Government of Colombia seeks to reactivate fumigation with Glyphosate

Colombia gets ready to fumigate with glyphosate 3:37

(CNN Spanish) -

The Colombian government issued a decree this Monday that seeks to reactivate the aerial spraying of illicit crops with glyphosate, a herbicide that, according to a ruling by the Constitutional Court of Colombia, affects the health of people and areas in where it is scattered.

"The special, independent and autonomous regulatory framework on the control of risks to health and the environment is adopted," the government said in a statement.

The spraying method must be reviewed by the National Narcotics Council before being reactivated and corresponds, according to the government, to the measure of “regulatory nature ordered by the honorable Constitutional Court in judgment T-236 of 2017 and Order 387 of 2019 ”.

According to the government, the decree “is nothing other than the legal framework that establishes the rules of the game for a program that seeks to confront the world drug problem with greater force, under technical and precise parameters that allow to verify the care of the environment. environment and people's health ”.

• Colombia wants to resume spraying with glyphosate (a toxic chemical) to combat coca crops: critics warn that it is very dangerous

Million dollar penalty against Bayer for glyphosate in Roundup (2019 video) 3:38

Glyphosate spraying returns to Colombia

The government of Iván Duque has indicated that eradicating coca crops will limit drug trafficking and violence by drug organizations.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine.

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In 2020, cocaine production in Colombia reached an all-time high.

According to a UN report, based on figures from 2017, the country produces around 70% of the world's cocaine and, although the size of the harvest has decreased slightly, production is growing due to better productivity.

The document also details that the Ministry of Health and Social Protection, as well as the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, must review scientific research on the chemical and its effects on health and the environment.

In addition, it indicates that health effects on people as a consequence of spraying should be addressed "impartially, independently and comprehensively, by an entity other than the executing agency of the program."

The areas of the System of National Natural Parks, Regional Natural Parks and "strategic ecosystems such as paramos, Ramsar category wetlands and mangroves, bodies of water and population centers" are excluded from the program.

• These are the health effects of glyphosate spraying

Colombia stops spraying with glyphosate (Video from 2015)

The program to eradicate coca crops with glyphosate was suspended in 2015 under the precautionary principle.

In March of that year, the World Health Organization, through its International Agency for Research on Cancer, issued a report in which glyphosate was considered a herbicide “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

However, the US Environmental Protection Agency "finds that there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used according to its current label."

Opposition political sectors, environmentalists and peasant organizations, especially in the south of the country where there is a greater number of areas cultivated with coca leaf, have publicly rejected the possibility of restarting spraying with the controversial herbicide.

In 2018, a farmer in rural Antioquia who grew coca until that year told CNN about his experience with aerial spraying in 2003 and 2004. The herbicide fell on the field like a toxic mist, causing irritation so painful that the skin of the workers were beginning to bleed, he explained.

- Fernando Ramos from CNN en Español contributed to this report from Bogotá.

Glyphosate