Bogota, Colombia ? The U.S. ambassador urged Colombia Sunday to spray weed killer inside the country’s spectacular nature parks to destroy cocaine-producing crops, insisting the chemicals will not cause widespread damage to the reserves’ ecosystems.

Harried by eradication campaigns elsewhere, drug traffickers have in recent years streamed into the parks, where spraying is banned. In the parks, they have torn down thousands of acres of virgin rain forest to plant coca, the raw ingredient in cocaine.

In response, Colombia’s government is debating whether to lift a ban on aerial fumigation in the reserves.

“We don’t want the parks and reserves to turn into refuges or sanctuaries for coca,” U.S. Ambassador William Wood said in an interview in the newsmagazine Cambio.

Wood insisted that research shows that the weed killer used in the spraying “doesn’t seep into the soil or contaminate rivers.”

The amount of land under coca cultivation in Colombia’s 49 national parks has more than tripled to 28,000 acres since 2003.

Colombia, the world’s biggest cocaine producer, is home to about 15 percent of all the world’s plant species and one of its most diverse arrays of amphibians, mammals and birds.