OneWorld.net (U.S.)

Colombia has restarted its U.S.-funded aerially herbicide campaign to destroy coca plants allegedly grown in the region that borders Ecuador.

The herbicides, including glyphosate (active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup), travel by air and water exposing food crops and people who live near the Colombia border.

Chela Vazquez, a PANNAcampaign coordinator, visited her Ecuadorean birthplace recently. She reports: "People are begging for help. There is a national outcry to stop aerial defoliation in the Colombian border area."Indigenous people in Colombia and Ecuador, as well as Ecuador's government, are insisting that the herbicide campaign stop.

According to Scoop Independent News, Ecuador's newly inaugurated President, Rafael Vicente Correa Delgado, called the renewed flights "a hostile act by Colombia against Ecuador," and recalled Ecuador's Ambassador to Colombia in protest.

Scoop also reports that the impacted "small-scale subsistence farmers, who usually live in near penury, rely completely upon their food crops for their survival and cannot be expected to recover easily, or at all, from losing a dramatically large portion of their livelihood as a result of adventitious sprayings.

During a visit to Washington in order to plead for an end to the [spraying], the Colombian indigenous leader José Francisco Tenorio cried out to his audience: ‘Our legal crops -- our only sustenance ...have been fumigated [sprayed]. Our sources of water, creeks, rivers, lakes, have been poisoned, killing our fish and other living things. Today, hunger is our daily bread. In the name of the Amazonian Indigenous people I ask that the fumigations [spraying] be immediately suspended."