Coffee’s plague starts with yellow spots and what look like burn marks. They form on the leaves of the coffee plant, causing the foliage to wither until the tree resembles a skeleton. It stops bean-producing cherries from growing. This is coffee rust or roya, caused by the hemileia vastatrix fungus. For two years it has been ravaging Central America and the Caribbean. Arabica plants – used for espresso and filter coffee – are particularly vulnerable. Arabica accounts for almost all production in the worst affected countries of Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Panama.

The current epidemic is the worst seen since the fungus appeared in Central America in 1976, says the International Coffee Organisation. More than half of the region’s coffee-producing areas are affected. In 2013 alone, production fell 20%.

Nobody’d be that stupid and inhumane, right? The CIA would, absolutely.

But, wait, it gets worse. Clamp your conspiracy hat firmly on your head: [nyt]

Up to one-third of Afghanistan’s poppy harvest this spring has been destroyed by a mysterious disease, according to estimates revealed Wednesday by United Nations officials, potentially complicating the American and NATO military offensives this summer in the country’s opium-producing heartland.

The Taliban’s public relations strategy against the offensives includes trying to convince local residents that Western troops will destroy their poppy crops, and in recent weeks Afghan farmers have started blaming the American and NATO militaries for spreading the disease, United Nations officials say. In many places, the blight has wiped out more than half of individual poppy fields.

A mysterious disease? Are you fucking kidding me? Agricultural scientists know how to de-mysterify this kind of thing fairly quickly. You look closely at affected plants and see if they are growing fungus on them. If that’s not it, start looking for bacteria or a virus. Etc. It’s suspicious as hell to me that somehow Afghanistan’s poppy crop didn’t matter except anyone with a brain is going to ask, “does that shit also affect wheat and corn, coffee and chocolate?” What is it? Scientists figure that kind of thing out for a living. That piece in the failing New York Times was from 2010. What have we learned since then?

Any news report that begins, “The US is strong-arming Columbia” ought to worry you. But Mother Jones, unlike the New York Times, tends to report on things that are actually happening, before the rest of the lumpenproletariat learn about it (thought a watered-down report on the New York Times, timed to not affect elections) [mj]

The big American suddenly stood up, leaned over the table and said to the Colombian in a low voice, “You’d better be careful not to talk to the press!”

Dr. David C. Sands, scientist and entrepreneur, was meeting with advisors to the Colombian Ministry of the Environment last March to push a new drug-war weapon marketed by his company: a special toxic fungus which would kill coca plants. The Colombian scientist who raised Sands’ hackles had pointed out that the fungus could also attack humans with weakened immune systems — a condition common among the often undernourished and generally unhealthy poor coca farmers and workers in the tropical rain forests of Colombia, where Sands wants to carry out a massive spraying program. “He didn’t care,” said the Colombian, who asked not to be named.

Sands is not the only party pushing this new biological weapon. The US Congress is demanding that Colombia apply the controversial fungus in order to receive $1.6 billion in emergency bailout funds for Colombia’s antidrug/counterinsurgency strategy called Plan Colombia. Last March, Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-NY, tacked on an amendment to the pending aid bill requiring President Clinton to certify that the Colombian government “has agreed to and is implementing a strategy to eliminate Colombia’s total coca and opium poppy production” using, among other means “tested, environmentally safe mycoherbicides.” Myco = fungus; herbicide = plant killer.
[emphasis mine]

Sounds nuts, doesn’t it? These people don’t respect evolution very much, do they? It’s especially crazy, to me, since things like opium poppies are moved around in great big bundles known as “fungal incubators” – and moved all over the fucking planet – it’s pretty easy to hypothesize how something like that could spread.

Like, to Afghanistan.

Ha ha ha, I kid. I kid.

It’s interesting, though, that there is so little reporting and scientific research about the mysterious opium crop failure. The reporting I could find blames “a drought” which is probably legit. But there is other reporting that Afghanistan was experiencing a bumper crop. That being the crop that failed. It’s like a conspiracy or something. [Yes I am aware of the episode of The Americans that hypothesizes a CIA plot to destroy Soviet agriculture.] But the US imperial system does its conspiracying openly, running its ops as a trial balloon in the New York Times. [nyt] [from 2000]

Imagine the horking blasts of diahhretic shit squirting from every journalist in California if someone casually suggested solving California’s drought using aggressive crop management techniques like bio-weapons. Imagine if water supplies were seeded with fungi that capitalists sold you the cure for? These fucking idiots are confronting (and wringing their hands in despair over) computer-based ransomware, give me a break! We are at the cusp of a time where someone might create bioweapons-as-ransomware. Cusp? We’re past it: the US apparently has been busily doing it since 2000 or so. I simply don’t have it in me to write a Robert Heinlein-esque parody of a dystopian future where European farm-subsidized government decides to crash US agriculture with a tailored blight or two. Like Heinlein thought we should do to the Chinese, and worse.

Dr. David C. Sands holds out a clear plastic petri dish filled with a white fuzzy fungus growing across the bottom. This substance, he believes, is the key to ending much of the world’s production of illicit drugs.

Members of Congress also believe that Dr. Sands and other researchers may be on to a powerful and environmentally safe method of killing not only coca plants, but also marijuana and poppy plants. The members have asked the government of Colombia to test a strain of Fusarium oxysporum over the next two years. If it proves effective, the disease will be sprayed on vast fields of coca plants there, and experts say it could wipe out much of the coca crop within a year.

Fusarium Oxysporum is also a banana blight. I wonder if the world’s banana crops are going to be “collateral damage”? It is not at all hard to imagine scenarios where a crop blight bioweapon gets loose and turns out to live and reproduce just fine on some “valuable” crop [I like opium and consider it valuable] but what if it gets loose in California’s surviving almond fields? [By the way, memo to Al Queda or Hamas: I can teach you how to make bioweapons that could cripple Israeli, Florida, or Californian agriculture. God, you people are stupid.]

It seems to me that the trigger on this bit of brain-damage was pulled some time ago. That it was being trial-ballooned in NYT in 2000 and later the same scenario plays itself out, involuntarily, in Afghanistan – it’s just too much coincidence.

[wik]

In 2000, the government of Colombia proposed dispersing strains of Crivellia and Fusarium oxysporum, also known as Agent Green, as a biological weapon to forcibly eradicate coca and other illegal crops. The weaponized strains were developed by the US government, who originally conditioned their approval of Plan Colombia on the use of this weapon, but ultimately withdrew the condition. In February 2001, the EU Parliament also issued a declaration specifically against the use of these biological agents in warfare.

Hahahahahahaaahahaha!!! Wait, let me catch my breath: we’re supposed to believe that the Columbians wanted that? Yet, the reporting from the same time was that the US Government was trying to tie the bioweapon’s use to foreign aid, as usual. Also, note that the US Government did develop the bioagent.

Wrap your brain around this: the US appears to have a) illegally developed a bioweapon, and published that fact in multiple ways and b) used it, possibly, in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the US congress complain about Hamas, and the Taliban, who are rank, pathetic nihil-league amateurs compared to the terrorism-farm in Langley, Virginia.

[Nature] reports that Fusarium appeared in bananas about 50 years ago. So that may be what the bioweapons labs started with…? Obviously, there’s not a lot of peer-reviewed reporting on “How we made a WMD!” in the literature.