According to Colombian media, the Ministry of Justice would already have the draft of the decree ready that, fulfilling one of the campaign promises of current President Gustavo Petro, would curb the use of glyphosate to eliminate so-called illicit crops. The initiative could come into force despite the fact that the administration of Iván Duque acquired, in June 2022, 263,000 liters of the herbicide.
The Government of Gustavo Petro, focused on changing the way to carry out the fight against drug trafficking, would be one signature away from eliminating the use of glyphosate for the eradication of illicit coca leaf crops.
The new decree, which awaits the presidential signature, would carry out one of Gustavo Petro’s promises during the campaign, to eliminate the use of glyphosate in Colombia, in part, due to its harmful effects against living beings and the environment.
“In the government of the Historical Pact there will not be a single drop of glyphosate that is thrown on the lands of our Homeland,” said the now president in his career to reach the Casa de Nariño.
Signing the text presented by the Ministry of Justice would imply the repeal of Decree 380, signed in 2021 by the then President Iván Duque, which resumed and regulated “the control of risks to health and the environment within the framework of the eradication of illicit crops by means of the aerial spraying method”.
With the entry into force of the new decree, the discussion, established in recent years, about the tools to combat drug trafficking would come to an end, especially when the now former president Iván Duque argued that Colombia needed all the instruments to eradicate the scourge, and this included the use of glyphosate.
“The current position of the Government regarding aerial spraying has changed and it was decided not to use the herbicide glyphosate in the aerial spraying method for the eradication of illicit crops, which is why the issues regulated by Decree 380 of 2021 lose their validity. object, and, therefore, it must be repealed”, says the document.
The new decree would provide the Government of Gustavo Petro with legal protection regarding the non-use of the herbicide. Last August, the Executive asked the Police Anti-Narcotics Directorate to ask the National Agency for Environmental Licenses (ANLA) not to continue with the permission granted to use the herbicide.
Colombia, the first producer of raw material for cocaine
The latest annual report of the United Nations Integrated System for Monitoring Illicit Crops (Simci), the first official measurement during Petro’s little more than 100 days in office, indicated that the production potential of cocaine hydrochloride reached 1,400 tons, this being a record in measurement.
On the other hand, Colombia remained, at the end of 2021, as the world’s leading producer of coca leaf, the main element for the production of cocaine, with a total area of crops that went from 143,000 to 204,000 hectares in the aforementioned year.
The use of glyphosate has been the subject of discussion since 2015 when, at that time, the administration of Juan Manuel Santos decided to suspend aerial spraying due to the recommendations of the World Health Organization and a ruling by the Constitutional Court that appealed to the principle of caution.
In 2017, another Constitutional Court ruling indicated that the authorities could reactivate spraying if they delivered documents supported by scientific research whose conclusions indicated that spraying does not cause harm to health or the environment.
Since the suspension of fumigations, academics, environmentalists, and social organizations have opposed the use of glyphosate due to its harmful effects. However, the United States, Colombia’s main partner in the fight against drug trafficking, has promoted the use of glyphosate and many governments in the South American nation have used it since the 1980s.
During his first speech before the General Assembly of the United Nations, Gustavo Petro indicated that drug trafficking is not only a problem for producer nations, but also extends to consumer nations.
“I demand from you here, from my wounded Latin America, to end the irrational war on drugs,” Petro said from New York City.
Petro has stated that the fight against drugs needs profound changes and in his short time in power he has received significant support. A few days ago, various world leaders grouped in the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and to which former Colombian presidents Juan Manuel Santos and César Gaviria belong, as well as the Puebla Group, of which progressive leaders and former presidents of Latin America are a part, have advocated for decriminalize drugs.
Petro’s initiative had a precedent in the past during the government of Juan Manuel Santos, who also tried to change the approach against drug trafficking by considering addressing the problem as a matter of human rights and public health.
“The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime should be called the United Nations Office on Drugs and Health. That is, merge the World Health Organization with the fight against drugs, because basically it is a public health issue. You also have to make an effort at the local level, which is very difficult. When I started writing these theses, when I was president, they attacked me and said: ‘What you want is to poison the children.’ I would arrive at a meeting and the moms would call me ‘miserable’. I asked them: ‘If your son is caught with drugs, do you want him to go to jail or to a medical institution where they help him? They all answered: ‘To an institution’. And I explained to them that this is what legalization is about,” said former President Juan Manuel Santos in an interview offered to the Colombian newspaper ‘El Espectador’ in 2020.
What is glyphosate and what effects does it produce in humans?
According to specialists in the agricultural field, glyphosate is defined as a herbicide that is used to eliminate so-called weeds in most plants. For this reason, the product is used in the process of preparing the land before sowing.
Glyphosate was developed by the Monsanto company in the 1970s. Currently, health regulators in the United States and Europe consider the product safe “as labeled,” stating that there is no evidence to conclude that it produces cancer in people.
However, in 2015, the WHO cancer research body (IARC) indicated that it was “probably carcinogenic.”
Despite the fact that the Monsanto company, acquired by Bayer in 2018, and one of the largest producers of glyphosate in the world, has stated that the product “is safe”, basing its statement on the results of hundreds of scientific studies, the organization has faced lawsuits in recent years that have led to the payment of millions of dollars in compensation.
With information from local media
