Colombia's health ministry seeks to halt coca spraying

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Colombia's health ministry seeks to halt coca spraying
Apr 27, 11:00 PM EDT

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Colombias Health Ministry is recommending the immediate suspension of aerial spraying of a herbicide thats the cornerstone of U.S.-financed efforts to wipe out cocaine crops.

The ministry on Monday based its decision on the reclassification last month of glyphosate as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization's research arm. It said it was acting in accordance with a constitutional court ruling that it take precautions whenever credible health risks are apparent.

President Juan Manuel Santos has yet to respond to the ministry's recommendation.

More than 4 million acres of land in Colombia have been sprayed with the popular weed killer over the past two decades to kill coca plants, whose leaves produce cocaine. The spraying program is partly carried out by U.S. contractors.




Read more: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_COLOMBIA_COCAINE_SPRAYING?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-04-27-23-00-05

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(Short article, no more at link.)

[DLnyc]

1. Interesting note, Glyphosphate is also known as "Roundup"

Glyphosate (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine) is a broad-spectrum systemic herbicide used to kill weeds, especially annual broadleaf weeds and grasses known to compete with commercial crops grown around the globe. It was discovered to be a herbicide by Monsanto chemist John E. Franz in 1970.[3] Monsanto brought it to market in the 1970s under the trade name Roundup and Monsanto's last commercially relevant United States patent expired in 2000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyphosate

[truedelphi]

2. RoundUp also contains polyethylalineamine or POEA,

Which is even more dangerous that the glyphosate. It also has to contain an aldehyde of some sort, or the glyphosate would not be sprayable but instead would remain in a cake-form.

Activists in Central and South America believe that whatever version of RoundUp that is used in those nations has other ingredients as well, as it seems to make people who come into contact with it much sicker than it does when used in other places.

[DLnyc]

3. Interesting, thanks!

[truedelphi]

9. Here is a link containing pertinent risk assessment info on RoundUp -

And apparently one Australian researcher has found that it damages DNA.

https://www.change.org/p/round-up-glyphosate-deadly-to-all

[Peace Patriot]

4. 40+ years of this...

40+ frigging years of this sick, sick, sick, sick, filthily corrupt, murderous, geocidal, genocidal U.S. war on people, animals and plants!

This is the very paradigm of corporate rule--that good people could not--and still can't--stop this. It has NOTHING TO DO with illicit drugs. It never has had anything to do with illicit drugs! It has everything to do with corporate 0.01% 'investors' selling massive amounts of poisons and weaponry to 'our' government--at a cost of trillions of our tax dollars--for the purpose of killing, poisoning and subjugating other people, not to mention ourselves.

When are we going to get this through our heads--that the INTENT of the U.S. "war on drugs" has been to drive 5 million peasant farmers from their lands in Colombia, as prep for "free trade for the rich"?

We are living in an "Alice in Wonderland" world--inside out, upside down and backwards! With the corrupt, murderous, failed, 40+ year U.S. "war on drugs," the cocaine and other lethal drugs just keep on flowing into our inner cities where 50% unemployment, rotten schools, and hopelessness drive young people to trade in drugs, which in turn feeds the profits of the "prison-industrial" complex--and, not incidentally, strikes millions of black voters off the voting rolls--and fosters murderous cops, who get off on breaking young black men's necks by giving them a "rough ride" to jail--ANY young black men, drug traffickers or not, guilty of minor 'crimes' like selling cigarettes on the sidewalk, or not, guilty of something--anything!--or completely innocent. The corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" is directly responsible for creating such cops.

Funny that most of the cocaine comes from a U.S. ally, Colombia--headed, until recently, by a Bush-installed 'president' with close ties to drug trafficking and rightwing death squads--and is routed through Honduras, where the U.S. State Department installed a fascist regime. Not funny. Odd. Telling. And supremely ironical.

The coca leaf itself is an innocent leaf, used for thousands of years by indigenous people as a mild, coffee-like stimulant. That it gets transformed into cocaine is the RESULT of the U.S. "war on drugs." The result! Drug cartels, banksters and others (the Miami mafia and its politicians, police and military forces and their 'contractors,' and the CIA, the Bush cartel, the DEA, the FBI, et al, if the truth were known) CREATE the profit with the illegality. This is why the Bush-approved former Colombian 'president,' Alvaro Uribe--with close ties to drug trafficking and rightwing death squads from the beginning of his career--OPPOSES the legalization of drugs. The cartels have been making huge profits off the illegality, which creates a vast field for corruption all the way to Wall Street and the agencies of the U.S. government.

Nothing whatever to do with stopping illicit drugs. All to do with profits, including Monsanto's profit in poisoning peasant farmers, their children, and their animals, and driving them from their lands.

[Bigmack]

5. TOTALLY AGREE! nt

[truedelphi]

8. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^n/t

[lark]

6. US doesn't care about the drugs

just wants to keep the contractors in business and keep the MIC busy producing weapons.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Campaign Against Glyphosate Steps Up in Latin America

Campaign Against Glyphosate Steps Up in Latin America
By Fabiana Frayssinet


[font size=1]
Glyphosate spraying of illegal drug crops has caused environmental damage in Colombia’s rainforest.
Credit: Public domain
[/font]
BUENOS AIRES, Apr 28 2015 (IPS) - After the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared glyphosate a probable carcinogen, the campaign has intensified in Latin America to ban the herbicide, which is employed on a massive scale on transgenic crops.
In a Mar. 20 publication, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) reported that the world’s most widely used herbicide is probably carcinogenic to humans, a conclusion that was based on numerous studies.

Social organisations and scientific researchers in Latin America argue that thanks to the report by the WHO’s cancer research arm, governments no longer have an excuse not to intervene, after years of research on the damage caused by glyphosate to health and the environment at a regional and global level.

~ snip ~

Vicente, meanwhile, noted that applied research carried out in several Latin American countries point in the same direction as the WHO study. In Argentina, for example, studies in the provinces of Rosario and Córdoba “clearly demonstrate the rise in cases of cancer, which in some instances are three or four times the national average.”

In Colombia, agronomist Elsa Nivia, director of the Pesticide Action Network in that country, found that in the first two months of 2001 local authorities reported 4,289 people suffering from skin and gastric disorders, and 178,377 animals – including horses, cattle, pigs, dogs, ducks, hens and fish – killed as a result of exposure to the pesticide.

More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/campaign-against-glyphosate-steps-up-in-latin-america/