Sniffing the devil's dandruff destroys rainforest

Prince Hakeem · (#1 (**permalink**))

I highly doubt any BNV members are coke heads but this has to be the biggest load of horse's dollop initiated by the Colombian and British governments, not to mention bloody hypocritical........

BBC NEWS | Politics | Cocaine use 'destroys rainforest'

Cocaine use 'destroys rainforest'
The British and Colombian governments have launched a joint drive to highlight the environmental damage caused by cocaine use.

Colombian vice-president Francisco Santos Calderon said taking it was seen as a "victimless crime" in Europe but it was devastating his country.

Some 2.2 million hectares of rainforest had been lost to cocaine production over the last 20 years, he added.

Home Office minister Vernon Coaker said this was the "real price" of the drug.

'Consequences'

The two politicians were joined at the launch of the Shared Responsibility campaign in London's Trafalgar Square by Alex James, the former bassist with the pop group Blur.

Mr Calderon said: "We need to show the consequences - the consequences to human beings and also the consequences to the environment."

I don't know why we care more about monkeys dying than people dying but we do. So this is a really intelligent way of going about it
Alex James, former Blur bassist

Cocaine consumption fuels exploitation, violence and environmental damage in Colombia, the world's second most bio-diverse country, he added.

Drug barons were devastating the country's soils and water sources by using harmful or banned pesticides, Mr Calderon said.

Mr Coaker said that although drug consumption was at an 11-year low, cocaine was the only drug that had risen in use since 1998.

He said the campaign was "trying to put across the message that the real price of cocaine is not what somebody pays on the street, and not only what an individual does in the UK when they snort powder cocaine".

Mr James, a former cocaine user who recently presented a BBC Panorama documentary on the effects of the drug, backed the environmental focus of the campaign.

He said: "I don't know why we care more about monkeys dying than people dying but we do. So this is a really intelligent way of going about it."

pattypan · (#2 (**permalink**))

It's true. Here is an article from 1994 about the environmental impact ...

Drug production creates an ecological nightmare - pesticides used to cultivate cocaine in Peru | Insight on the News | Find Articles at BNET.com

Drug production creates an ecological nightmare - pesticides used to cultivate cocaine in Peru
Michael Hedges

Coca cultivation has devastated the Amazon region of Peru. Growers have defoliated and poisoned the land and rivers with pesticides and other chemicals. Yet there's little authorities can do.

Viewed from an airplane flying over the Huallaga River Valley in eastern Peru, the emerald carpet of this part of the Amazon basin is scarred by ugly black, gray and brown swaths. The black patches mark where coca growers have burned out new planting areas; the gray ones are abandoned fields; the brown are scars left behind as barren mountainsides have tumbled into rivers, causing unprecedented flooding throughout the region.

After two decades of supplying the world's cocaine markets, the valley is showing obvious effects. But officials here are most concerned about the environmental hazards that cannot be seen. "Nobody has studied the impact on people of the chemicals put in the rivers by coca growers"' says Rafael Urrelo Guerra, rector of the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva in the town of Tingo Maria.

Coca growers dominate life in the Huallaga Valley They dump kerosene, sulfuric acid, acetone, pesticides and other chemicals used to grow and process their crop into the tributaries that eventually find their way to the Amazon River. "Coca leaves have received far more chemicals - fungicides, pesticides and herbicides - than other crops for which it wouldn't be economically feasible to spend so much says Jose Loayza Thrres, vice rector of the agrarian university. In places, the drinking water has become discolored and carries an astringent smell. Children who spend hours stamping coca leaves in pits may be absorbing toxic chemicals through their skin, say Peruvian medical experts.

Less than 20 years ago, the Huallaga and Ucayali rivers and their tributaries teemed with fish that supported an exploding human population. "I remember when the fisherman caught Boca Chica fish here like this," Urrelo says, holding his hands 2 feet apart. "Now they don't catch any, or just very small ones. The small rivers are dead."

While the social impact of cocaine has been well documented in Peru and the United States, the environmental destruction wrought by coca planting in the Andes has been largely ignored. But it is a major factor in what some scientists contend is a looming catastrophe for this jungle basin. The Peruvian professors estimate that almost 750,000 acres have been stripped of natural cover for coca planting. The U.S. State Department's estimate is nearly 500,000 acres.

Warren Hern of the University of Colorado has spent much of the last 30 years in the Ucayali River region. The twin factors of population growth and deforestation are creating an "end-stage ecological destruction," he says. "What is happening here at a frightening pace will make [the region look like] Ethiopia and Somalia in 50 years. The process appears inexorable."

The first wave of environmental damage was caused by timber companies that indiscriminately cut the forests, say Urrelo and Hern. But beginning in the 1970s, the profits from coca leaves made that crop the driving economic force in the region. "It has destroyed the economy, where people can't be self-sufficient by farming other crops because the prices for coca leaves are so high," says Hern. "Ecologically, it is completely destructive to the most biodiverse area on the planet." Some species of plants and birds vanished before scientists could identify them, he contends. "In 1964, you could travel not far from here and see 400 to 500 species of birds in a day, as many as there are in the whole United States. In 1984, Id take that same trip and see 40 to 50 kinds. Now I might see four or five."

Lloyd Armstead, technical and liaison officer for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, agrees that coca growing has devastated the valley. "The destructive slash-and-burn agriculture has changed river flows, stripping off top-soils and exposing underlying sand soils."

Armstead believes the Huallaga region's coca cultivators "are rapidly eliminating one of the most genetically prosperous ecosystems of the entire Amazon River basin." Devastating floods in November 1987 that killed scores of people in the valley were caused in part by hillsides sliding into rivers after being stripped by coca growers.

Coca growing in the Huallaga Valley is inextricably linked to the guerrilla war between the Shining Path and the Peruvian military and police. As many as 30,000 people were killed in the fighting in the 1980s and early 1990s.

In March 1989, Peruvian officers say, the guerrillas overran a garrison at Uchiza, killing 16 officers and suspected informants. "They took the wounded officers and tied them to explosive charges, which they detonated," a law-enforcement official says. "Others, they ran over their heads with heavy equipment." The military and police have responded with equal brutality, according to some reports.

The war turned in favor of the government with the capture of Shining Path founder Abimael Guzman in September 1992. But there was skirmishing in the valley as recently as June.

Peruvian air police, a paramilitary force whose officers adopt noms de guerre, patrol the area regularly. On a recent patrol, Officers Shogun, Greco and Perceo, with field adviser Angel Chamizo of the State Department's narcotics section, flew over an area in eastern Peru where the Drug Enforcement Administration has kept advisers in recent years. The Amazon jungle changed dramatically when the scout plane crossed the Cordillera Oriental, which separates the regional capital of Pucallpa from the Huallaga Valley.

Near Uchiza, where the Shining Path has protected and bullied coca producers, the mountains were scarred as if strip-mined, with ugly brown craters on their crowns. The tributaries of the Ucayali and Huallaga rivers were clogged with brown silt where the stripped hillsides had collapsed. Several small fires burned, but sometimes the smoke is so thick that planes have trouble landing on the gravel airstrips in the valley, say the officers; growers set dozens of uncontrolled fires to clear patches for various crops, mostly for coca. They then plant in strips and crescents on the mountainsides with no regard for soil conservation, terracing, crop rotation or other techniques used by the farmers who grow bananas, cocoa beans, rice and other crops.

"The coca growers come in, use incredibly heavy amounts of chemicals to get in a crop or two, then move on to another location," Chamizo says.

All these stages of production are visible as the Peruvian air patrol circles the valley. The mint green coca plants stand out against the dark jade jungle. In some places the leaves have been gathered and are drying. Elsewhere, workers tend circular patches of leaves being processed into the bulk paste that is flown to Colombia for conversion into cocaine powder or crack.

At one time, officials made an effort to destroy the growing fields and disrupt the early-stage production, but the strategy has shifted, says Sherman Hinson, head of the U.S. narcotics affairs section in Peru. In the late 1980s, the United States put a high percentage of its resources in Peru into an operation centered at Santa Lucia in the Huallaga Valley and urged the Peruvian security forces to mount a major push there. The result was a partial success - at the cost of at least 36 Peruvian crop-eradication officers killed by the Shining Path and coca growers.

The effort to stamp out the mature coca leaves was suspended in February 1989 after a skirmish in which four U.S. helicopters sustained gunfire damage and had to be grounded. "At that point we had 10 helicopters in the country, and all had been so badly damaged they couldn't fly," Hinson says.

The plan now is to target the point at which the coca paste is sold and shipped to Colombia for further refinement. Authorities hope that by disrupting the market at the local level, where growers sell their products to the low-level cartel buyers, "we can create a frame of mind that there is something else the growers could be doing that would be a better deal for them," says Hinson.

Also, when you consider the CIA's involvement in cocaine trafficking and the destructive effect it's had in Jamaica and the African American communities it's not something anyone should be indifferent to.

Agu Bu Oji · (#3 (**permalink**))

The greed of a few nations regardless of the commodity is destroying the planet... all this 'go green' talk is non sense, these are consumerist nations, even china had to go consumerist to put the drive gear to their communist system.

Prince Hakeem · (#4 (**permalink**))

Quote:

Originally Posted by Black Lion

The greed of a few nations regardless of the commodity is destroying the planet... all this 'go green' talk is non sense, these are consumerist nations, even china had to go consumerist to put the drive gear to their communist system.

My point exactly....