funded, Professor Abdukarimov Abdusatter, director of the Institute of Genetics in Tashkent, candidly admitted in an interview last year that he intended to engage in genetic modification in order to intensify the potency of P papaveracea.

British plant pathologist Professor Paul Rodgers has warned that genetic modifications increase the risk of fungus mutation and the probability of danger to other plants, animals and humans.

In press releases and other statements to the media, Arlacchi indicated that the UNDCP was working together with the UN's Environment Program (UNEP) to ensure that the use of biological agents is properly monitored and controlled. But UNEP officials have denied any knowledge of UNDCP's claims to have involved them in environmental monitoring. During the three years since the UNDCP became closely involved in promoting field-testing of the Fusarium fungus to stop the cocaine trade in Colombia, and pinned the same hopes on developing the Pleopsora fungus as a panacea to annihilate the opium poppy, there has been no credible record of consultation with any UNEP or another other UN agency.

The resurgence of opium-growing in many parts of Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban regime opens up the prospect that if poor farmers refuse to accept the new government's attempt to enforce strict narcotics suppression, a compliant and US-dependent regime in Kabul could well authorize the spraying of mycotoxins to attack the poppy harvest.

The Sunshine Project's Pimiento has called for independent monitoring of UNDCP’s biological research. "We are confident that a full and transparent review will conclude that this bio-weapons project should be stopped. It should have been dropped years ago."

Meanwhile, many observers are wondering whatever happened to the long-awaited evaluation of the UNDCP's "Made-in-Tashkent silver bullet" that should have been completed by the end of 2001. The opium farmers of Asia have a right to know whether the UNDCP's scientists have secretly approved the principle of unleashing of the anti-poppy fungus as the latest weapon in the hardliners' war on drugs.

(Note: The new UNDCP acting chief is Antonio Costa, who has tried to restore donor confidence in the UN program. It is not yet know whether he will pursue the mycotoxin research and hardline policy of his discredited predecessor Arlacchi.)

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