Monday, November 08, 2004



Roundup Ready Coca

Wired has a story about the emergance of a Roundup-Ready Coca strain in Colombia. The US government has been paying the Colombians to conduct a massive aerial spraying campaign in an effort to eliminate the Coca plant and thereby reduce cocaine production. Unfortunately, the plants just aren't dying anymore. There's a lot of speculation that the drug-lords simply bought themselves a few genetic engineers and used published techniques to implant Monsanto's (patented) Roundup-Ready gene, but it seems instead that the resistance is natural and propagated by farmers distributing cuttings to one another (which Wired naturally compares to file sharing). The US government of course is officially in denial, refusing to believe that simple-minded South American peasants could vanquish the American chemical industry with ten thousand year-old techniques, while making plans to escalate from herbicide to biological warfare agents. I guess they don't care about the prospect of a crop-eating fungus destroying people's crops and causing a famine if it's Colombians who will starve...

0 comments: