The People's Defender, a Colombian government human rights watchdog, has accused authorities of damaging the health of locals and the environment in the province of Putumayo.  U.S. funded aerial fumigation of illicit coca and poppy crops has increased, and every year the number of hectares under drug cultivation goes up, along with the amount of virgin forest destroyed.  The recent election of hardline President Alvaro Uribe, who is strong supporter of the U.S. led war on drugs, is expected to lead to increased fumigation.  Human rights groups and environmentalists say the U.S. policy attacks the weakest part of the drugs chain, without impacting cocaine production.

The peasant farmers who grow coca as the only way to survive suffer the most under the policy.  They do not share in the massive profits that the smugglers and dealers in the US get.  Environmentalists complain that the herbicides used damage the environment, killing all plant life, not just drug crops.  The People's Defender's is calling for a halt to spraying in Putumayo, Colombia's coca growing heartland.  Eduardo Cifuentes, the Colombian ombudsman, said he has received more than 6,500 complaints this year of planes fumigating food crops, leaving peasants without a livelihood, damaging the health of people - particularly children caught outside as the chemicals are dropped - and causing great damage to the sensitive eco-system of the Amazon.

In related news, the Associated Press reports that U.S.-funded alternative development aid has fallen far short of its goals.  Tens of thousands of peasant farmers in Putumayo state were to have received development aid under the $1.3 billion Plan Colombia, an initiative of the Clinton administration that was approved by Congress and is still active under the Bush administration.  But only about half the families in Colombia's cocaine heartland ever received the aid, a U.S. official said Thursday at a briefing with journalists.  "I believe the magnitude of the problem was way above their ability to actually get out and meet every family that supposedly signed the voluntary eradication pacts," the U.S. official said on the condition of anonymity.  "We are (telling) peasants to grow legal crops that must be transported on vehicles they do not have, over roads that do not exist, to sell in domestic and international markets to which they do not have access," says Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.  "These peasants don't stand a chance."