by Our Foreign Desk

COLOMBIAN President Juan Manuel Santos bowed to public pressure at the weekend, announcing a halt in use of the glyphosate herbicide to destroy coca plants.

The Health Ministry had recommended change to the president, based on a World Health Organisation decision to classify glyphosate as a carcinogen.

Mr Santos said that defence and health officials should agree on a transition period, during which “spraying of glyphosate has to be replaced with other mechanisms — for example, intensifying manual eradication” of coca plants.

US ambassador Kevin Whitaker said that the decision on whether to use the chemical was a decision for Colombia and would be respected by Washington.

More than 4 million acres of land in Colombia have been sprayed with glyphosate over the past two decades to kill the plants whose leaves can be used to produce cocaine. The herbicide was provided by the US and the spraying programme is carried out partly by US contractors.

The decision to end the use of glyphosate could have a side effect of easing peace talks with Farc (the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which has demanded an end to the spraying as part of any deal.

Both sides had already agreed that aerial eradication would be used only as a last resort.

The two main cocaine-producing countries, Peru and Bolivia, have avoided use of chemical herbicides, using manual eradication instead.

US transnational corporation Monsanto and other manufacturers of glyphosate-based products have strongly rejected the WHO ruling, citing a 2012 US Environmental Protection Agency that the herbicide was safe.