Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins—From Spices to Vices

by Noah Whiteman

The offerings made in exchange for these raw materials—from loans to scientific expertise—had strings attached that coincided with US style of agriculture: large-scale monocultures. In the end, advice from the United States superseded local knowledge. Unfortunately, the adopted US approach involved questionable agricultural and forestry practices like the introduction of unnecessary crops and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. These practices continue to this day and have hastened the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rain forest, among other negative effects. And importantly, many of the remaining gray-barked Cinchona tree species of the Andean cloud forests are now threatened, owing to centuries of exploitation followed by deforestation and habitat degradation.