Miriam Poma stands in the electromechanical workshop for high-end vehicles that she co-owns in the city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz, Bolivia. In the past, she had several jobs in the informal sector and also had to overcome a lot of resistance to working as an automotive mechanic. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Sep 21 2023 (IPS)

In Bolivia, more and more women have gone from being homemakers or street vendors to joining the noisy world of engines, their hands now covered in grease after learning that special touch to make a car work. But they frequently have to put up with machismo or sexism, injustice and mistrust of their skills with tools.

Automotive mechanics is traditionally associated with masculine men wearing oil-stained coveralls. In La Paz and other Bolivian cities over the years many auto repair shops have upgraded from precarious workshops on the street to modern facilities with high-tech equipment.

Vehicles have also transitioned from human-operated nut-and-gear systems to cars governed by electronics.

But openness to women has not evolved in the same way in the profession, as it is unusual to find female mechanics.

And auto repair shops do not appear in studies on informal employment in Latin America by the International Labor Organization (ILO), although mechanic shops are very much present in the informal sector.

“At the age of five I learned about fractions through tears. My father would ask me for a fork wrench (middle wrench, in Bolivia), but since I didn’t know which one it was, he would throw it at my head,” Miriam Poma Cabezas, a senior electromechanical technician, now 50 and divorced, told IPS.

Since that incident, a mixture of anecdote and forced apprenticeship, 45 years have passed, most of them dedicated to the profession of mechanics specializing in engines and now in the electronics of high-end vehicles, in a workshop of which she is co-owner in the city of El Alto, next to La Paz, the country’s political capital.

On a busy street in the La Paz neighborhood of Sopocachi, Ana Castillo uses complex techniques to dismantle rubber tires, identify the damage, and clean and apply chemicals to fix them. At 56, she is an expert in the trade.

She charges about a dollar and a half for each repaired tire, which involves exerting vigorous effort to loosen rusted lug nuts, in order to find the puncture in worn tires amidst the fine black dust that has darkened her hands for 20 years.

“God put me here and I love it because you have to use your strength. I would go crazy sitting still,” Castillo, who completed law school, though she never practiced law, tells IPS as she quickly operates a wrench that creaks as it loosens one of the nuts, stuck hard and moldy from water and dirt.

But she does not only repair tires. She is also a specialist in rebuilding classic cars, an activity for which she is becoming very well-known.

Ana Castillo checks one of the rims she has on the sidewalk of her workshop on a busy street of the Sopocachi neighborhood in the Bolivian city of La Paz. Automotive mechanics holds no mysteries for Castillo, who is also a specialist in rebuilding antique cars. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

With a great deal of effort, Poma managed to set up her own high-level electromechanical repair shop, but before that she had spent years working as an informal self-employed worker, not only in automotive mechanics.

For her part, Castillo complained about the municipal seizure of a piece of land where she wanted to build the mechanic shop of her dreams, together with her husband Mario Cardona. A court ruling granted them the right to use the land and a city council resolution upheld it, but they still have not been given back the land.

A case like so many others

The automotive mechanics sector is just one example of those in which the participation of Bolivian women is particularly difficult, because they are seen as traditionally male professions and there is strong resistance to women breaking into the field, whether out of necessity or a sense of vocation.

The 2018 Annual Report of the UN Women agency, based on figures from the National Institute of Statistics, states that seven out of 10 women in Bolivia are economically active, work in informal conditions and lack labor rights, which makes it difficult to specifically identify how many work as mechanics.

UN Women highlights that Bolivia “is the third country in the world, after Rwanda and Cuba, with the highest political participation of women”: 51 percent in the Chamber of Deputies and 44 percent in the Senate.

But this high female presence in politics in this South American country of 12.3 million inhabitants does not translate into a boost for women in other areas, particularly business and formal employment.

The president of the Chamber of Businesswomen of Bolivia (Camebol), Silvia Quevedo, told IPS that there is no “state incentive (for women’s participation) in any particular job” and encourages “women themselves to forge their own way, based on the quality of their work.”

Camebol emerged in the department of Santa Cruz, the most economically developed in the country, and has since spread to six of Bolivia’s nine regions. It has a thousand members and its purpose, together with strengthening its institutional framework, is to influence public policies to promote equal opportunities in business.

A study conducted by the ILO on Bolivian self-employed women workers in the informal sector shows that the department of La Paz accounts for 31.8 percent of this segment, with an average age of 45 years and eight years of schooling, below the 12 years of compulsory basic education.

In the city of La Paz, 75 percent of self-employed women work in commerce, 15 percent in manufacturing and eight percent in community services. In the other two largest cities in the country, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, the proportions are similar, according to the report.

Electromechanics specialist Miriam Poma checks on a screen the problems of a high-end vehicle in her specialized workshop in the Bolivian city of El Alto, adjacent to La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Experienced hands

Miriam Poma told IPS that she began to create her own source of employment at the age of 16, on the bustling commercial Huyustus Street in La Paz, where thousands of vendors sell all kinds of merchandise. She sold shoes and handbags.

But soon after, she decided to devote herself full time to repairing Volkswagen vehicles, and ended up as head mechanical assistant to her father, Marcelino Poma, who competed in rally races until he was 70 years old.

Creativity to adapt at a young age to the opportunities of street commerce led Ana Castillo to sell pork sandwiches. She was 14 years old at the time, forced by the responsibility of caring for her two younger brothers after they had all been abandoned by their mother.

“I know how to make everything: sausages, pickles, sauces; I’m not afraid to start from scratch,” Castillo, who helped her two younger brothers earn degrees in business administration and social communication, told IPS enthusiastically.

In the formal economy, “foreign trade has a woman’s face,” said Quevedo, the president of Camebol, based on surveys of the participation of its members in export companies.

Quevedo is an economist with extensive knowledge in agriculture who specializes in exports.

In 2022, international sales of non-traditional products amounted to 9.7 billion dollars, according to the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE), in a country with a GDP of 41 billion dollars.

But there are still prejudices about women’s efficiency in men’s jobs, as the two women mechanics noted.

Poma said the customers in her father’s repair shop initially did not trust her to tune their engines, and tried to keep her from working on their vehicles.

Her brother, Julio Poma, would say he had done the work, and only after the client expressed complete satisfaction would he reveal that the work was actually done by his sister.

Recently, Poma tried to pass on her knowledge to men in the field of motor electronics, but no one was interested in a female instructor who was also a racing driver in 2006. In order to attract students, she had to hire a foreign expert.

A study carried out by the Women’s Institute of La Paz, belonging to the city government, indicated the level of interest in learning gastronomy, computer technology, cell phone use and education in small business finances.

Among the non-conventional trades, the respondents called for training in masonry, plumbing and electricity, a spokesperson for the Institute told IPS. The Institute conducts training workshops for 1,450 low-income women heads of households between the ages of 25 and 70.

Sofía Quispe, the president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, finds a good haul of paper and cardboard in a municipal dumpster at the end of Avenida 6 de Agosto in La Paz, in a nighttime job that the southern hemisphere winter makes more challenging. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 12 2023 (IPS)

They haul many kilos of recyclable materials on their backs but receive little in return. These Bolivian women who help clean up the environment from dawn to dusk are fighting for recognition of their work and social and labor rights.

The inhabitants of La Paz, Bolivia’s political center, walk hurriedly and almost oblivious to the women of different ages silently opening heavy lids of municipal garbage dumpsters that are taller than the women themselves."This sector isn't noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is 'devalued'." -- Bárbara Giavarini

They use a homemade tool, a kind of hook with a long wooden handle, to dig through the unsorted waste, trying to avoid getting cut by broken glass, and in search of plastic containers, paper, cardboard or aluminum cans.

People walk by on the avenues and squares without looking at them, and sometimes actively avoiding them. The recyclers feel this indifference and even rejection, but they overcome it with the courage gained over years and generations, convincing themselves that they have a dignified vocation.

“People call us dirty pigs (cochinas), they humiliate us and we can never respond,” says Rosario Ramos, a 16-year-old who accompanies her mother, Valeriana Chacolla, 58, sorting through the trash for recyclable waste.

A study by the United Nations Joint Program on self-employed women workers in the country describes them generally as being “of indigenous origin, adults with primary school education. Seventy percent of them are also involved in activities related to commerce, while 16 percent work in the manufacturing industry.”

Of a population of 12.2 million projected by the National Institute of Statistics for the year 2022, 5.9 million are women. La Paz is home to 1.53 million people.

Of the total population of this Andean country, 41 percent defined themselves as indigenous in the last census, while according to the latest official data available, 26 percent of urban dwellers live in moderate poverty and 7.2 percent in extreme poverty, including most of the informal recyclers.

One of the groups of women of the Ecorecicladoras de La Paz association gather next to a municipal dumpster in a corner of Plaza Avaroa in Bolivia’s political capital, after finishing their nightly collection of reusable materials. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

On this southern hemisphere wintertime July night in La Paz, the group of women are virtually invisible as they gather around the dumpsters located in a corner of the Plaza Avaroa, in the area of Sopocachi, where residential and public office buildings are interspersed with banks, supermarkets and other businesses.

It’s a good place for picking through the waste in the dumpsters, and the women find paper, newspapers, plastic and aluminum containers. Although the volume of waste is large, each one of the garbage pickers manages to collect no more than one or two kg on one of the days that IPS accompanied different groups of the women in their work.

The silence is broken on some occasions when salaried municipal cleaners show up and throw the women out of the place, because they also compete to obtain materials that they then sell to recyclers. This is a moment when it becomes especially clear that garbage has value.

That is one of several reasons that forced the informal garbage pickers to come together in an association called EcoRecicladoras de La Paz. “There is no work for us, and they only listen to us when we organize,” says María Martínez, 50, the recording secretary of the 45 members, who also include a few men.

In Bolivia, trash is not separated into reusable and non-reusable waste in homes or offices. This task is carried out by private recycling companies, who buy the raw materials from informal waste collectors such as EcoRecicladoras.

Leonor Colque Rodríguez, 78, wearily ends her night shift collecting recyclable waste in Sopocachi, an area in La Paz, Bolivia. She has been working for 40 years as a “grassroots recycler” and is the head of her household. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Martínez, with slightly graying hair, says she comes out every evening. “I was a domestic worker until I was 30 years old. When my daughter was born I couldn’t get a job. I collected plastic bottles, clothes and shoes and sold them to the factories, but the recycling companies who pay really low prices emerged,” she complains.

It takes about three months between the initial collection and the final sale of the recyclable materials. Martínez collects the materials, carries around seven kg on her back, walks about three kilometers and patiently stores them until she has enough to sell them to the wholesaler.

“One year I collected 200 kg of scrap metal and sold it for 150 bolivianos (about 20 dollars),” she recalls. The recycling companies want to buy by the ton, she explains, with a grin, because it is impossible for them to reach that volume.

She represents a second generation of garbage collectors. Her mother, Leonor Colque, is two years short of turning 80, and has been combing through garbage dumps and trash on the streets for 40 years. On her back she carries a cloth in which she hauls a number of pieces of paper and some plastic waste.

“They should stay in school because this job is not for young girls,” she recommends, sadly, because she could not achieve her goal of sending one of her daughters to a teacher training school.

At 58, Chacolla, like almost all women garbage pickers, is the head of her household. Her husband, a former public transport driver, lost his job due to health problems and occasionally works as a welder, door-maker or bricklayer.

When she goes out to sort through trash she is accompanied by her daughter, Rosario, who explains and expands on what her mother says, calling for a change in the public’s attitude towards them and respect for the work they do as dignified, emphasizing, as they all do, that they deal with recyclable waste, not garbage.

Vests like this one identify women “grassroots recyclers” in their work of sorting through waste in dumpsters installed by the municipal government of La Paz in different parts of the Bolivian city. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

“I walk with the Lord in my heart, he always helps me,” says Angelica Yana, who at 63 years of age defies the dangers of the wee hours of the morning in the Achachicala area, on the outskirts of La Paz, five kilometers north of the city.

“Nothing has ever happened to me,” says Yana, who leaves her home at three in the morning to scrape up enough to support a son who offers fine finishing masonry services, and her sick husband.

At the age of 70, Alberta Caisana says that she was assaulted by municipal cleanup workers while she was scrounging for recyclable materials. She now carries a credential issued by the Environmental Prevention and Control Directorate of the Autonomous Municipal Government of La Paz, and wears a work vest donated by development aid agencies from the governments of Sweden and Switzerland.

She relies on her uniform and identification card as symbols of protection from the indifference of the people and aggression from local officials.

The mother of a daughter and the head of her household, Anahí Lovera, saw her wish to continue her university studies frustrated, and at the age of 32 she combines collecting plastic bottles with helping in different tasks in the construction of houses.

In the foreground, the secretary of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, María Martínez (50), together with Carla Chávez (42) and her mother Leonarda Chávez (72) take a break from sorting through waste in the Sopocachi area of the Bolivian city of La Paz. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Others, they say, sell clothes and other recovered objects in street markets, such as the famous one in Villa 16 de Julio in the neighboring city of El Alto, where used and new objects are sold in an area covering two kilometers.

Lovera’s work appears to go smoothly, but she and her colleagues describe the moment of dealing with the buyers. They deliver an exact volume and weight of products and the buyers declare a lower weight in order to pay less.

“This sector isn’t noticed by society, especially because we work with waste, that is, with what society throws away; this work is ‘devalued’,” Bárbara Giavarini, coordinator of Redcicla Bolivia-Reciclaje Inclusivo, told IPS.

One sign of the public’s recognition of the “grassroots recyclers,” as they call themselves, could be the direct, sorted delivery of the waste, which would facilitate the women’s work, she said.

Redcicla, a platform that promotes the integrated treatment of waste, has been helping since 2017 to organize them and bring visibility to their work, while fostering the delivery of waste from citizens to “grassroots recyclers” and working for the recognition of their work as dignified.

The president of Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofía Quispe, supports the idea of getting help from local residents in sorting materials and delivering them to their affiliates, instead of throwing them into dumpsters where they are mixed with products that prevent subsequent recycling.

The president of the women’s group Ecorecicladoras de La Paz, Sofia Quispe, walks along the central Arce Avenue in this Bolivian city in search of dumpsters where local residents throw their waste. CREDIT: Franz Chávez / IPS

Quispe is a 42-year-old mother of three. Like most of her fellow recyclers, she walks about two kilometers on foot in search of dumpsters, dressed in the customary indigenous wide-brimmed hat and pollera or skirt.

On the night that IPS accompanied her, she did not find the dumpster that was usually on Avenida 6 de Agosto, probably because it had been removed and taken to another part of the city.

The impoverished garbage picker was once a skilled seamstress who worked in small family-owned factories in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. Upon her return due to an illness, she was unable to raise the money she needed to buy a machine and raw materials.

She was also discouraged by the lack of interest among local residents in buying garments made in Bolivia, as they preferred low-cost clothing smuggled into the country as contraband.

Leonarda Chávez, another 72-year-old head of household, who collects recyclable materials every day with her daughter Carla Chávez (42) and granddaughter Maya Muga Chávez (25), feels satisfied because she can see her dream come true.

This month, her granddaughter earned a diploma in Business Social Responsibility, with which she completed her university education, in addition to a degree in commercial engineering and business administration, in a country where higher studies do not always guarantee good jobs.

Among the darkness and the objects discarded by people, hope is also alive. Rosario Ramos took the lessons of hard work and created her own goal: “I will study advanced robotics and prosthetic assembly,” she says with a confidence that contrasts with the group’s sad stories.

A photo of workers of the state oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) drilling an oil well. CREDIT: YPFB

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jun 19 2023 (IPS)

One of the largest natural gas reservoirs in South America is showing signs of decline and the hopeful expectations that emerged in 2006, to turn Bolivia into a regional energy leader, are waning.

When the fossil fuel bonanza was already showing signs of fatigue, then president Evo Morales (2006-2019) announced in the middle of his election campaign, in March 2019, the discovery of what was described as a “sea of ​​gas” in the department of Tarija, in the south of the country.

But the certainty of a future natural gas boom gave way to a downward trend in the sector that is currently affecting production and sales and has shattered the hopes that gas would remain the engine of internal development for a long time to come, according to industry experts.

“They strangled the goose that laid the golden eggs,” said Gonzalo Chávez, an analyst with a PhD in economics, who pointed to a 3.2 billion dollar drop in gas revenues between 2014 and 2021. The decline is attributed to the lack of exploration of new reserves.

In 2014, oil and gas revenues amounted to nearly 5.5 billion dollars, compared to less than 2.3 billion dollars in 2021, according to Chávez’s calculations. The fall is considerable, more so given that in 2021, public spending totaled 2.6 billion dollars. The economy grew that year by 6.5 percent, according to the Ministry of Economy and Public Finance.

The state-owned oil and gas company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) “has shown that it does not now have the technical or financial capacity to explore or develop new fields,” economic analyst Roberto Laserna told IPS.

The company’s website reported that the investment in exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons for the period 2021-2025 amounts to 1.4 billion dollars, and quotes its president, Armin Dorgathen, as stating that the aim is “to change this situation of the importation of fuels.”

On Jun. 12, the YPFB announced that the testing stage at the Chaco Este X9D oil well, located in the province of Gran Chaco in Tarija, “recorded hydrocarbon flows in two reservoirs,” as part of the effort the company is making to show that it is pulling out of the production rut.

Dorgathen announced that the discoveries will contribute an average production of 8.76 million cubic feet per day of natural gas and 281 barrels per day of crude oil.

Questions that IPS sent to YPFB a few days earlier, regarding the drop in gas revenues, received no response.

In the 21st century Bolivia remains dependent on hydrocarbons, both for its energy consumption – 81 percent of which comes from fossil sources – and for its tax revenue – 35 percent of which comes from the industry since the Hydrocarbons Law was introduced in 2005.

This landlocked Andean country of 12.2 million people has an economy traditionally based on extractive activities, especially tin, lead, zinc, copper, gold and silver mining, and more recently and abundantly on fossil fuels, after the discovery of large gas deposits at the beginning of this century.

One of the first measures adopted by Morales upon taking office in 2006 was the total nationalization of the industry, leaving the entire production and marketing chain in the hands of the YPFB. And thanks to the gas boom, 38 billion dollars in oil and gas revenues were obtained in the period 2006-2018, when the steady decline began.

A photo of the Chaco Este X9D well, exploited by YPFB in the Gran Chaco province of the department of Tarija in southern Bolivia. CREDIT: YPFB

Hasty actions

To try to pull out of the crisis, Minister of Hydrocarbons and Energy Franklin Molina announced on Apr. 28 to Congress 18 new exploration and exploitation projects, 11 of which are to be carried out this year, with an investment of 324 million dollars – a plan considered unrealistic by industry observers.

The 11 projects, where oil appears to take precedence over gas, are located in four of Bolivia’s nine departments: La Paz in the west,Tarija in the southeast, Santa Cruz in the east, and the central Chuquisaca.

“The fact that we do not have gas and we are net fuel importers is the fault of flawed government policies” in the sector, financial analyst Jaime Dunn wrote on his social networks.

According to the expert’s calculation, the fiscal deficit for the year 2022 reached 1.7 billion dollars, largely due to the fuel subsidy, because a 159-liter barrel of oil is bought on the international market for an average of 90 dollars and is sold domestically for 27 dollars.

Long gone are the “sea of ​​gas” dreams that in April 2002 led President Jorge Quiroga (2001-2002) and his Minister of Economic Development Carlos Kempff to announce that after a study of 76 oil fields by a US company, it was estimated that the country’s proven and probable gas reserves totaled 52 trillion cubic feet (TCF).

But only 10.7 TCF of proven natural gas reserves were certified in 2018.

The search for new reserves runs up against a legal framework that protects the environment and indigenous lands, where part of the probable sources of hydrocarbons are located. “The constitution contains many obstacles and restrictions to attract foreign companies with the capacity for exploration,” said Laserna.

The rewritten constitution, approved in February 2009, forces companies interested in exploration and exploitation to obtain authorization from the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, with the threat that any permit will be declared null and void if this requirement is not met.

Foreign companies, according to the constitution, are “subject to the sovereignty of the State,” which rules out arbitration and diplomatic demands as a way of solving conflicts.

A photo of the 15-story building of the headquarters of Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), located in La Paz, where the executive and organizational offices of the government-owned oil company have been operating since 2018. CREDIT: Franz Chavez/IPS

Environment and development

In terms of energy production, the constitution prohibits transnational corporations from exclusively managing concessions.

In addition, it places the environment above interests in economic uses of land and gives the local population the right to participate in environmental management, “to be previously consulted and informed about decisions that could affect the quality of the environment.”

These powers granted to indigenous peoples and local communities are protecting the Tariquía National Flora and Fauna Reserve, in the municipality of Padcaya in the department of Tarija, which covers 246,870 hectares, part of which is close to the border with Argentina.

Since 2017, Lurdes Zutara has been a local organizer fighting the entry of oil companies into the area, warning that since the first roads were opened to give access to exploration equipment and teams, the water from the local source that gives rise to rivers and streams has decreased in flow.

Speaking with IPS from her town in Tariquía, the activist said that some families in the communities accepted the entry of heavy machinery, and noted that municipal authorities belonging to the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) party were facilitating the preparatory operations for oil exploration.

“The immediate risk is drought because the road affects the water intakes,” Zutara said.

She added that things will never be the same, that the relationship among local inhabitants will change because inequalities will emerge between those who obtain development with the support of the company and others who will be left out.

Bolivia is officially a multinational country located in the center of South America, where 41 percent of the population of 12.2 million consider themselves indigenous, according to the last census.

The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), based on data from the National Statistics Institute (INE), described in its latest report on human development the persistence of significant inequalities by geographic area, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status.

In 2018, 54 percent of the inhabitants of rural areas suffered from moderate poverty and 33.4 percent from extreme poverty, compared to 26 and 7.2 percent, respectively, in urban areas.

Against this backdrop, Chávez the economist lamented that Bolivia went from being a major gas reserve in the South American region “to an importer” of fuels, with the subsequent impact on social development.

Laserna concurred, stating that “the outlook for the country is very discouraging” with respect to gas and the expected socioeconomic boost that was to come from fossil fuels.

The young Jhaneth Rojas shows radishes planted in a greenhouse-type family garden or solar tent in the village of Phuyuwasi in a highland valley in the central Bolivian department of Cochabamba. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
PHUYUWASI, Bolivia, Jun 7 2017 (IPS)

In this remote highlands valley community in central Bolivia, a group of Quechua indigenous women have learned how to combat the intense frosts and the shortage of water in solar tents, and to use what they grow to prepare nutritious new meals for their families.

In Phuyuwasi, in the central department of Cochabamba, in a landscape dominated by vegetation resistant to low temperatures, Maribel Vallejos told IPS how the project involving family gardens in greenhouses has changed her life and those of other women in the community.

“I used to buy vegetables for 100 Bolivian pesos (about 12 dollars), but now I save that money,” said Vallejos, the only participant in the project who speaks Spanish as well as their mother tongue, Quechua.

This village ino Pocona, one of the 46 municipalities of the department of Cochabamba, is benefiting from a programme run by the Ministry of Rural and Land Development, with the support of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other U.N. agencies.

After two years of skills training, “there is no more (child) malnutrition. We used to not eat well, now we eat clean and we know what we are eating. We are stronger eating these vegetables,” said Vallejos.

Although the surrounding fields are green, with oats and potatoes growing in the fertile soil, it is not easy to produce crops in these Andean region valleys as temperatures can drop abruptly to four degrees Celsius at night before soaring to 28 degrees, the project coordinator in Cochabamba, agronomist Remmy Crespo, explained to IPS.

Experts from several disciplines arrived at the municipalities of Pocona and the neighbouring Pojo, where the local population lives in scattered villages and hamlets, to provide integral support ranging from food production, transformation or commercialisation to consumption, said Abdón Vásquez, the programme’s national coordinator.

When the extension workers arrived in 2015, the local diet consisted mainly of rice, eggs and occasionally chicken. Today the daily intake of the members of the families involved in the project has increased by about 800 calories in proteins, vitamins and minerals provided by the vegetables they grow, said Crespo.

Two carp freshly netted from one of the family ponds dug with the support of FAO in Conda Baja, in the municipality of Pocona. The introduction of fish farming and vegetables in the production and food intake of rural communities in highlands valleys in Bolivia has changed the lives of local people. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

Jhaneth Rojas, a young farmer from Phuyuwasi, described to IPS how much her family’s dietary habits changed, as she pulled red radishes from the dirt and showed them to us with a smile.

Local farmers did not used to grow radishes, beets, cucumbers, squash, green beans, broccoli or spinach, but today “my father is interested in expanding the solar tent so that his children grow strong” with the production and intake of vegetables, said Rojas.

The project began in this village of 102 families in February 2016 with six tents, and today the community grows vegetables in 28 solar greenhouse tents.

Communities in Pocona, with a combined total population of 14,000 people, asked for technical support and supervision to build another 36 greenhouse tents, which protect the crops in a temperature-controlled environment.

In the village of Conda Baja, Elvira Salazar shows us her small garden, with lush green lettuce, green beans and beets she grows to feed her family.

Close to her garden, several fish farming ponds appear to be empty, but on closer look, carp (Cyprinus carpio) fry can be seen swimming in the one-metre-deep water diverted from the mountain slopes.

A farmer from Phuyuwasi examines a green tomato in her greenhouse garden, with Remmy Crespo, FAO coordinator in Bolivia’s central department of Cochabamba. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The fish have also been incorporated into the diet of the village’s 99 families, said Luis Alberto Morales, who together with his wife Zulma Miranda enjoy the taste of the fish.

Every 100 grams of carp provide 120 protein-rich calories, as well as vitamins A, B2, B6, B12 and E, iron, potassium, magnesium and phosphorus.

Harvesting the fish is a festive event. The fish farmers invested around 150 dollars in each 10 X 10 metre pond, and received intensive training sessions in fertilisation of fish, raising fish fry, water oxygenation, water quality control and feeding.

A total of 224 families from the municipalities of Pocona and Pojo (which has a population of over 10,000), have ponds populated with fish brought from the southern department of Santa Cruz.

In addition to fish, FAO added the production and consumption of the meat of guinea pigs, an Andean rodent smaller than a rabbit, which produce an average of 30 offspring per female annually.

Daly García told IPS that the nutritional quality of guinea pig meat motivated her to build breeding pens.

On her two-hectare family farm near Pojo, the seat of the municipality, 200 km from the city of Cochabamba, she now breeds guinea pigs using the fodder and alfalfa that she herself grows. She also produces apples, peaches and other fruit.

Clemencia Zapata, from Villa Esperanza, proudly holds up the leaves of two cabbages just picked from her small farm 3,000 metres above sea level in the Bolivian Andes, which she plants using organic bio-inputs provided by FAO and the municipality, to replace agrochemicals. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

Farther from Pojo, at 3,300 metres above sea level, on the slopes of the mountains surrounding the village of Villa Esperanza, Clemencia Zapata tends her 1.5-hectare plot. Every morning she climbs a path to her land, where lettuce, cabbage and maize grow in neat rows.

The crops, growing under the bright sun of the Andes highlands, need assistance to combat pests, Zapata explained to IPS. FAO agronomist Miguel Vargas brought containers with “bio inputs” which replace agrochemicals.

Bio inputs have the technical support of FAO, the German Technical Cooperation Agency (GTZ) and the Andes Agrecol organisation, in addition to the Pojo city government.

The products have been widely welcomed by the 150 people who have used them to replace agrochemicals, which they blame for health ailments such as eyesight problems and damage to the nervous system.

The project sells the bio inputs to farmers, at cost price, using the income to expand the production and benefits to other producers.

The last link in the project’s chain is the Healthy Products Processing Plant, inaugurated on Apr. 21 and headed by the Pojo Association of Producers of Nutritious Food. Like the solar tents, the facilities and brand have a female face.

Teacher Cinthya Orellana and producer Zaida Orellana direct the activities, under strict quality and hygiene control. The food must be boiled for 20 minutes and served hot, they recommend.

A nutritious soup of corn, vegetables and jerky or dried meat, or vegetables combined with fava beans, are among the dishes offered at local trade fairs.

“Men are not interested, that’s why all the partners are women,” said Orellana, a young woman who left the textile workshops of Argentina and Brazil to return to her land to look after her husband and children and work in the industrial processing of food products in Pojo.

Coca leaf growers from the traditional region of Yungas, in northwest Bolivia, surround the legislature in the city of La Paz, demanding an expansion of the legal cultivation area by the new law. Credit: Franz Chávez.

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Mar 9 2017 (IPS)

A new bill in Bolivia, which will allow the amount of land allocated to producing coca to be increased from 12,000 to 22,000 hectares, modifying a nearly three-decade coca production policy, has led to warnings from independent voices and the opposition that the measure could fuel drug trafficking.

Since 1988, the amount of land authorised for growing coca has been 12,000 hectares, according to Law 1,008 of the Regulation of Coca and Controlled Substances, which is line with the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.

This United Nations Convention pointed the way to a phasing-out of the traditional practice among indigenous peoples in the Andean region of chewing coca leaves, which was encouraged during the Spanish colonial period, when the native population depended heavily on coca leaves for energy as they were forced to extract minerals from deep mine pits.

But the traditional use of coca leaves instead grew in Bolivia. According to the president of the lower house of Congress, Gabriela Montaño, some 3.3 million of the country’s 11 million people currently use coca in traditional fashion.

Citing these figures, lawmakers passed the new General Law on Coca on Feb. 24. The bill is now awaiting President Evo Morales’ signature.“This law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.” – Public letter signed by local intellectuals.

Morales originally rose to prominence as the leader of the seven unions of coca leaf growers in the central region of Chapare, in the department of Cochabamba, fighting against several conservative governments that wanted to eradicate coca cultivation, in accordance with Law 1,008 and the U.N. Convention.

The law had enabled the anti-drug forces, financed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), to wage an all-out war against coca cultivation. The struggle against the law catapulted Morales as a popular figure and later as a politician and the country’s first indigenous president, in January 2006.

Montaño estimates that annual production amounts to 30,900 metric tons, 24,785 of which are used for medicinal purposes, in infusions or rituals, she said.

The remaining 6,115 tons are processed into products, or used for research and export, she said.

Assessing compliance with the 1961 Convention, medical doctor and researcher Franklin Alcaraz told IPS that in South America, only Ecuador has managed to eradicate the practice of chewing coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, some fifty intellectuals signed a public letter titled: “Public Rejection of the General Law on Coca”, which stated that “this law is making available to the drug trafficking trade more than 11,000 metric tons of coca leaves per year, the average yield from the 8,000 hectares which the law grants to producers.”

Bolivia was one of the 73 signatory countries to the 1961 Convention where clause “e” of article 49 declared that the practice of chewing coca leaves would be banned within 25 years of the (1964) implementation of the accord.

In January 2013, Bolivia recovered the right to practice traditional coca chewing, when it won a special exemption to the 1961 Convention. Its request was only voted against by 15 of the 183 members of the U.N., including Germany, Japan, Mexico, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Wives of coca leaf farmers from Yungas during a vigil at the gates of the La Paz police station, where dozens of leaders were taken, accused of inciting disturbance during the demonstrations held to demand an expansion of the legal cultivation area in their region in northwest Bolivia. Credit: Franz Chávez.

In a January 2014 communique, the representative of the United Nations Office On Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonino De Leo, stated that the exemption “only applies to the national territory.”

The new bill repeals the first 31 articles of the 1988 law and legalises 22,000 hectares for cultivation – 10,000 more than before.

In practice, the new legal growing area is just slightly larger than the 20,200 hectares of coca which UNODC counted in 2015, according to its July 2016 report on the country.

President Morales has defended the increase in the legal cultivation area and reiterated his interest in carrying out an old project for the industrialisation of coca leaves.

On Feb. 28, Morales expressed his support for the new bill and accused conservative governments of supporting the demonisation and criminalisation of coca leaf chewing at an international level.

Montaño said that in 2006, when Morales first took office, 17,000 hectares of coca were grown in the Chapare region. Ten years later, UNODC registered only 6,000 hectares devoted to coca production.

She said that under Morales, the reduction of coca crops has been negotiated and without violence, in contrast to the repression by conservative governments that generated “blood and mourning”.

Before Congress passed the law, coca producers from the semitropical region of Yungas, in the department of La Paz, held violent protests in the capital.

Between Feb. 17 and Feb. 23, hundreds of demonstrators surrounded Murillo square in La Paz, where the main buildings of the executive and legislative branches are located, demanding 300 additional hectares, on top of the 14,000 presently dedicated to coca in Yungas.

There are an estimated 33,000 coca farmers in Yungas, and 45,000 in Chapare.

In the midst of clashes with the police, destruction of public property and the arrest of at least 143 organisers, talks were held with the government, which ended up giving in to the demands.

The settlement also granted growers in the Chapare region an additional 1,700 hectares, on top of the 6,000 currently registered and monitored by UNODC.

Political analyst Julio Aliaga told IPS that traditional use of coca leaves only requires 6,000 hectares, rather than the 22,000 hectares that the government of the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) is about to legalise.

This figure of 6,000 hectares is drawn from a European Union study on demand for coca leaves in Bolivia for infusions, chewing or in rituals. This study was not mentioned by the authorities or MAS legislators.

“Bolivia has a large surplus of coca which goes toward drug trafficking. The cocaine ends up in Africa, Europe and Russia, and the new colossal market of China,” Aliaga said.

Samuel Doria Medina, the leader of the opposition centre-left National Unity (UN), questioned the 80 per cent expansion of the lawful cultivation area and told IPS that the measure is “a clear sign of an interest in increasing the production of narcotic drugs.“

“The new policy will be indefensible before multilateral drug control agencies,“ since the UNODC certified that “94 per cent of the coca production from Chapare goes toward the production of cocaine,” he said.

In his opinion, the new law provides an incentive for the drug trafficking mafias to sell drugs in Bolivia, “with the well-known violence that this business entails.”

Experts and adolescents during a workshop about the risks of internet for children and young people, as part of the 2016 Internet Governance Forum (IGF2016), held in Zapopan, in eastern Mexico. Credit: Franz Chávez /IPS

By Franz Chávez
ZAPOPAN, Mexico, Dec 27 2016 (IPS)

Email surveillance, blocking of websites with content that is awkward for governments, or the interruption of services such as WhatsApp are symptoms of the threat to freedom of expression online, according to Latin American activists.

Representatives of organisations in the region participated this month in Zapopan, on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Guadalajara, in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2016), an initiative formally established by the United Nations Organisation in 2006. They discussed the problems facing freedom of speech on the social networks.

A total of 12 Mexican civil society organisation highlighted the situation in their country, which is similar to that of other countries in the region.“There are no hegemonic standards or models of legislation for the information society. Every region, country, government and key actor makes decisions in accordance with their own financial and technical possibilities, political will and digital culture, which it is necessary to work on.” -- J. Eduardo Rojas

In a statement they denounced the interception of communications and the use of malware “to silence journalists and political opponents”.

“Mexican authorities intercept private communications” and 99 percent of the geolocalisation and obtaining of people’s digital identity (metadata) ”are done without a judicial order,” they stated in the document, issued by the Mexican branch of Article 19, a Paris-based international organisation for the defence of freedom of expression.

“Civil society actors are very worried” with regard to the surveillance that the new technologies allow “and the possibility of intercepting our computers and telephones, where we leave a digital fingerprint when we look for news or use our email,” Edison Lanza, special rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, told IPS.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in force since 1948, states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

“Three years ago, someone hacked into my email account and made my list of contacts public,” Martha Roldos complained to IPS. She is executive director of the Ecuadorian Foundation 1000 Pages, which researches and promotes accountability of civil servants towards the community.

She described challenges faced by activists, including espionage or interception of email messages, and mentioned government actions such as employing facial and voice recognition equipment for people involved in journalism or environmental activism.

In Brazil, the mobile text messaging app WhatsApp was interrupted on four occasions over the last two years by judges who demanded that conversations be revealed as part of investigations – a measure that was condemned by Artigo 19, Articulo 19’s local branch.

“The court ruling is disproportionate and is a direct attack on freedom of expression. The measure represents a blatant violation of principles and of the proportionality that judicial rulings should have,” said Artigo 19 in defense of millions of Brazilian citizens who use the popular app.

Ana Ortega, the head of the Freedom of Expression Committee (C-Libre) in Honduras, told IPS that among the many incidents against freedom of expression was the arrest of and prosecution against Elvin Francisco Molina for allegedly spreading false information on his Facebook page about the country’s banking system.

Accused of causing “financial panic in the social networks,” Molina was investigated by order of the National Council of Defence and Security. C-Libre expressed concern over the “criminalisation” of the use of social networks in the draft of a new Criminal Code which is being debated by the National Congress.

In Honduras, “there is no law to protect internet users and we take refuge under the right to freedom of expression and the 2006 law on access to information,” explained Ortega.

The report “Surf Freely”, carried out by the Venezuelan Press and Society Institute in several of that country’s states before and after the December 2015 parliamentary elections, concluded that web pages that were blocked belonged to companies that had provided information about the exchange rate of the dollar.

It was also established that other blocked websites were media outlets and blogs critical of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela and the administration of President Nicolás Maduro.

Yvana Novoa, a lawyer for the Peruvian organisation Anti corruption and Freedom of Information (Liber), documented cases in which users were blocked from accessing the Facebook account of the city of Lima. Also, “some public officials such as ministers have blocked users who criticise them on Twitter,” she told IPS.

Article 2 of Peru’s constitution recognises the right to freedom of information, opinion, expression and dissemination of thought through written or oral means, or images, through any social means of communication, without previous authorisation or censure.

But “there is no criminal penalty when a user is blocked by official social networks accounts,” said Novoa.

The blocking of sites as a form of censorship on the Internet is not very effective because the message will just be multiplied over the social networks, said Javier Pallero, an Argentine analyst for the international digital rights defence organisation, Accessnow.

Beyond that, it represents an action that stifles the debate needed to strengthen democracy, he told IPS.

Censorship on the internet “is a deplorable act by people who fear the power of information,” said David Alonso Santivañez, a Peruvian expert on digital legislation.

In any case, in his opinion, the capacity of social networks to multiply a message some 60 million times in a minute calls into question the possibility of true censorship of people’s communication.

What is needed, the expert told IPS, is to create laws that guarantee the use of the service, offer security and are the result of teamwork between civil society, legal experts and governments.

“Judges and prosecutors are the ones that have to investigate these kinds of abuses and interference in the private lives of journalists, activists and political leaders. If they detect illegal interference with no judicial order, without any legitimate objective, they must sanction this kind of offence,” urged IACHR rapporteur Lanza.

In a world dominated by the information society, the paradigm of self-regulation makes it necessary for “multi sectoral stakeholders to establish an informed and intelligent dialogue in order to define approaches, methods and techniques to face the challenges of an increasingly digitalised society,” J. Eduardo Rojas, a Bolivian expert who heads the Networks Foundation, told IPS.

“There are no hegemonic standards or models of legislation for the information society. Every region, country, government and key actor makes decisions in accordance with their own financial and technical possibilities, political will and digital culture, which it is necessary to work on,” he said.

Women from the Sucre Association of Urban Producers, who are from poor neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Bolivia’s official capital, with a basketful of ecologically grown fresh vegetables from their greenhouses, which have improved their families’ diets and incomes. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
SUCRE, Bolivia, Oct 17 2015 (IPS)

The hands of women who have migrated from rural areas carefully tend to their ecological vegetable gardens in the yards of their humble homes on the outskirts of Sucre, the official capital of Bolivia, in an effort to improve their families’ diets and incomes.

“The men worked in the construction industry, and 78 percent of the women didn’t have work – they had no skills, they washed clothes for others or sold things at the market,” Lucrecia Toloba, secretary of “productive development and plural economy” in the government of the southeastern department of Chuquisaca, told IPS.

Her hair in two thin braids and wearing traditional native dress – a bowler hat, a short, pleated skirt called a pollera, and light clothing for the mild climate of the Andean valleys – Toloba, a Quechua Indian, is an educator who now runs the National Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme in the region.“We organised as women, and now we eat without worry because we grow our food free of chemicals." -- Alberta Limachi

In her modest office, she explains that women are at the centre of the programme, which brings them recognition from their families and communities, diversifies their families’ diets, and offers them economic independence through the sale of the vegetables they grow ecologically in the city, which at the same time benefits from healthy, diversified fresh produce.

Five km away, on the outskirts of the city, women in the neighbourhoods of 25 de Mayo and Litoral, who belong to the Sucre Association of Urban Producers, met IPS with a basket of fresh produce from their gardens, including shiny red tomatoes, colourful radishes and bright-green lettuce.

A total of 83 poor suburban neighborhoods in Sucre are taking part in the project, which has the support of the national and departmental governments and of the .

The initiative has 680 members so far, said Guido Zambrana, a young agronomist who runs the Urban Garden Project.

The lunch we are served is soup made with vegetables grown in their backyard gardens, accompanied by tortillas made with cornmeal mixed with flour from different vegetables. Fresh produce is also grown in greenhouses built throughout the hills of Sucre, 2,760 metres above sea level and 420 km south of La Paz, the country’s political centre.

The women have learned how to grow vegetables and how to improve their family’s food security, Tolaba explained.“We want to reach zero malnutrition,” she said.

In Sucre temperatures range between 12 and 25 degrees Celcius. But in the greenhouses, built by the families with support from the government, temperatures climb above 30 degrees.

Sometimes, the temperatures marked by the thermometers in the greenhouses spike and the windows have to be opened. The greenhouses have roofs made of transparent Agrofil plastic sheeting and walls of adobe. They are built under the guidance of technical agronomist Mery Fernández.

Two of the peri-urban agricultural producers of Sucre proudly show one of their greenhouses, which families from 83 poor suburban neighbourhoods have set up in their yards as part of the National Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The luscious leafy chard and lettuce in the greenhouse of Celia Padilla, who came to Sucre from an indigenous village in the neighbouring department of Potosí with her husband in 2000 and settled in Bicentenario, a neighbourhood in a flat area among the hills surrounding the city.

Padilla, who also belongs to the Quechua indigenous community like most of the women in the association, joined the project with a garden of just eight square metres last year, and is now thinking about building a 500-square-metre greenhouse.

Her husband, a construction worker who does casual work in the city, is pleased with the idea of expanding the garden by building a greenhouse. Their home garden provides the family with nutritional food and brings in a not insignificant income through the sale of fresh produce to neighbours or at market.

With the earnings, “I buy milk and meat for the kids,” Padilla told Tierramérica, holding bunches of shiny green chard in her hands.

Water for irrigation is scarce, but a local government programme has donated 2,000-litre tanks to capture water during the rainy season and store it up for using in drip irrigation.

The chance to improve the family diet generated a good-natured dispute between Alberta Limachi and her husband, who came to this city from the village of Puca Puca, 64 km away.

The couple, who own a 150-square-metre plot of land on the outskirts of the city, had to decide between a family garden or using the space to build a garage. Limachi, one of the leaders of the urban producers, won the argument.

Her enthusiasm is contagious among her fellow urban farmers.

“We organised as women, and now we eat without worry because we grow our food free of chemicals,” she told Tierramérica, after proudly serving a snack of green beans and fresh salad.

One of the farmers on the outskirts of Sucre with her son, sitting proudly on the 2,000-litre water tank donated by the government of Chuquisaca. The tank stores rainwater used in drip irrigation on the organic vegetables she grows. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

“I don’t ask my husband for money anymore, and we don’t spend anything on vegetables,” Padilla said, pleased to help support her family. Her garden is well-known in the neighbourhood because she grows lettuce, chard, celery, coriander and tomatoes, and her neighbours come knocking every day to buy fresh vegetables.

A committee made up of associations of farmers and consumers monitors and certifies that the fresh produce is organic and of high quality, José Zuleta, the national coordinator of the Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Programme, told Tierramérica.

“The women grow their food without (chemical) fertiliser, using organic compost that can return to the soil, which means their production is sustainable,” Yusuke Kanae, an agronomist with the FAO office in Sucre, commented to Tierramérica.

Kanae, originally from Japan, offers the women technical know-how and simple practices such as converting a creative variety of containers – ranging from a broken old football to plastic television set packaging – into improvised pots for growing vegetables.

“Even if it’s just 20 bolivianos (slightly less than three dollars), the women can help buy notebooks and shoes,” said Kanae, to illustrate the importance of the women’s contribution to the household, which chips away at what he described as “sexist” dependence, while putting them in touch with their indigenous cultural roots.

Kanae also supports the introduction of organic vegetables in the city, and has encouraged the owners of the Cóndor Café, a vegetarian restaurant, to buy products certified by the women as organic.

Visitors to the restaurant enjoy substantial dishes prepared with the vegetables from the women’s peri-urban gardens, which combine Japanese and Bolivian cooking, and cost only three dollars a meal.

The manager of the restaurant, Roger Sotomayor, told Tierramérica that he enjoys supporting the family garden initiative. “We want to encourage environmentally-friendly production of vegetables,” he said, stressing the high quality of the women’s produce and the fact that the cost is 20 percent lower than that of conventional crops.

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

This reporting series was conceived in collaboration with Ecosocialist Horizons

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A student at the Unidad Educativa La Paz school drinks fruit juice from a package distributed by the municipal government’s Complementary School Food Unit, which delivers 26 tons of natural products based on traditional grains and other ingredients to some 140,000 students. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Mar 7 2015 (IPS)

A successful school meals programme that serves breakfast and lunch with Andean flavours to 140,000 students in La Paz gave rise to a new law aimed at promoting healthy diets based on local traditions and products in Bolivia’s schools, while combating malnutrition and bolstering food sovereignty.

“We want fruit on Wednesdays!” shouted the students in a classroom in the Unidad Educativa La Paz school, when IPS asked for their suggestions to improve the meals they receive as part of the Complementary School Food Unit (ACE), a national programme.

A demand like this for healthy food, coming from youngsters, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The model for ACE was a school breakfast that began to be served in 2000 in this city, the seat of government of Bolivia, and grew into an innovative meals programme based on nutritious locally-grown natural food for children and adolescents studying in the public schools in the biggest of this country’s 327 municipalities.

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other international institutions have praised the result of the initiative in various reports.Every day, from dawn to dusk, some 26 tons of food and beverages are distributed from production centres located in Bolivia’s highlands, more than 4,000 metres above sea leavel, or in the valleys and tropical areas of the department of La Paz. The school meals programme has thus bolstered both employment and trade.

“We are leaders in producing school meals with Andean foods like amaranth, fava bean flour and quinoa,” the city government’s director of education Jorge Gómez told IPS with evident enthusiasm, in the austere office where he coordinates the meal plan for public school students between the ages of five and 15.

The high-protein amaranth and quinoa grains formed the foundation of the diet of the pre-Columbian cultures of South America’s Andean region.

Among the positive results: In the first eight years of the programme, anemia fell 30 percent among public school students in the municipality, according to independent studies by the Mayor de San Andrés University and the international organisation Save the Children.

ACE, which was established in the primary and secondary public school system nationwide in 2005, is run by special municipal units. In 2013 it reached two million students in this country, according to the Education Ministry, which is responsible for the programme.

The initiative not only improved the eating habits of students, but gave a boost to small-scale community agriculture.

In addition, it gave rise to the “law on school meals in the framework of food sovereignty and a plural economy” which went into effect on the last day of 2014, banning transgenic and packaged foods in schools and stipulating that they be replaced by traditional Andean foods, most of which are locally produced, starting this year.

Professionals with the city government’s Complementary School Food Unit show the uniform to be worn by the students trained as “leaders in school nutrition and health” in the city’s schools. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The La Paz model

Gómez explained that he talks to fathers and mothers to improve the family diet, and that a variety of products are included in the meals and snacks distributed in the 389 schools in La Paz run by the central and municipal governments, in the morning, afternoon and evening shifts.

La Paz, which covers 2,000 sq km, is home to 764,617 of the country’s 10 million people. Of that total, 293,000 are poor, with incomes of less than 90 dollars a month, according to official figures from 2013.

As they eat snacks and drink natural fruit juice from colourful packages, the students in the school visited by IPS say the chocolate-covered granola bars are their favourites.

The bars, made with cacao from the semi-tropical northwestern department of La Paz, are highly popular, and the day of the week they are included in the snack there is not enough for everyone because some students take several portions, the school principal, Marcela Fernández, told IPS.

The school meals provide one-fourth of the daily nutrients needed by a child or adolescent, and include milk, yoghurt, fruit juice and chocolate, to which iron, folic acid, and vitamins A, B and C are added.

The school meals also help families cut costs. “It’s a big help for the family budget,” the president of the Unidad Educativa La Paz school board, Fernando Aliaga, told IPS.

The school’s gym teacher, Hugo Quito, said the students have more energy now, because of the healthy meals.

The meals are the result of innovative and creative production and planning using products with Andean flavours, such as corn bread and buns made with other native grains, baked with eggs, oats and almonds, and steam-cooked quinoa biscuits called“k’ispiña”.

The biscuits revive an Andean tradition of old, when they were used as non-perishable food on long treks or during periods when food was scarce.

Each combination of ingredients was created by the city’s nutritionists, who are focused on reducing anemia among students. But the task is not always easy. One example was an “empanada” – a stuffed bread or pastry – with a filling of chard, which a group of parents complained about because they thought the green colour of the leafy vegetables was from mold.

A boost to agriculture

The boom in demand for natural foods also had a positive side effect, triggering a productive revolution of Andean grains, bananas and other fruits, which are now being produced in an organised manner by farmers grouped in companies and cooperatives.

Every day, from dawn to dusk, some 26 tons of food and beverages are distributed from production centres located in Bolivia’s highlands, more than 4,000 metres above sea leavel, or in the valleys and tropical areas of the department of La Paz. The school meals programme has thus bolstered both employment and trade.

The positive impacts on the health of schoolchildren and the revival of natural, Andean foods, along with the boost to community agriculture, served as a guide for the national law when it came to drawing up the new guidelines for ACE, for the meals distributed in public primary and secondary schools.

The new law is also in line with objectives set out by the government of President Evo Morales, in office since 2006, which promotes the integral concept of “Vivir Bien” – roughly “living well” – as the crux of its social policies.

The law is aimed at keeping children in school, fomenting agricultural production by giving top priority to locally produced ingredients, guaranteeing natural food products that are close to the local culture, and promoting community farming.

Meanwhile, the Complementary School Food Unit of La Paz has entered another pioneering phase: training leaders in nutrition, with the participation of teachers, parents and students, who are given uniforms and caps after undergoing training.

These leaders help raise awareness on healthy eating habits, nutrition and prevention of health problems in their schools and among the broader community. “We are promoting change, at the level of families and schools,” one of the technical experts in charge of the programme, who preferred to remain anonymous, told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The high level of pollution in the Rocha river, which runs across the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, is clearly visible during the dry season. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, May 19 2014 (IPS)

The law for the defence of Mother Earth passed by Bolivia a year and a half ago has not yet moved from good intentions to concrete action.

The Framework Law on Mother Earth and Integral Development for Living Well, in effect since Oct. 15, 2012, outlines principles for making a shift from classic development models to an integral model “in harmony and balance with nature, recovering and strengthening local and ancestral knowledge and wisdom.”

The law enshrines the legal rights of nature, condemns the treatment of Mother Earth’s environmental functions as merchandise rather than gifts from nature, and requires efforts to prevent and avoid damage to the environment, biodiversity, human health and intangible cultural heritage.

Chapter four of the law establishes an institutional framework on climate change, centred around an office called the “plurinational authority for Mother Earth”.

The director of that unit, Benecio Quispe, was appointed on Feb. 18 and is still in the process of naming a team and setting up an office.

The first activity organised by Quispe’s office was the First National Workshop on Climate Change Policies targeting social, academic, public and private organisations and representatives of the different levels of government: central, departmental (provincial) and municipal.

The aim of the two-day workshop that ended Saturday May 17 was to help conceive of climate change policies with community participation and input.

The framework law could be used to create controls and monitoring systems in regions exposed to deforestation and fires in forested areas, lawmaker David Cortés of the governing Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), who is also a member of the Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE International), told IPS.

The biggest study so far on environmental legislation, published by Globe International and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, praised the Mother Earth law as a “sweeping overhaul” of the national management of natural resources, climate and ecosystems.

But it also said the legislation failed to set out quantifiable targets that would make is possible to assess its implementation.

Application of the law is moving ahead slowly with great difficulty “because the means of production, neoliberal policies” and business community are characterised by the careless exploitation of natural resources, lawyer Víctor Quispe (no relation to the director of the Mother Earth authority), who is also an adviser to the lower house of Congress, told IPS.

Environmental awareness has grown since the law was passed, said Cortés, who cited, for example, efforts by the authorities to generate water saving habits among the population.

Two million of Bolivia’s 10.5 million people still lack clean drinking water and just under four million have no sanitation, Environment Minister José Zamora said last year.

But while the framework law requires new legislation to enable its application and enforcement, other initiatives are seeking solutions to concrete problems, like water.

This was a central theme in Cortés’s presentation at the latest meeting of Globe International, held Feb. 27-28 in the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C.

In Bolivia, climate change has led to the melting of glaciers, which has reduced supplies of water to cities in the dry season. At the same time, it has intensified rainfall and flooding in the months of December and January, Cortés said.

To preserve water, the government launched the “My Water Programme” in 2011, aimed at improving supplies for human consumption and irrigation while helping to guarantee food sovereignty, reduce poverty and boost agricultural productivity.

So far, the Programme benefits 2,937 projects in 98 percent of the country’s 327 municipalities, with an investment of 118 million dollars, a source with the Productive and Social Fund, which is carrying out the initiative, told IPS.

These projects respond to demand for water for consumption and irrigation, in urban areas by means of systems of distribution to households and in rural areas by harnessing sources and building mini-dams.

Pollution is another problem. For instance, the authorities are attempting to clean up the Rocha river, which runs across the central city of Cochabamba. Some 50 factories dump waste into the river.

When rainfall is abundant, the tree-lined Rocha river runs clear. But in the dry season it becomes a source of pollution, with nitrates and sulphates above the permitted levels, according to the Cochabamba city government’s Mother Earth protection office.

The director of the office, Germán Parrilla, told IPS that the authorities were implementing “an integral basin management plan that starts at the headwaters” of the river which runs through both rural and urban areas.

The efforts include the removal of solid waste dumped into the river by local residents and rubble that locals have used to fill up part of the basin to gain land, as well as fines for polluters, in line with the 44 recommendations issued by the comptroller’s office in 2011, Parrilla explained.

In the meantime, Quispe the lawyer is pushing for parliamentary approval of a bill on the reforestation of mining areas in the department of Potosí, to improve air quality in places where waste from tin, zinc and wolfram mines was abandoned.

But the congressional adviser’s main objective is the clean-up of the Pilcomayo river, which emerges in Potosí and runs north to south across the municipalities of Chuquisaca and Tarija before crossing the border into Argentina and Paraguay.

The Pilcomayo river carries mineral waste dumped by companies mining near its headwaters, which kills off fish life downstream.

“It is a question of life or death,” said the lawyer, who hopes the Economic Development Commission will pass the bill he submitted.

The initiative would bring together a number of municipalities to carry out an environmental impact study, adopt prevention measures and clean up the river with financial support from the governments of Potosí, Chuquisaca and Tarija.

A local resident tries to save some of her belongings during the floods in Bolivia’s Amazon department of Beni. Credit: Courtesy of Diario Opinión

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Apr 4 2014 (IPS)

Unusually heavy rainfall, climate change, deforestation and two dams across the border in Brazil were cited by sources who spoke to IPS as the causes of the heaviest flooding in Bolivia’s Amazon region since records have been kept.

Environmental organisations are discussing the possibility of filing an international legal complaint against the Jirau and Santo Antônio hydroelectric dams built by Brazil, which they blame for the disaster that has already cost 59 lives in Bolivia and material losses of 111 million dollars this year, according to the Fundación Milenio.

Bolivian President Evo Morales himself added his voice on Wednesday Apr. 2 to the choir of those who suspect that the two dams have had to do with the flooding in the Amazon region. “An in-depth investigation is needed to assess whether the Brazilian hydropower plants are playing a role in this,” he said.

The president instructed the foreign ministry to lead the inquiry. “There is a preliminary report that has caused a great deal of concern…and must be verified in a joint effort by the two countries.”

Some 30,000 families living in one-third of Bolivia’s 327 municipalities have experienced unprecedented flooding in the country’s Amazon valleys, lowlands and plains, and the attempt to identify who is responsible has become a diplomatic and political issue.

Environmentalists argue that among those responsible are the dams built in the Brazilian state of Rondônia on the Madeira river, the biggest tributary of the Amazon river, whose watershed is shared by Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.

In Bolivia – where the Madeira (or Madera in Spanish) emerges – some 250 rivers that originate in the Andes highlands and valleys flow into it.

“It was already known that the Jirau and San Antonio [as it is known in Bolivia] dams would turn into a plug stopping up the water of the rivers that are tributaries of the Madera,” independent environmentalist Teresa Flores told IPS.

“Construction of a dam causes water levels to rise over the natural levels and as a consequence slows down the river flow,” the vice president of the Bolivian Forum on Environment and Development (FOBOMADE), Patricia Molina, told IPS.

Her assertion was based on the study “The impact of the Madera river dams in Bolivia”, published by FOBOMADE in 2008.

“The Madera dams will cause flooding; the loss of chestnut forests, native flora and fauna, and fish; the appearance and recurrence of diseases such as yellow fever, malaria, dengue; the displacement of people, increased poverty and the disappearance of entire communities,” the study says.

“Considering all of the information provided by environmental activists in Brazil and Bolivia, by late 2013 everything seemed to indicate that the elements for a major environmental disaster were in place,” Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA) researcher Marco Octavio Ribera wrote in an article published Feb. 22.

But Víctor Paranhos, the head of the Energia Sustentável do Brasil (ESBR) sustainable energy consortium, rejected the allegations.

The dams neither cause nor aggravate flooding in Bolivia “because they are run-of-the-river plants, where water flows in and out quickly, the reservoirs are small, and the dams are many kilometres from the border,” he told IPS.

In his view, “what’s going on here is that it has never rained so much” in the Bolivian region in question. The flow in the Madeira river, which in Jirau reached a maximum of “nearly 46,000 cubic metres per second, has now reached 54,350 cubic metres per second,” he added.

Moreover, the flooding has covered a large part of the national territory in Bolivia, not only near the Madeira river dams, he pointed out.

The ESBR holds the concession for the Jirau hydropower plant, which is located 80 km from the Bolivian border. The group is headed by the French-Belgium utility GDF Suez and includes two public enterprises from Brazil as well as Mizha Energia, a subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsui.

At the Jirau and Santo Antônio plants, which are still under construction, the reservoirs have been completed and roughly 50 turbines are being installed in each dam. When they are fully operative, they will have an installed capacity of over 3,500 MW.

Claudio Maretti, the head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Amazon Initiative, said “there is neither evidence nor conclusive studies proving that the dams built on the Madera river are the cause of the floods in the Bolivian-Brazilian Amazon territories in the first few months of 2014 – at least not yet.”

In a statement, Maretti recommended “integrated conservation planning, monitoring of the impacts of infrastructure projects on the connectivity and flow of the rivers, on aquatic biodiversity, on fishing resources and on the capacity of ecosystems to adapt to the major alterations imposed by human beings.”

The intensity of the rainfall was recognised in a study by the Fundación Milenio which compared last year’s rains in the northern department or region of Beni – the most heavily affected – and the highlands in the south of Bolivia, and concluded that “it has rained twice as much as normal.”

Several alerts were issued, such as on Feb. 23 for communities near the Piraí river, which runs south to north across the department of Santa Cruz, just south of Beni.

At that time, an “extraordinary rise” in the water level of the river, the highest in 31 years, reached 7.5 metres, trapped a dozen people on a tiny island, and forced the urgent evacuation of the local population.

The statistics are included in a report by SEARPI (the Water Channeling and. Regularisation Service of the Piraí River) in the city of Santa Cruz, to which IPS had access.

The plentiful waters of the river run into the Beni plains and contributed to the flooding, along with the heavy rain in the country’s Andes highlands and valleys.

The highest water level in the Piraí river was 16 metres in 1983, according to SEARPI records.

Flores, the environmentalist, acknowledged that there has been “extraordinarily excessive” rainfall, which she attributed to the impact of climate change on the departments of La Paz in the northwest, Cochabamba in the centre, and the municipalities of Rurrenabaque, Reyes and San Borja, in Beni.

Molina, the vice president of FOBOMADE, cited “intensified incursions of flows of water from the tropical south Atlantic towards the south of the Amazon basin,” as an explanation for the heavy rainfall.

She and Flores both mentioned deforestation at the headwaters of the Amazon basin as the third major factor that has aggravated the flooding.

In Cochabamba, former senator Gastón Cornejo is leading a push for an international environmental audit and a lawsuit in a United Nations court, in an attempt to ward off catastrophe in Bolivia’s Amazon region.

“The state of Bolivia has been negligent and has maintained an irresponsible silence,” he told IPS.

Molina proposes taking the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, to denounce the environmental damage reportedly caused by the Brazilian dams.

With reporting by Mario Osava in Rio de Janeiro.

Indigenous and peasant women from every region in Bolivia at a demonstration in La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Feb 13 2014 (IPS)

Three years ago Bolivia passed a law to combat discrimination and racism, but no one has been convicted as a result, in spite of hundreds of legal complaints.

Rebeca Javier, a young journalist without distinguishing features, was assaulted and insulted by a man using racial slurs of the kind often used against indigenous people, while she interviewed people in the street in the southeastern city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.

A few hours later, the man was free, in spite of the existence of filmed evidence and witnesses."There are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts..." -- Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights

“I asked the prosecutor for justice, but she did not listen to me,” Javier complained to IPS.

“There has not been a single sentence” because prosecutors and judges do not classify acts of discrimination as crimes, Leoncio Gutiérrez, the head of the governmental Fight against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, told IPS.

“If there is a law, there should be a penalty,” Griselda Sillerico, the acting ombudsperson, told IPS. She condemned “the impunity” that continues to condone discrimination in this country of 10.3 million people, the majority of whom are indigenous, and where the president since 2006 has been Evo Morales, a native Aymara.

“Those in charge of prosecutions are not forceful and convincing, and justice cannot be permissive and tolerant,” she said. In her view, the problem resides in the system of administration of justice in Bolivia, a plurinational state under its 2009 constitution.

On Dec. 31, after holding him for eight hours, the prosecutor in the Javier case freed the aggressor, Víctor Hugo Soria, in spite of proof and witnesses’ testimony that he had hit Javier, spat on her and insulted her with phrases like “colla de mierda” (roughly translated it means “bloody Indian”) which are used against Aymara women by racist sectors in the west of the country.

Javier, a Spanish-speaking journalist for one of the foremost television channels in the region, described her feelings of impotence in the face of the prosecutor’s action, and said she had lodged a second legal complaint. Now the case is being investigated by a police department special victims unit.

In October 2010 Morales promulgated the Law Against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination, which was controversial from the outset because it included sanctions against the media if they disseminated “racist and discriminatory ideas,” with the penalty of a temporary ban for up to a year.

Promotors of the law, which was welcomed among the indigenous peoples, are now working three years later on its dissemination via social agencies, through eight departmental committees, the ombudsman’s office and the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights, Gutiérrez said.

The law is intended to eliminate racist behaviour and all forms of discrimination, and to consolidate public policies for protection and prevention, according to Article 1.

Actions committed for racist motives are criminalised, as are discrimination, dissemination and incitement to racism or discrimination, participation in racist or discriminatory organisations or associations, and insults or other verbal aggression. Penalties can range from one to seven years of imprisonment.

In Sillerico’s view, the barriers to enforcing the law are related to the difficulty in dismantling a “colonial state” that is embedded in Bolivian society and is indifferent to the problem.

“It is remarkable that there are no known prosecutions under the law that have led to prison sentences for these acts, and three years later there is no progress evident in the judicial branch, which is in charge of enforcement,” Verónica Sánchez, the secretary general of the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights in La Paz (APDHLP), told IPS.

Much the same happens with cases that come to international notice, like that of 10 teenage girls who applied to enrol in a private all boys’ school in the central city of Cochabamba in 2012.

Their request unleashed protests by the school’s staff, students and parents, in spite of a law in Bolivia prohibiting sex segregation in education, Julieta Montaño, head of the Legal Office for Women, an NGO, told IPS.

“The mothers of the boy students said they would not be responsible if the girls were raped,” said Montaño, who managed to have charges laid against eight leaders, parents and teachers who opposed the girls’ entry to the school.

The girls were eventually admitted after an agreement was reached, but the criminal case is proceeding at snail’s pace. “We are not seeking the maximum penalty; we just do not want the crime to go unpunished,” in order to send a message against gender discrimination, the lawyer said.

Between January and October 2013, the Vice-Ministry of Decolonisation accepted 135 complaints about racism or discrimination, most of them based on sexual orientation and educational level, and 57 percent of them arising in public agencies.

The ombudsman’s office received 1,652 complaints between 2010 and October 2013. The cases included older adults, people with disabilities, peasant farmers, coca growers, prison inmates, migrants, young people, pregnant women and others.

One example quoted by the ombudsman’s office is a xenophobic statement made by Isaac Ávalos, a senator for the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Toward Socialism), in 2012. “Out of every 10 Colombians who come to Bolivia, eight are involved in illicit activities,” he said, as a justification of public insecurity.

Later he apologised for his words.

“I would not like to see anyone sent to prison because of discrimination, that would be the worst thing that could happen to us” as a society, Jorge Medina, an Afro-Bolivian congressman and the principal promotor of the law, told IPS.

“The law is not necessarily punitive, and its spirit is not to fill the prisons with those who discriminate,” said the MAS lawmaker.

Medina is in favour of conciliation methods by means of an apology from the aggressor, but he is concerned about the lack of follow-up in cases that should be resolved in the ordinary courts.

APDHLP’s Sánchez supports education on values and respect for differences with programmes for students. “It’s an issue of mental structure” that must be changed by training and policies, she said.

The case with the greatest repercussions to date has been the opening of a lawsuit against the Fides news agency and the newspapers El Diario and Página Siete. The government is accusing them of incitement to racism for alleged distortion in their reports on a speech by Morales on Aug. 15, 2012.

Police officers carry the charred remains of a lynch mob victim in a community in Chapare in the Bolivian department of Cochabamba. Credit: Courtesy of Dico Soliz/Opinión

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Dec 9 2013 (IPS)

Images of tortured bodies and barely recognisable faces, victims of lynch mobs made up of furious local residents, periodically shock Bolivian society.

It is vigilante justice in impoverished rural and urban areas that has nothing to do with indigenous community justice, which the perpetrators invoke to justify their actions.

According to statistics provided to IPS by the Defensoría del Pueblo – the ombudsperson’s office – between 2005 and October this year 53 cases of lynchings, possible lynchings, attempted lynchings and threats of lynching were documented in seven Bolivian cities: La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba, Chapare, Cobija, Potosí and Llallagua.

But a count based on cases covered by the media from 2005 to 2012 indicates that 180 people were lynched in this South American country during that time.

And the phenomenon is on the rise: media reports indicate that 35 people were killed by lynch mobs between April and August this year alone. Of these killings, 14 happened in the western department of La Paz – most of them in the vast working-class city of El Alto, next to the city of La Paz – and 11 occurred in the department of Cochabamba.

It is in this central department that the barbarity of lynchings is at its worse, according to sources with the police and the press, especially in the tropical coca-producing province of Chapare, where a majority of the population is Quechua while the country’s second-largest indigenous group, the Aymara, has a growing presence.

This country of 10 million people is basically divided between the western highlands, home to the impoverished indigenous majority, and the more ethnically mixed and wealthier eastern provinces.

Two bodies appeared Sept. 27 in Entre Ríos, a small town in Chapare province. The two young men had been burnt, their feet and hands bound with barbed wire and their faces unrecognisable.

According to reports from the small town, two unidentified men between the ages of 25 and 30, who had taken a motorcycle taxi, awakened the driver’s suspicions because one of them was armed.

In a confusing incident, the gun went off, and local residents started beating the two young men who they suspected of trying to rob the driver. They then tied them to posts and burnt them alive, using fuel and rubber tires to feed the flames.

The crowd involved in the lynching, written off locally as another instance of “community justice”, have been protected by a cloak of silence.

“That isn’t community justice, it’s a crime,” Cochabamba’s ombudsman Raúl Castro told IPS.

“Lynching is murder, and it cannot be permitted under the concept of community justice, because it has nothing to do with it; it is a summary execution that violates constitutional principles and due process,” the departmental prosecutor Freddy Rorrico told IPS.

But lynchings do not figure as crimes under local jurisdiction, and the fact that the killings are collective – and collectively silenced – hinders investigations.

In La Paz, the national ombudsman Rolando Villena told IPS that “the ordinary justice system should be more efficient, effective, transparent and timely,” to prevent locals from resorting to summary executions in a country where the death penalty does not formally exist.

Police citizen security plans should be expanded to rural areas, he said.

But above and beyond the inefficiency of the courts, “there is a strong component of mistrust in, lack of knowledge and familiarity with, and rejection of the justice system and the police among rural communities and poor populations,” he said.

The face of justice in Bolivia began to change after the new constitution went into effect in 2009, declaring the country a “plurinational state” – a recognition of the indigenous majority, who have historically suffered from discrimination and racism.

The constitution also made it possible for voters to elect members of the highest level courts and judicial councils.

Articles 191 to 193 mention rural indigenous jurisdiction and establish that native communities can administer justice according to their own rules and procedures.

But that jurisdiction, which has to respect the ordinary justice system, “respects the right to life and the right to defence and the rest of the rights and guarantees established in the constitution,” the articles add.

The constitution thus recognised and revived the practice of indigenous justice administered by local leaders – although rural communities already meted out justice according to their customs and traditions before the new constitution went into effect.

Experts in ordinary and community justice stress that native traditions specifically exclude the death penalty.

Community justice follows longstanding traditions and is used to punish minor crimes, said Cintia Irrazábal, academic secretary of the community justice programme implemented by the Mayor de San Andrés University’s faculty of law and political science.

In public assemblies, community leaders are informed of and analyse the crime – generally involving the theft of livestock, seeds or other property – and apply reparative sentences, which almost always involve manual labour, she told IPS.

In more extreme cases, such as aggravated theft, the perpetrator and his or her family are banished. “That is the maximum penalty,” Irrazábal told IPS.

Cases of murder, rape and other serious crimes are referred to the police and the ordinary justice system, she said.

Ombudsman Villena attributed the lynchings to “the lack of protection, the slow pace at which the security bodies work, the inefficiency of the state, the crisis of the judicial system, and the high levels of impunity.”

He showed IPS the results of internal investigations that indicate that “45 percent of Bolivia’s municipalities have no judge, only 23 percent have a prosecutor, and a mere three percent have a public defender.”

Félix Costa, mayor of Puerto Villarroel, one of the five municipalities that make up Chapare province, told IPS that lynchings were due to “the failure to administer justice properly.”

According to Costa, the people in his town of 46,000 get angry when the police or the courts fail to punish suspected criminals.

In Puerto Villarroel, an area of intense trade and a hub linking road traffic between eastern and western Bolivia, there are only 20 police officers in charge of public safety, traffic and the fight against drugs.

Cochabamba prosecutor Torrico acknowledged that there are difficulties in administering justice. “I have only three prosecutors to deal with a number of crimes, and three specialised in anti-drug questions,” he said, to illustrate the weak state of the public prosecutor’s office in a conflict-ridden area.

But collective fury cannot override respect for life, he said. “The theft of a motorcycle is not comparable to setting someone on fire,” he stressed.

Victims are frequently burnt, alive on some occasions, to eliminate all evidence of lynchings, which are also committed in poor districts on the outskirts of cities.

The violence is generally unleashed against people suspected of murder, rape or armed robbery. But sometimes people suspected of stealing something like a bicycle or cooking gas cylinder are targeted.

On Nov. 4, in Sorata, a small town in the department of La Paz, a mob dragged a 25-year-old man out of his house because he was suspected of killing a local shopkeeper. He was beaten unconscious, left in a ditch, and the next day poisoned and hanged.

Rafael Correa, José Mujica, Cristina Fernández, Evo Morales, Nicolás Maduro and Desiré Bouterse called for apologies over the presidential jet incident. Credit: Government of Venezuela

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 5 2013 (IPS)

South American leaders demanded that the governments of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain provide explanations and public apologies to Bolivian President Evo Morales for refusing his presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way home from Moscow.

Five presidents and other high-level representatives of the members of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) who held an extraordinary meeting Thursday in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba said the denial of access to the four European countries’ airspace was a violation of Morales’ rights and immunity and of international law, and set a “dangerous precedent”.

They also decided to create a commission tol follow up on the formal complaints that will be brought before the United Nations and other international bodies.

The declaration was not signed by UNASUR as a bloc but by presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Cristina Fernández of Argentina, Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, José Mujica of Uruguay and Desiré Bouterse of Suriname, as well as delegates of the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Guyana and Peru. Paraguay did not take part in the meeting because it is still suspended from the bloc as a result of the ouster of President Fernando Lugo in June 2012.

Although UNASUR announced Wednesday night that a summit would be held, the bloc failed to cobble together a quorum, and was unable to issue a declaration as a bloc, which would have required a consensus among the region’s 12 presidents.

Brazilian foreign policy adviser Marco Aurélio Garcia said President Dilma Rousseff was unable to make it to the meeting. Unofficial reports indicated that she did not attend because of the protests that have been raging in Brazil for the past two weeks.

In a communiqué isused Wednesday, Rousseff had expressed her “indignation” over the incident, saying it not only affected Bolivia but Latin America as a whole. Similar sentiments were expressed by presidents Ollanta Humala of Peru, Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, and Sebastián Piñera of Chile.

Nevertheless, the absence of the four leaders was interpreted by some as a breakdown in relations among the members of UNASUR.

“What happened to Morales in Europe and the absence of some of the presidents sent out a harsh message to the countries of ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of Our Americas) because of their policies of nationalisation of companies, mistreatment of ambassadors and incompliance with international agreements,” lawmaker Luis Felipe Dorado, with the centre-right opposition National Convergence party, told IPS.

As an example, he cited Morales’ proposal to withdraw Bolivia from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

Dorado also lamented that the president said Bolivia could do without the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund.

From pressure to protests

Prior to the meeting in Cochabamba, Fernández, Correa, Maduro and Bouterse took part in a rally in solidarity with Morales held by Bolivian social organisations.

In the rally, Morales – Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president – said Spain’s ambassador to Austria had demanded to be allowed to inspect the presidential aircraft, while the Bolivian leader was in the Vienna airport from Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning.

His presidential jet has been rerouted and forced to land in Vienna, where it was grounded for 14 hours waiting for France, Italy, Portugal and Spain to revoke their airspace decision.

The incident was sparked by the suspicion that the plane was carrying whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former technical contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale,

The Bolivian president said the Spanish ambassador, under orders from the deputy foreign minister of Spain, attempted to force his way onto the aircraft to make sure Snowden was not there.

Morales said he told the ambassador he was a president, not a “criminal” whose plane had to be inspected before it was allowed to continue its journey.

Argentine President Fernández said at the rally that “It is curious that the countries that talk about legal security and respect for international law and human rights have committed this unprecedented violation. They should apologise for once.”

Mujca said the four European governments had made an enormous mistake. “This is embarrassing for the old countries…we aren’t colonies. When one Latin American leader is insulted, we all feel insulted.” He called for apologies instead of “unfounded arguments.”

Maduro concurred. “This is abuse and contempt of Latin America’s people because we decided to be free and to carry out democratic revolutions,” he said, after accusing the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of organising the rerouting and grounding of Morales’ jet.

Correa also accused the “intelligence agencies” of the countries involved in the incident of coordinating the denial of access to their airspace. He also blamed Washington, and said the reactions against the countries governed by leaders and parties of “a new left” in Latin America were triggered by their “anti-colonialist stance.”

While the South American leaders were in Cochabamba, Morales supporters protested outside the embassies and consulates of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the United States.

In Santa Cruz de la Sierra, members of the ruling Movement to Socialism painted graffiti on the walls of the U.S. consulate.

Popular demands that the ambassadors from the four European countries be expelled found little echo among the ranks of the ruling party. But Morales said he would not be afraid to close down the U.S. embassy, because he had no doubt U.S. pressure was behind the “virtual kidnapping” of which he was victim.

Ana Chipana with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. A quinoa stalk on the table. Credit: Wara Quinoa

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Apr 30 2013 (IPS)

Ana Chipana, from Bolivia, did not like eating quinoa when she was a girl. But this grain-like crop native to the Andes was her ticket to becoming a successful entrepreneur who has visited NASA and the United Nations.

Chipana moved to the United States 12 years ago with her husband Ramiro and lives in the city of Tamarac in southern Florida. When he fell ill with a serious gastrointestinal ailment, she was forced to change her family’s eating habits, she told IPS by phone.

She remembered the traditional diet she ate as a little girl in Bolivia, especially quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa).

Quinoa contains up to 23 percent protein – over twice the level in common cereal grains – as well as carbohydrates, all of the eight essential amino acids, iron, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and vitamins. It is easily digested, has a low fat content, and is gluten-free.

“It represents a rich source of nutrients, is nearly complete as a source of protein, minerals, vitamins and energy, and as a crop has a high level of environmental tolerance,” FAO spokesman in Bolivia Einstein Henry Tejada told IPS.

Like the potato, quinoa was a staple crop in the pre-Inca and Inca cultures in the Andes. But it gradually fell into disuse, and today it is not widely consumed in Bolivia, although it has become increasingly popular in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan.

When her husband recovered, Chipana realised that she could help bring the health benefits of quinoa to others. In 2010 she founded a small company, Wara Quinoa Organic Bakery, in Tamarac. Her bakery sells organic baked goods made with quinoa flour, that are free of sugar and gluten.

Her story is one of tenacity and drive. She wrote to NASA (the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration) three times, to present her healthy products. Her persistence paid off last year, when the space agency invited her to serve a breakfast at a conference for astronauts and technicians.

NASA has known about the nutritional qualities of quinoa for decades. The agency, which has its own laboratory of nutritionists and scientists carrying out R&D in space food and packaging, does not hire outside companies. But curiosity about her coffee cakes, muffins and cookies won out in the end, she said.

“The chef and the astronauts told me that quinoa forms part of their diet, both in space and on earth. At the Space Center (in Cape Canaveral) they eat quinoa in salads, and in outer space they eat freeze-dried food that ranges from shrimp cocktails to sweet and sour chicken and hamburgers made of grains, including quinoa,” Chipana said.

The photo of her standing next to veteran space shuttle astronaut James Reilly holding one of her coffee cakes has spread on the social networks in Bolivia, becoming an unintentional symbol of the government’s campaign to encourage the local and international consumption of quinoa.

President Evo Morales is seeking to make quinoa one of the staple foods in the Bolivian diet.

Bolivia is the world’s top producer of quinoa, producing 51,000 tons a year, most of which is exported. The United States is the main buyer. According to the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade, quinoa fetched 3,000 dollars a ton in 2012.

Quinoa exports brought in 80 million dollars in 2012, 26 percent more than in 2011. And in the last four years, domestic consumption rose from 4,000 to 12,000 tons a year, or 350 grams to 1.1 kgs per person.

At Bolivia’s urging, the United Nations declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa.

Because quinoa was only eaten in native highlands communities and poor urban neighbourhoods, “consumption levels were low, but the internal market is starting to grow,” President Morales told the U.N. General Assembly on Feb. 20, when the international year was announced.

Chipana was there too, and served her baked goods in a lunch attended by Morales, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) Director General José Graziano da Silva, among others.

But Chipana said it was “very difficult” to break into the market, as few people were familiar with quinoa. She explained that she had better luck “with Anglo-Saxons, because they know about the nutritional values and organic characteristics of quinoa,” than with Latinos. And she has only managed to sell her products in organic food stores, she added.

Chipana suggested that Bolivia “take measures to meet external demand, and step up agricultural research and the industrialisation of quinoa.”

Quinoa grows “in poor, arid, saline soils that are also subjected to extreme climate conditions during more than two-thirds of the annual harvest cycle,” Tejada said.

The expansion of monoculture farming further impoverishes soils, which require crop rotation and the recovery of native fauna and flora in order to maintain soil fertility and environmental balance, he said.

Although this country of 10 million people reduced the poverty rate from 61 to 45 percent between 2005 and 2011, according to official national statistics, one million people still suffer from some degree of hunger, malnutrition or food insecurity, as indicated by statistics presented by FAO representative in Bolivia Crispín Moreira. But that is down from two million in 2008.

“To reduce hunger and poverty, which are mainly concentrated in rural areas where promising means of life are scarce, FAO recommends a two-pronged approach: improving the sustainability of production systems and ensuring access to food,” Tejada said.

Quinoa, he said, “is the natural element capable of meeting both requisites, besides offering many other natural strong qualities at the service of humanity.”

The 19,000 inhabitants of the municipality of Caraparí, the area supplying a third of Bolivia’s gas exports, do not have access to gas or petrol, six years after the nationalisation of the mega deposit and almost a quarter century after its discovery.

The paradox goes almost unnoticed because that area of the department of Tarija, in the middle of the Bolivian Chaco, is 1,205 kilometres south of La Paz — far from the economic centre where state coffers are constantly replenished by revenue from natural gas exports to Argentina and Brazil.

President Evo Morales, in his Jan. 22 report to the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, noted that income for the hydrocarbon sector grew from 673 million dollars to 4.2 billion dollars between 2005 and 2012. He considered this augmentation a result of the nationalisation of the sector in May 2006.

A general strike in the last week of January in Caraparí, the second section of the Gran Chaco province in the far south of the country, sounded a warning that prompted a government pledge to install a fuel-distribution point in the area before October.

The closest place to buy a container of liquefied gas, or stock up on petrol and diesel, is 50 kilometres away in the town of Yacuiba, bordering Argentina, Mayor Ermas Pérez told IPS.

Merchants charge up to 7.2 dollars per 10-kilogramme container of gas, well above the official price of 3.2 dollars, resulting in an outcry from residents including food farmers, small livestock farmers and traders.

“We depend on Yacuiba, and at night they don’t let us bring gasoline because of police (restrictions on) controlled substances,” said Pérez, who has been mayor of Caraparí since 2005.

“It was a movement for dignity in the land of gas where there is no gas,” journalist Elton Lenz, a popular leader who is familiar with the reality of the municipality’s 49 oil-rich communities, told IPS. He was quick to clarify that this was “not a political act”.

In 2008, Morales victoriously stated that Caraparí had increased its income from 134,417 dollars to 1.4 million dollars; but the mayor cannot legally use some of that income to install a service station.

Pérez declared that his town was the first in the country to implement a free school breakfast and lunch programme, and that it fully meets demands for health and education. But he also wishes to invest in irrigation programmes, mechanised crop farming and livestock farming, activities that do not fall within the purview of the municipality.

“They say we have the largest per capita income of Bolivia, but there is poverty here. Several communities have to cook with wood-burning stoves, because the state company YPFB (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos) does not distribute liquefied gas,” complained Lenz.

Natural gas arrived at homes in the municipality’s town center in May 2012, but only one group of 160 families is benefiting from the supply. Meanwhile, the community’s reservoirs act as a huge source of energy for neighbouring countries: Bolivia exports about 30 million cubic metres of natural gas to Brazil and another seven million to Argentina.

There is a high prevalence of indigenous populations in Caraparí’s rural areas, especially Guarani, as well as in the surrounding Gran Chaco province. Since becoming a centre of energy activity in the country, the Tarija department has witnessed recurring conflicts between the original inhabitants and the YPFB.

Carlos Arze, energy analyst at the Centro de Estudios para el Desarrollo Laboral y Agrario (Center for the Study of Labour and Agrarian Development), described Caraparí’s fortunate geographical position atop the oil fields of San Alberto and Itaú, and parts of other deposits, like Margarita-Huacaya and Sabalo.

“We can conclude the province of Gran Chaco contributes about 33 percent of all natural gas produced annually in Bolivia,” he said.

In January, YPFB reported that in 2012 the country reached its highest historical natural gas production, with 51 million cubic metres per day. Oil production also rose to an average of 51,000 barrels per day and at the end of the year stood at 60,000 barrels daily.

The economist Julio Alvarado complained that nationalisation has not brought significant changes in Bolivia’s politics on hydrocarbons. “We continue to export and let others industrialise gas,” he told IPS.

“We are worse than before,” he said, recalling that only former President Hernán Siles Zuazo, in his last term from 1982 to 1985, built a pipeline to distribute hydrocarbons from their fields to the largest domestic markets, located in western Bolivia.

“The poverty of the people, in whose territory (lie) the natural resources that finance the national budget, are in contrast to the prosperity of transnational corporations and the huge amount of resources spent by national and local governments,” said Arze.

Alvarado agrees, saying that last year’s five percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) goes to paying salaries, travel expenses and sending numerous delegations overseas, instead of giving priority to development and productive activities.

On energy, Arze finds a “contradiction” in government policies “because they continue to favour foreign companies, which rapidly sell the production to obtain big profits”, while the government finances its spending “without caring about the development of areas where these resources come from”.

“There are no social policies.  The public projects are only roads, works of cement, while the social aspect is neglected,” lamented Lenz.

The journalist says that in this region a quartre–litre of carbonated soft drinks costs 1.20 dollars and a bowl of soup sells for two dollars, while in La Paz these prices are less than half.

The government and YPFB have promised to build a service station capable of supplying petrol, diesel and liquefied gas with an investment of 500,000 dollars by October.

The people of Caraparí warn that, this time, they will make sure that promise is fulfilled.

Donato Ayma in the Atipiri radio station booth. Credit: Franz Chávez /IPS

By Franz Chávez
EL ALTO, Bolivia, Dec 7 2012 (IPS)

Every morning from 6:00 to 8:00 AM, native people in this sprawling working-class suburb of La Paz, Bolivia listen to the programme broadcast by former education minister Donato Ayma in the Aymara language.

He starts his programme every day on the local Atipiri radio station saying “Mä amuyuki, mä ch’amaki” (“with one single thought, one single force,” in Aymara).

In an interview with IPS, Ayma explains the importance of the radio to Bolivia’s predominantly indigenous rural highlands population.

Ayma, one of Bolivia’s best-known native broadcasters, says “the radio is still the most accessible and easily operated media” in this geographically diverse country of high mountains peaks, altiplano, valleys, lowlands and Amazon jungle.

He describes campesinos ploughing their steep fields in the bleak Andes highlands, where the ploughs are still pulled by oxen, accompanied by the songs on their portable radios.

“The young women prefer to hear programmes in their mother tongue – they’re bilingual, but they tend to choose music that reflects the thinking and experiences of their people,” he says, describing life in the highlands.

Electricity is often unavailable and newspapers rarely reach remote villages, where the radio is listened to “by illiterate people; people can listen to each other, using their ears.”

The Aymara academic and researcher describes his childhood in the frigid altiplano, in Toledo, a village in the western department or province of Oruro. That is where he began his career behind a microphone, in 1969, and began to develop what he calls a New Model of Communication (NUMOCOM) for Bolivia.

“I’m a radio aficionado,” he says enthusiastically, discussing his seven-month stint in the cabinet of President Carlos Mesa (2003-2005), his 15 years at the San Gabriel Radio station, and his experience now in Atapiri, a station launched to discover radio broadcasting talent among indigenous people.

Since 2006, Atipiri has been putting into practice the ideas of the Centre of Education and Communication for Indigenous Communities and Peoples, of which Ayma is a founder. Like the San Gabriel station, it broadcasts from El Alto, a city of one million in the highlands next to La Paz.

El Alto is home to many of the indigenous Bolivians who have come to La Paz, the seat of government, from rural villages.

Initiatives to keep native culture and values alive and to help indigenous people in rural areas integrate have, paradoxically, mushroomed in El Alto.

Ayma pointed out that in the 2001 census, 62 percent of the population of Bolivia identified themselves as indigenous.

That census not only asked people for the first time whether they saw themselves as belonging to an indigenous group, but it also found that the mother tongue of half of the population was an indigenous language.

Based on these and other figures, the National Statistics Institute estimates that 66 percent of the population has an indigenous “ethnolinguistic” origin.

The 2009 constitution declared Bolivia a “plurinational” state, with 36 different ethnolinguistic groups.

Ayma bases his new model of communication, NUMOCOM, on the concept of “community radio stations as instruments of communication and development” which offer programming that comes from “the deep roots of the people.”

The first commercial radio station in this country was Radio Nacional de Bolivia, which began to operate in March 1929. But broadcasting in the Aymara language – the most widely spoken indigenous tongue in Bolivia, after Quechua – only dates back to the 1960s, when a programme in that language was on the air from 5:00 to 7:00 AM.

Under the NUMOCOM model, experienced, university-educated journalists become communicators speaking in their mother tongues and producing programming tailored to their communities.

The reality these communicators address and reflect in the community radio stations is ignored by the mainstream press and broadcast media, Ayma said.

“The pages of any Latin American newspaper are full of news about the European royalty, their weddings, their pregnancies,” he says. “But we don’t see news from
Charaña (on the western border with Chile), the foothills of Anallajchi (a snow-capped mountain), the llama grazing areas, or the Amazon jungle.

“At this very moment, a herder is coming home thirsty after a long day of work, and he’s listening to us,” says Ayma, who adds that the herder complains that his life isn’t reflected in the media, which are dominated by the homogeneous popular entertainment programming of the transnational media corporations.

Ayma criticises the commercial radio stations of El Alto because they ignore traditional Bolivian Andean music, played with pan pipes, charango, guitar and drums, and only play cumbia combined with techno and rap.

He cited Bolivian journalist Luis Ramiro Beltrán, 1983 winner of the McLuhan Teleglobe Canada award for his theories on communication for development, which were predominant in Bolivia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Taking these theories as a basis, Ayma developed his NUMOCOM model of communication, incorporating other values like environmental conservation, preservation of Pachamama or Mother Earth, and the appropriate use of water for human consumption and irrigation.

He also urges people to fight the use of synthetic products that end up in garbage dumps or the water, and kill livestock.

Finally, he advocates horizontal communication, to be used in the organising and empowerment of communities, in which the communicators are part of the action.

He says, for example, that while vertical communication gives orders, like “sweep the streets,” horizontal communication gets the broadcaster involved, who joins in the task and says “let’s sweep the streets.”

Bolivian sugar cane cutters at work. Credit: Gastón Brito/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Nov 13 2012 (IPS)

Bolivia’s sugar mills are once again operating at full capacity, with producers flooding the domestic market and desperate to obtain permits to export a surplus of 138,000 tons to Chile, Colombia, Peru and the United States.

The low point for sugar producers, marked by scarcity, speculation and smuggling, was in 2010, and remains a bad memory for this newly blossoming agroindustrial sector in the eastern department of Santa Cruz, home to four of the country’s five sugar mills: Guabirá, La Bélgica, San Aurelio and Unión Agroindustrial de Cañeros (Unagro).

The fifth, Industrias Agrícolas Bermejo Sociedad Anónima, is located in the region of Bermejo, in the southern department of Tarija.

This year, sugar production in Santa Cruz is expected to total 11 million quintals (506,000 tons). In Bolivia, the quintal, equivalent to 46 kg, is the unit of weight used for products like sugar.

Once domestic demand is met, a surplus of approximately three million quintals (138,000 tons) will remain. But according to the general manager of Unagro, Marcelo Fraija, “only one million can be exported with the government’s authorisation.”

A study conducted in 2010 found that investment in the sector in land, crops, industrial facilities, farming machinery and infrastructure totaled some 500 million dollars, said Andreas Noack, the manager of Social Responsibility at the Bolivian Foreign Trade Institute (IBCE).

That same year, the sugar mills in Santa Cruz produced 395,000 tons, while the one in Bermejo produced 42,366 tons.

Abrupt changes in weather patterns in the nine provinces of Santa Cruz, where 131,600 hectares of sugar cane are grown, led to a drop in production, and the government was forced to intervene in the market.

Domestic consumption that year was estimated at 345,000 tons, but the authorities deemed it necessary to impose price controls. The prices set for the Bolivian market were lower than those being charged in neighbouring Peru, and large quantities of sugar ended up being smuggled across the border.

With the domestic supply running out, the government prohibited exports and began to import sugar from Colombia. But the situation was finally resolved when the government backtracked and set a wholesale price closer to what the market-driven price would have been, and conditions returned to normal.

“We will never see a repeat of this period,” when imports were agreed upon by the government and producers as a means of “protecting food security,” Fraija told Tierrámerica*.

But the regulation of exports remains intact, for the purpose of guaranteeing the domestic supply, and sugar producers are calling on the Ministry of Rural and Agricultural Development to lift these restrictions.

In 2009, Bolivia’s sugar exports totaled 75 million dollars, although sales had reached over 100 million dollars in previous harvests. During the first nine months of this year, sugar exports totaled less than 17,000 dollars and account for a mere 0.19 percent of the country’s total exports.

“We are happy with the 2012 harvest,” which benefited from good weather conditions and loans granted by the government to sugar producers with terms of up to four years and guarantees from companies and unions, said Hugo Gutiérrez, former president of the Union of Sugar Cane Producers of Santa Cruz.

The harvest began in May, and attracted around 2,000 cane cutters and their families from the cold high plains of the Andes in western Bolivia to the sugar cane plantations of the eastern region, divided among roughly 3,500 landowners.

This year these seasonal workers were paid between 4.3 and 4.6 dollars for every ton of sugar cane cut. But when labour is scarce, plantation owners have been forced to pay up to five dollars and use machinery, Gutiérrez told Tierramérica.

Some plantations are up 500 hectares in size, but small producers grow sugar cane on parcels of between 20 and 300 hectares. The harvest is moving ahead full steam and will continue until late November, when the rains interrupt work in the cane fields.

“The government was right to be concerned over the amount of sugar leaving the country when prices were low,” Mariano Aguilera, the former president of the region’s largest sugar mill, Guabirá, told Tierramérica. But “today is different and clear trade policies are needed,” he said.

Producers have made sacrifices to transform their crops and adapt them to capricious climate conditions, said Gutiérrez. “On the one hand, the government helps us out with financial support, but on the other, it closes the doors to exports.”

Sugar producers are now facing an even bigger problem: international sugar prices are dropping. The world market price has fallen from 800 dollars a ton at the beginning of the year to 500 dollars, stressed Fraija.

In Bermejo, 1,165 km south of La Paz, despair is growing among producers due to the small amount of sugar sold on the domestic market and the lack of demand for the growing stored reserves.

Given this situation, a bill signed into law on Nov. 10 to create a tax to finance scientific research on sugar cane has met with fierce opposition.

The Sugar Cane Producers Union of Guabirá set up roadblocks on highways in Santa Cruz to protest the proposed tax on producers of 0.007 Bolivian pesos per liter of alcohol and 20 cents per quintal of sugar.

Producers see the measure as a duplication of efforts. A Centre for Research on Sugar Cane Technology Transfer has already been operating at the Guabirá Sugar Mill for a number of years.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

The ski run on Chacaltaya glacier is just a memory now. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jun 29 2012 (IPS)

The effects of climate change are causing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in losses of crops, livestock and housing in Bolivia. But the few climate change adaptation and prevention policies adopted by the authorities are piecemeal and fragmented, experts say.

In the June 2011 to May 2012 agricultural season, 0.3 percent (21,000 hectares) of the country’s farmland suffered flooding, hail or drought, according to the Ministry of Rural Development’s contingency unit.

And a total of 20,449 families in 72 of Bolivia’s 328 municipalities lost income or had problems putting food on their table, according to government statistics.

The damages may seem mild compared to previous years: In 2007, the impacts of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather phenomenon affected a surface area nine times bigger than over the past year, with 185,432 hectares damaged. And from mid-2008 to mid-2010, the farmland where crops were destroyed totalled 162,045 and 164,963 hectares, respectively.

But the impact of these disasters is magnified by Bolivia’s vulnerability: this nation of Amazon rainforest and Andes highlands has a great variety of ecosystems, and over half of the population lives in poverty.

Poor native communities in rural areas bear the brunt of flooding and drought, Mirna Inés Fernández, an activist with the group Reacción Climática, told IPS.

This year, the area most heavily damaged by flooding was the pastureland on the plains in the northern province of Beni, while Chaco, in the south, has suffered from intense drought, the contingency unit reported.

The Beni plains were still cut off from the rest of the country in mid-June, Zamira Cortez, the head of the early warning system, told IPS from the municipality of Santa Ana del Yacuma.

The road between that town and the provincial capital, Trinidad, was still covered in water, and the 291-km drive, which usually takes five hours by car, took up to three days by boat.

In that livestock-raising area, the growing season is short, from September to December, and farmers have to weather cycles of drought and flooding, which make it impossible to produce large volumes of food.

Extreme weather events “have caused between 300 and 400 million dollars a year in losses of goods and trade flows since 2006,” says “Tras las huellas del cambio climático en Bolivia”, a report on climate change in Bolivia published in 2011 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The average temperature in this country’s tropical Andean region rose by 10 to 11 tenths of a degree Celsius per decade starting in 1939. But in the last 25 years, it has risen between 32 and 34 tenths of a degree every 10 years.

In the Amazon region in the north and northeast of the country, the temperature rose eight tenths of a degree per decade between 1901 and 2001.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report 2007 forecast a higher rise in temperatures in the future, and said that warming in the Andean region accelerated the retreat of glaciers, affecting water and electricity supplies.

The glacier on the top of the 5,400-metre Chacaltaya mountain, 30 km from La Paz, disappeared in 2009, even earlier than scientists had predicted. The glacier, the world’s highest ski area until a little over a decade ago, was one of the first to melt due to climate change.

The UNDP warns that there is little research on climate change in Bolivia. The report said it drew on “specific scientific observations, and local perceptions based on very little systematisation and generated from climate models that still reflect high levels of uncertainty.”

Last year, an on-line forum on agricultural risk management organised by the Ministry of Rural Development concluded that “the position of this country is still in the process of construction, and subject to ongoing adjustments (associated with) the National Development Plan, which in its design will take into account the effects of climate change.”

In 2009, Bolivia organised the World People’s Conference on Climate Change, which called for global justice with respect to rich nations’ responsibility for global warming.

But the country’s domestic institutions and laws are disjointed, fragmented and compartmentalised, with specific actions developed for specific areas, but with no coordination, the UNDP says.

“There is awareness in the communities that leadership is needed, in order to confront these conditions. But the state has not adopted measures,” María René Pinto, the coordinator of the Environmental Defence League’s (LIDEMA) programme for the reduction of vulnerability to climate change, told IPS.

A study by LIDEMA found that the problems of productive infrastructure and water sources have increased the vulnerability of the livelihoods of small farmers from 51 communities in 15 municipalities in the country’s nine departments or provinces.

The study sought to identify roles related to productive, social and environmental development, with the aim of proposing sustainable climate change adaptation measures.

In her visits to the municipalities, Pinto observed an absence of leadership in dealing with climate-related difficulties, but saw an increase in community organising around the issue.

In the highlands, the study found a reduction in incomes, a growing tendency of the population to move away from their home regions, family breakdown, preponderance of monoculture, the generation of conflicts, and shortages of food and water for agriculture and human consumption, due to the shrinking of glaciers.

And in the country’s central valley, conflicts over water sources broke out between communities, family incomes shrank, more and more people moved away, and soil erosion increased.

On the plains in the north and east of the country, many families lost their homes, land and livestock, fell ill from diseases caused by stagnant floodwater, and are isolated because roads are underwater or were destroyed by the flooding.

Citing these findings, the researcher stressed that the country should develop and strengthen its capacities and improve the performance of its institutions, to tackle the problem of adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

She also said it is necessary to put a new value on traditional indigenous knowledge, promote dialogue between different generations of farmers, for the sake of transferring and sharing technologies and know-how, and create prevention strategies.

Technical experts from the Ministry of Rural Development contingency unit told IPS that an integral system of information for small farmers was being designed. The information will include agro-meteorological data, local knowledge, and indigenous wisdom.

* This article is part of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN).

After a 62-day march from Bolivia’s tropical lowlands, over 1,000 indigenous protesters opposed to the construction of a road through a pristine rainforest reserve reached the seat of government Wednesday, just a few hours after the police called off a six-day national strike.

The native demonstrators say they will camp out in the capital until the left-wing government of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, promises to protect their homeland in the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), the country’s largest nature and freshwater reserve.

On the last stretch of the march, from the outskirts of La Paz to the presidential palace, the protesters steered clear of a demonstration by pro-Morales native Aymara protesters, in order to avoid a clash.

Tension was running high on Wednesday due to the presence of the combative “ponchos rojos” or “red ponchos”, a radical Aymara faction who sent representatives as a sign of political support for the president, who is himself Aymara.

They were joined by members of trade unions and other organisations that back the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) party.

Just before the protesters from the Amazon rainforest reserve, located in the central province of Cochabamba and the northern province of Beni, reached La Paz Wednesday, the government and the rank-and-file police protesters reached an agreement that put an end to the police mutiny over low pay.

The agreement signed by the police and the government in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, after a six-day strike, granted a 14 dollar a month raise and a 30 dollar bonus, increasing the base pay for a police officer to just under 300 dollars a month, retroactive to January. The government also agreed to reform a strict new disciplinary code.

“Our march is not only demanding the preservation of TIPNIS. It is an act of defence of the dignity of Bolivians and the respect of indigenous territories, as well as the defence of biodiversity, the environment, Mother Earth, and the constitution (of 2009),” the leader of the protest, Fernando Vargas, told IPS.

The head of the Pacha Amuyu Foundation, Aymara anthropologist Juan Ángel Yujra, told IPS that “being met by an indigenous counter-march has caused a great deal of pain.”

Yujra said the narrowly averted clash between indigenous people from the jungle and Aymara from the highlands reflected a rupture between social sectors that in the past were all part of the alliance that brought Morales to power.

“It is a test of strength” to see who has the power to decide on what kind of development model Bolivia will follow: one in which transnational corporations impose their will, or another in which the country’s natural areas are protected, with support from foreign donors and governments, he said.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands.

Since 1990, the native people of the rainforest have marched to La Paz nine times. In October 2011, at the end of the eighth march by the communities grouped in the
Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), made up of 11 regional indigenous associations, Morales enacted a law defending TIPNIS and cancelling the plans for the road.

But the government backtracked on its decision following a February 2012 march from TIPNIS to La Paz in favour of the road, by pro-MAS outsiders and coca growers who have settled in the park. They pressured Morales to enact law 222, which calls for a consultation with the local population, leaving open the possibility of building the controversial road.

The indigenous protesters holding a vigil outside the seat of government are demanding the repeal of law 222. They are also calling for the creation of a legal framework for prior consultation of indigenous people on all development projects involving native territory.

The 177-km road across TIPNIS is one small portion of a highway funded and built by Brazil across Bolivia, to form part of an international corridor for the transport of goods from Brazil to the Pacific Ocean.

The 300-km stretch joining the cities of San Ignacio de Moxos in Beni and Villa Tunari in Cochabamba would reduce a 16-hour drive between the two cities to just four hours.

But opponents of the road say it will pave the way for illegal loggers, drug labs, and agribusiness projects to grow transgenic and biofuel crops in the nature reserve.

A study by the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development likened the impact of the road to “the passage of a tornado that would destroy everything in its path, with the expected disappearance of the 64 communities who live in TIPNIS,” comprising some 15,000 people from the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane indigenous ethnic groups.

Lawmaker Pedro Nuni, who represents people in Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region, told IPS that the protesters were hoping the government would agree to talks on the issue.

Before the marchers reached La Paz, Vice President Álvaro García Linera said a dialogue would be held on the legal foundations indicated by the Constitutional Court, which requires reaching a consensus on how the consultation process on the TIPNIS road is to be carried out.

The marchers, supported by university students and people from lower and middle-income sectors, tried to march through Murillo square, the centre of political life in Bolivia. But they were beaten back by the police – the same police who a few hours earlier were demanding social justice and the right to protest.

“This is discrimination,” said the president of the ninth march, Bertha Bejarano. “President Morales does not own the square, it belongs to everyone.”

The exhausted marchers, who included pregnant women, mothers carrying children, and youngsters, were welcomed and cheered by thousands of people in La Paz. Yujra said this was a sign of recognition for people “from different cultures, whose lifestyles and rights are linked with nature.

“Only an agreement can help resolve the conflict and ease the tension in the country,” said the anthropologist, who predicts a lengthy struggle for land and in defence of the environment.

Snow-capped mountains shrouded in clouds tower over the ninth gruelling march of indigenous people from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands to the seat of government, to challenge the government’s environment policy and protest the construction of a road through a protected area of rainforest and water reserves.

Caricature of President Evo Morales saying “More development, more roads!” Credit: Subcentral Tipnis

Close to 1,000 people are walking to La Paz from the city of Trinidad, 600 km away, where the march started on Apr. 27 with the aim of persuading the government to cancel a planned stretch of highway through the centre of the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (Tipnis).

The march, which involves climbing peaks 5,000 metres above sea level, is the second to be carried out in defence of the Tipnis natural park, located between the central departments (provinces) of Cochabamba and Beni.

Tipnis covers over 12,000 square km of staggering biodiversity in the Bolivian Amazon region in the centre of the country. The road through it, planned by the Bolivian government, is part of an international highway for the transport of goods from Brazil to the Pacific Ocean for which Brazil is paying 80 percent of the cost.

The second goal of the protest is to create a legal framework for prior consultation of indigenous people on all development projects involving land lived on by one of the 36 native groups recognised by the country’s constitution, in force since 2009, Nazareth Flores, organising secretary for the protest, told IPS.

Trinidad is at an altitude of only 160 metres, while La Paz is at 3,600 metres above sea level, and the ascending route between them includes extremely difficult stretches.

The marchers are expected to reach La Paz this week and organisers are planning a demonstration at the president’s residence, the Palacio Quemado.

In October 2011, a similar protest lasting 66 days drew massive popular support in La Paz, with thousands of people coming out into the streets to welcome the marchers. The demonstration succeeded in obtaining passage of a law cancelling the road project through the Tipnis natural park.

But the government backtracked on its decision following another march, this time in favour of the highway, carried out by outsiders who have settled in the park, coca growers and some local people supporting the governing Movement to Socialism party.

They pressured left-wing President Evo Morales to enact Law 222 on Consultation, which leaves open the possibility of building the controversial road.

As the column of protesters marches onward, negotiating precipices and enduring low temperatures and food shortages, in an attempt to get the law repealed, women and children are suffering from cold and flu viruses, and do not have enough warm clothing or food, Flores said.

As the marchers overcame one difficulty after another, President Morales gave a speech in defence of nature at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, or Rio+20, which concluded Friday Jun. 22 in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro.

Morales, an ethnic Aymara Indian, spoke in defence of indigenous peoples. But the marchers in Bolivia received his message with surprise and incredulity.

“Here he pays no heed to our demands, but surprisingly, abroad he talks about defending indigenous people,” said Flores.

Journalist Gustavo Guzmán, a former Bolivian ambassador to the United States, pointed to seven occasions when Morales addressed the United Nations in New York and defended the rights of Mother Earth and indigenous people.

Pro-government Afro-Bolivian lawmaker Jorge Medina told IPS that the march and the demands of the tropical lowlands indigenous people have the recognition and backing of the constitution.

But he criticised the opposition Movement without Fear (MSM) party for “interfering” in the finances of the demonstration. He also complained about the presence of non-governmental organisations.

Participation by NGOs and political parties “ruins the spirit of the march,” he said, adding that “Efforts must be made to reach an agreement that benefits everyone.”

“Our position as indigenous people is firm. We seek dialogue,” Carlos Salvatierra, a representative of the Central Organisation of the Indigenous Peoples of Beni (CPIB), told IPS.

On Wednesday Jun. 20, the constitutional court suspended the consultation planned by the government about the building of the highway through Tipnis, and ruled that procedures for the consultation must first be agreed between the parties, bringing a ray of hope to the marchers.

So far the march has cost the lives of two activists, a man and a woman who died in an accident Tuesday Jun. 19 while they were fetching provisions for the marchers. And in another traffic accident, a paramedic from the municipality of La Paz on his way to the marchers’ campsite was killed.

Patricia Molina, coordinator of the Bolivian Forum on Environment and Development (FOBOMADE), told IPS “the government’s environmental policies, past and present, have been mere rhetoric, a sham.”

Molina pointed to pollution from mining, the burning of large areas of grassland and shrubs, the expansion of coca cultivation and the mountains of waste materials accumulating in Bolivia, and asked why no solutions to these problems were forthcoming.

“It’s time to ask ourselves what kind of country we want, what kind of environment we want, and what we are going to do to stop the destruction of nature. It is clear that the government has nothing to contribute. The march continues to show up the government’s doublespeak,” she said.

Almost six years after the nationalisation of gas and oil reserves in Bolivia, foreign companies maintain an active presence in the sector, and the government is now offering them greater incentives to increase oil production.

Gasfield discovered by Repsol in Huacaya, 800 km southeast of La Paz. Credit: IPS/Photostock

During the same week that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina announced the expropriation of 51 percent of shares in the oil company YPF, previously held by the Spanish corporation Repsol, the Bolivian government issued a decree that raised incentives for crude oil production from 10 dollars to 40 dollars a barrel.

Supreme Decree 1202 establishes that the Bolivian national treasury will issue tax credit notes in the amount of 30 dollars.

For each barrel (159 liters) of crude they produce, foreign oil companies will continue to receive 10 dollars in cash in addition to a credit note that can be used for tax payments.

In a statement released by the state-owned oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB) on Apr. 19, company president Carlos Villegas stated that the reason for the allocation of this additional incentive was that “operators have not made significant investments to find larger reserves of oil.”

Researcher Carlos Arze of the Centre for Research on Labour and Agrarian Development (CEDLA) explained that the contracts signed between foreign companies and the Bolivian government following the 2006 nationalisation did not include clauses obliging the companies to replenish reserves.

On May 1, 2006, leftist President Evo Morales announced the nationalisation of Bolivia’s hydrocarbon reserves. In October of that year, new contracts were signed with the oil and gas companies operating in the country – most of which were foreign-owned – and endorsed by the Bolivian Congress.

Six years later, these companies are earning 824 million dollars in profits, “and not a single one has pulled out of Bolivia,” Arze told Tierramérica. He recalled the comments of a Brazilian businessman who concluded at the time that his operations in Bolivia would be even more secure, since they now had congressional backing.

“If this was an anti-imperialist nationalisation, why didn’t they leave?” asked Arze.

In 2004, the oil and natural gas industry in Bolivia was worth 1.172 billion dollars. The companies operating in the sector took 71 percent of the profits (832 million dollars), according to Arze.

The new contracts changed the equation. Now, private operators receive 27 percent of revenues, while the state keeps 73 percent through various taxes, shares and royalties, he noted. But in absolute terms, the amounts earned by the companies have changed very little.

In 2010, the sector generated 3.053 billion dollars, of which the oil and gas companies received 824 million dollars. If you add the incentives for oil production, estimated at six million dollars annually, the total is 830 million, just two million dollars less than they earned before the rules of the game were changed, noted Arze.

According to YPFB, between 2001 and 2005, the state took in 332 million dollars annually in oil and gas revenues.

After nationalisation, these revenues rose to a yearly average of 2.07 billion dollars. Over the last six years, the state has earned 12.424 billion dollars from oil and gas operations.

Gas production has risen from 40.4 million cubic metres daily in 2005 to 45.06 million cubic metres in 2011.

But oil production has fallen. In 2005, Bolivia produced 50,035 barrels of oil a day, but in 2011, output had dropped to 41,147 barrels.

As of June 2011, 15 foreign companies, headed up by Petrobras of Brazil, had signed contracts with Bolivia for oil and gas exploration and extraction activities, for terms of between six and 28 years, according to figures from YPFB.

Political economy professor Julio Alvarado told Tierramérica that Bolivia’s current oil policy is aimed at encouraging foreign companies to continue operating in the country’s most productive fields.

Alvarado noted that the nationalisation decree ordered an audit of the transnational companies, but the final reports were not made public. This protection of corporate data is a demonstration of a policy favorable to foreign investors, he said.

In the meantime, Bolivia has become increasingly dependent on fuel imports for domestic consumption. In 2010, imports totaled 600 million dollars, in 2011 they had risen to 900 million, and this year they are expected to reach 1.2 billion dollars, according to Alvarado’s figures.

In 2010, Spanish oil and gas company Repsol was the foreign company with the second largest share in production in Bolivia, with 8.7 percent, far behind Petrobras, which accounts for 63 percent.

In the oil sector, Repsol has operations in a quarter of the country’s blocks and fields and accounts for five percent of exploration activities.

During the nationalisation process, the Bolivian state’s forced purchase of 1.1 percent of the Spanish share in the Andina company was compensated with a payment of 6.2 million dollars in 2007.

In contrast, the nationalisation of the shares held by U.S.-based Amoco in the Bolivian company Chaco resulted in the filing of a lawsuit against the Bolivian state for 233 million dollars, said Arze.

Repsol is in charge of production at the Margarita gas field in the southern department of Tarija, which holds some two trillion cubic feet of gas and is the source of the eight million cubic metres of gas per day supplied to Argentina – an amount equivalent to the daily consumption in Bolivia.

In March 2010, Bolivia pledged to increase gas exports to Argentina to up to 20 million cubic metres daily by 2017.

The source of this gas is the Margarita-Huacaya field, operated by different companies. Repsol is present as part of the joint venture Repsol YPF E&P Bolivia SA, which has a 37.5 percent stake in the field.

Arze believes it will be a profitable business for Repsol, since it will benefit from the prices paid by Argentina, roughly 11 dollars per million British thermal units (BTU) in the first quarter of 2012.

Brazil, which imports three times the daily consumption in Bolivia, pays nine dollars per million BTU.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Small-scale dairy farmers in this remote area of Bolivia’s northeastern Amazon region of Beni have a new hope for protecting their livestock from the fierce annual floods that start in December.

Dora Domínguez shows IPS the forage grown on the artificial hill and the feed storage shed, behind her. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

The answer: artificial hills complete with grass and a feed storage shed, where the cattle can wait out the floods.

Dora Domínguez is president of the Association of Movima Milk Producers, which groups 36 families who own a combined total of 1,200 head of cattle. The Association is taking part in a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) initiative to build novel elevated livestock shelters, which also serve as areas for growing forage.

The project involves the creation of artificial hills up to three metres above ground level on the vast plains of Beni. The mounds are being built under the direction of the head of risk management in the FAO office in Bolivia, Óscar Mendoza.

The hills become islands when the rainy season starts in December and water begins to run down to the Amazon floodplains in torrents from the Andes mountains to the west.

The livestock, the economic mainstay of poor local cattle farmers, many of whom are Movima Indians, depends, can survive on the islands.

Ranchers who own 2,000 head of cattle or more per family can afford to transport their animals to higher- lying areas. But until now, small farmers have been left at the mercy of the floods, which within a few hours of the rivers overflowing their banks transform the plains into lakes up to one-metre deep.

The FAO initiative is covering 65 percent of the small dairy and beef farmers in the municipality of Santa Ana del Yacuma, some 900 km northeast of La Paz, who own between one and 500 head of cattle and account for 22 percent of the livestock in the area.

“People used to just adapt, trying to come up with their own contingency methods,” Mendoza told IPS. “That’s why we decided to take measures geared to dealing with climate swings, to mitigate the risks to agricultural production.”

The solution came nearly three decades after the biggest flood that Domínguez and other local farmers remember.

In 1982, the floodwaters rose up to four metres above ground level, and the main square of the town of Santa Ana del Yacuma, the capital of the municipality and province of Yacuma in the region of Beni, looked like a kind of Noah’s ark, because it was packed full of people, cows, goats, pigs and barnyard fowl.

“People set out from their farms on canoes at night, shouting, when the floodwaters took them by surprise,” Domínguez recalls.

With that memory engraved on her mind, Domínguez did not hesitate to join the FAO project, giving it the support of her association and even her physical labour to move several tons of earth to make the artificial island – a model that the U.N. agency wants to expand to the entire region.

“I carried dirt on my shoulders,” she says, sitting on the hill and gazing at the new grass growing there, which will feed the livestock during floods.

Early flood warnings

Another step in climate change adaptation was the implementation of an early warning system with FAO support, to back up the national weather service and provide radio alerts for people living in the country’s eastern lowlands.

The project involved the installation of networks of sensors near rivers to monitor water levels. When an early warning is issued, municipal emergency units are mobilised to order the evacuation of people and animals.

In addition, strategies are being applied that combine best practices and technologies to confront climate change and adapt production to the annual flooding and the drought that follows the rainy season, Mendoza said.

An alliance between the municipal government of Santa Ana del Yacuma, small farmers, and FAO made this possible, said Mayor Gustavo Antelo.

To build the artificial hill, the municipal government provided a 2,000-square-metre lot, FAO supplied technical support and financing, and the beneficiaries gave freely of their time and labour to haul in soil and build the feed storage shed as well as a facility where a veterinarian can treat animals.

New hope

Dairy farmers Hernán Suárez and Rinelson Arambel say the desperate situations seen in the 1980s have become a thing of the past. “The cows would bellow loudly as they drowned. We felt so helpless,” Suárez says.

“Everything would turn into a giant lake for several months, and the help would arrive, to a nearby town, in Hercules planes. The shortage of food would create a crisis among the local people, and some farmers would be left without any livestock,” Arambel says.

Only in 1992 was a dike built around the town to keep out the floodwater. But that did not help people on the surrounding farms.

Mariano Chávez, another member of the Movima Association, describes the worry and fear that used to start building up in December, when the rains began. But he is calm now, as he watches his 14-year-old son José enthusiastically help plant grass on the island.

Suárez learned new techniques for growing grass and hay, and storing fodder. Now he has a corral and a chute for vaccinating and artificially inseminating his cattle.

The difficulties faced by people in the municipality of Santa Ana del Yacuma arise from the area’s remoteness from the rest of the country – there is no year-round road to the capital of Beni region, Trinidad, 290 km away – and its geography, as it is crisscrossed by the Yacuma, Mamoré and Rapulo rivers, which are prone to flooding.

Santa Ana del Yacuma can only be reached by car in the dry season. During the high water season, the only way in or out is by small plane, and the ride costs around 57 dollars per person. “The pilots take advantage of people,” Suárez complains.

As the afternoon wears on, the temperature climbs to 36 degrees Celsius, the mosquitoes come out, and dark clouds on the horizon announce rain.

Each member of the Association produces between 50 and 60 litres of milk per day. The price per litre is no more than half a dollar in the town’s small market. At times of emergency, production easily falls to 10 litres a day, says Domínguez, who runs her family’s farm.

Suárez says his family earns around 500 dollars a month from their sales of milk – not enough to feed the household and cover the costs of feeding and caring for the livestock.

Chávez would like to see support for improving the local Nelore cattle – hardy heat- and insect-resistant cattle with a distinctive large shoulder hump – by crossbreeding with Holstein, to boost milk production.

He thinks a credit programme, rather than donations, would be a good idea. “It shouldn’t be free; facilities for people to pay, with their production, should be offered,” he says.

A milk cow costs between 600 and 800 dollars in this part of the country.

* This article was produced with support from FAO.

Margarita Amabeja with the rice seed she is about to plant, and this season's first cassava. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez
COMUNIDAD SAN LORENZO, Bolivia, Dec 20 2011 (IPS)

Margarita Amabeja holds out her hands full of golden rice grains and rough brown manioc roots – the first results of a strategy to adjust the agricultural cycles to the seasonal floods and droughts in the vast plains of Beni, in northeastern Bolivia.

Amabeja, an older widowed farmer who is the head of her family of four, directs the productive activities on the small farm where they grow corn, rice, vegetables and other food.

Now she is calmly waiting for the rains, which fall on the Andes mountains to the west and run down to the Amazon floodplains in torrents.

But the old fear of losing everything has disappeared from her face. Some 1,250 families like hers are receiving technical assistance in the municipalities of Santa Ana del Yacuma, San Joaquín and San Ramón in Beni, a region of wetlands, savannah and jungle where three-quarters of the population lives in poverty.

A system of hydrometeorological information, weather forecasts and early warnings alerts the municipalities and local residents about events such as the arrival of a flood, by means of satellite signals.

The system forms part of an agricultural risk management programme run by the local office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and financed between 2009 and May 2011 by official development aid from Italy.

The programme has also focused on improvements in the production of rice, cassava, corn and vegetables, to ensure supplies during times of scarcity.

The strategy is based on shortening the crop cycle, to mitigate the risks posed by weather events and natural disasters, the head of risk management in the local FAO office, Óscar Mendoza, told IPS.

Between December and March, huge areas in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands are flooded, and almost all of the crops are destroyed, while housing and other infrastructure is damaged.

FAO suggested that local farmers adopt a modified crop calendar and plant short cycle varieties of corn and rice, to avoid losses caused by flooding. In addition, large ponds were built to conserve water for times of drought.

Mendoza said the idea of harvesting before the arrival of “la gateadora” – floodwaters caused when the rivers overflow their banks – was welcomed by local farmers like Amabeja.

In this Amazon plain located 900 km northeast of La Paz, normal life grinds to a halt when in the space of a few hours “la gateadora” or crawling flood covers the fields, besieges villages and towns, isolates entire communities, and interrupts farm and ranching activities.

When the rivers flood, the plains are suddenly transformed into lakes, covered with up to one metre of water, Zamira Cortez, head of the risk and natural disaster unit of the municipal government of Santa Ana del Yacuma, where the village of Comunidad San Lorenzo is located, told IPS.

When that happens, Cortez organises a shelter in the town of Santa Ana, stocking it with food and other supplies, staffing it with medical personnel, and equipping it with chemical toilets until the waters go back down and people can return to their homes.

The job is not easy. She often goes out in a boat to look for people left stranded by the floodwaters and carry them to safety. Cortez laments that so many fail to go to the shelter before the flooding makes it impossible for them to move.

The floodwaters kill cassava, the staple food of the 23,500 people in the municipality made up of 40 villages, Mendoza said.

After the waters recede in April, the plains get so dry that it is difficult to plant.

The flooding and subsequent drought are followed by cold temperatures in the winter, as well as forest fires, which start either by accident or as a result of the slash-and-burn technique that farmers use to clear their land.

But the results of the changes brought about by the FAO programme are promising.

The planting of cassava was moved ahead to May or June, and the harvest takes place seven months later, which reduces the losses caused by flooding and makes it possible to save stalks for the next planting. Varieties more suited to local conditions were also introduced.

In Santa Ana del Yacuma, the 2010-2011 harvest season brought a yield of 1,250 kg of corn per hectare, Mendoza said.

And farmers produced 1,500 kg of rice and 900 kg of beans per hectare – quantities that enable families to not only feed themselves but to sell surplus production in the small markets of the villages on these lush green plains.

With the new techniques that have emerged as a result of research for adaptation to climate change, yields have increased by up to 30 percent, according to Mendoza, who has been working in the area for four years.

The initiative was also expanded to the forage produced by some 200 families that raise livestock on a small scale – up to 100 dairy or beef cattle, which supply the small local markets.

All of these measures are focused on curbing the fall in production caused by people abandoning their farms to work for large landowners or to move to the cities or head overseas, Sheila Hurtado, the head of the productive development unit of Santa Ana del Yacuma, told IPS.

Because of the flooding, half of the local food producers have abandoned their farms. “Many left the region, and others abandoned agriculture to become farmhands on large ranches,” she said.

Until recently, this area also produced large harvests of oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines. But the climate has killed off the orchards. “Climate change is killing the food producers of Santa Ana,” Hurtado said.

* This article was produced with support from FAO.

Bolivian migrant in the airport in El Alto, next to La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

By Franz Chávez and - -
LA PAZ, Dec 1 2011 (IPS)

Women make up a majority of migrants from South America’s Andean region and they send more money home to their families than men, according to a study carried out in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

Bolivian migrant in the airport in El Alto, next to La Paz. Credit: Franz Chávez/IPS

Recognition of the contribution made by women migrants will also help to get a gender focus included in Bolivia’s new immigration law, she added.

Ivana Fernández, head of immigration issues at the Coordinadora de la Mujer, told IPS that 57 percent of Bolivians who went abroad to find work in 2010 were women.

A similar proportion of Peruvians who left for Spain last year were women, according to that European country’s statistics institute.

Last year, 210,000 women left Bolivia, while 139,000 Peruvian women chose Spain as a destination.

But in the case of women from the Andean region heading to Spain, the largest number came from Ecuador: 395,000, or 51 percent of all Ecuadoreans in that country.

Ecuador was followed by Colombia, with 289,000 women in Spain, representing 55 percent of all Colombian migrants who settled there.

Fernández said that most of the women go overseas on their own, and are especially exposed to abuses, exploitation and violence in their work, which in most cases is domestic service. And because they are undocumented, they are even more vulnerable, and are paid low wages, she added.

Women from the four countries studied sent home a total of nearly 3.2 billion dollars in remittances in 2010, more than the total sent by male migrants, Fernández noted.

She said the aim of the “Opening Worlds” project, which is funded by the European Union and Oxfam UK, is “to inform, protect and defend women migrants, and guarantee their rights.”

Jorge Cruz, coordinator of the Uramanta Foundation’s migration programme, told IPS that “communication among relatives must be strengthened” in order to rebuild families torn apart by migration.

The Uramanta Foundation works in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, helping to preserve family ties and providing guidance for the recipients of remittances to invest in productive enterprises to help support the household.

Cruz, who stressed the importance of keeping the family together, said his organisation designs a support system for each household, with the participation of a multidisciplinary team.

The “Opening Worlds” researchers interviewed women who had gone abroad to work and returned to Bolivia. They also visited migrant women working in Spain.

The report discusses the independence that many of the women have gained in terms of administering their money.

That was reflected by Carmen Pérez, a Bolivian woman who left for Italy in 2000. After working for three years as a caretaker for the elderly, she returned to her hometown, Cochabamba.

“I didn’t depend on my husband’s wages anymore,” Pérez, who had graduated from law school before heading abroad, told IPS.

In Italy, she faced racism and difficulties communicating in a new language, while she desperately missed her five-year-old son.

After coming back to her family, she found that the price she had to pay for going away was a gradual waning of her son’s affection. Today she is working as a lawyer and is demanding that the government appoint specialists to diplomatic posts, in order to provide effective assistance to migrants.

Cruz said the Uramanta Foundation helps keep family connections alive. For example, with the support of volunteers, it offers instruction to the children of migrants to enable them to communicate via Internet with their family members abroad.

From the “Aula Tikuna”, an orientation centre in a poor neighbourhood of Cochabamba, youngsters are able to stay in close contact with their mothers and other relatives abroad, he explained.

The Foundation has two notebooks containing 38 examples of “best practices” – the organisation’s contribution to the design of immigration policies.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez and - -
LA PAZ, Oct 25 2011 (IPS)

With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia’s Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.

The 66-day march by the demonstrators to La Paz and the controversy over the road undermined the backing for President Evo Morales among his main support base, the country’s indigenous majority.

Late Monday, Morales signed into law the agreement putting an end to the plan to build the road that was opposed by some 1,000 native protesters from the Amazon, who made the gruelling 600-km march from the rainforest to La Paz.

The demonstrators, who were subjected to a brutal police crackdown in late September near a remote village 330 km north of La Paz, were greeted as heroes by thousands of people who took to the streets on Wednesday Oct. 19 to welcome them when they reached this city in Bolivia’s western highlands.

“The threat is latent, but the message sent out is that the native peoples have thought deeply about the defence of our territories,” indigenous lawmaker Pedro Nuni told IPS.

The legislator, who belongs to the governing Movement to Socialism (MAS) but disagreed with the Morales administration over the issue of the rainforest road, said “the government knows it cannot decide on the future of our land without consulting us.”

Nuni was pleased that, as he said, 95 percent of the 16 demands set forth by the protesters were addressed. The chief demand was the full cancellation of the project to build a 177-km road across the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS).

The 415-million dollar stretch of road was one small portion of a highway funded and built by Brazil across Bolivia, which will form part of an international corridor for the transport of goods from Brazil to the Pacific Ocean.

The 300-km stretch joining the cities of San Ignacio de Moxos in the northern province of Beni and Villa Tunari in the central province of Cochabamba, which was to cut across TIPNIS, would have reduced a 16-hour drive between the two cities to just four hours.

The local communities in TIPNIS are actually divided over the road, with peasant movements, trade unions, transport workers, shopkeepers, traders and some indigenous communities defending its construction on the argument that it would bring development.

The TIPNIS national park covers more than one million hectares in the provinces of Beni and Cochabamba and is collectively owned by some 15,000 people from three indigenous groups: the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane Indians.

The law enacted by Morales was hastily approved by the legislature as the demonstrators held a vigil outside the building.

The new legislation confirms the importance of the sociocultural and natural heritage of TIPNIS.

Recognition of the indigenous groups’ collective right to the territory was achieved 21 years ago, when native people from the country’s Amazon rainforest first marched to the highlands of La Paz and secured government recognition of four indigenous territories that were threatened by logging companies and the exploitation of other natural resources.

The 1990 march threw the forgotten and neglected indigenous communities of the Amazon region into the limelight for the first time.

But this time the roughly 1,000 men, women and children from the jungle did not march alone. They were joined along the way by a similar number of indigenous people from the highlands and the Chaco grasslands region who are worried that many of the country’s 84 collectively-owned indigenous territories, known as Tierras Comunitarias de Origen or TCOs, are under threat because they are rich in oil, forests, minerals and other resources that foreign corporations are keen to get their hands on.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands. Morales, the country’s first-ever indigenous president, is an Aymara Indian.

In an interview with IPS, environmentalist Carmen Capriles, one of the leaders of the Save the Madidi Campaign, discussed the concept of the “plurinational state”, as established by the new constitution that went into effect in 2009, in which she said indigenous communities and people of mixed-race or European descent mutually recognise their different identities while declaring their unity in the Bolivian state.

The activist, who is working to defend the 1.9-million-hectare Madidi National Park in northwestern Bolivia, said the plurinational state was achieved by a struggle waged along the country’s roads and in its jungles and mountains, in the face of repression and stiff opposition.

Capriles also said there is a growing sense of unity between indigenous people from poor rural areas and from urban slums, who are forging a natural alliance to defend nature.

Morales’s reputation as one of the world’s foremost champions of the environment was hurt by the plan to build the road across the TIPNIS reserve.

The leader of the TIPNIS native communities, Fernando Vargas, defended the rights of the people living in the reserve to use the natural resources there in a sustainable manner that preserves the park. He also urged Morales to build a country that is based on the conservation of nature, while alluding to future battles by indigenous people to preserve their lands.

But Capriles said the law putting an end to the conflict over TIPNIS was an isolated solution that leaves other protected areas and TCOs vulnerable.

She was referring to areas like the Madidi National Park and the Pilón Lajas Biosphere Reserve and Communal Lands in the north of the province of La Paz – which are close to recently discovered oil reserves.

In addition, the projected El Bala hydroelectric dam would flood some 300,000 hectares of land in the Madidi National Park and the adjacent Pilón Lajas biosphere reserve and indigenous territory, including the TCO owned by the Leco indigenous community.

“The people of the eastern lowlands and the western highlands should not treat each other as enemies,” said Vargas. “Let’s continue forging ahead with the process of change, but without destroying the ‘tierras comunitarias de origen’, and with full respect for the rights of indigenous peoples.”

The head of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), Adolfo Chávez, who led the march, called for “unity in peace” but urged Morales’ ministers to avoid provoking “popular outrage.”

Morales, meanwhile, said all responsibility for the cancellation of the road fell on the heads of the indigenous leaders who led the march. He told them they would have to explain the decision to the inhabitants of TIPNIS who wanted the road built.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez and - -
LA PAZ, Sep 28 2011 (IPS)

Bolivia’s main trade union declared a 24-hour general strike Wednesday to protest Sunday’s police crackdown on indigenous demonstrators who were protesting the construction of a road through a pristine rainforest preserve.

Thousands of members of unions belonging to the Central Obrera Boliviana (COB) held protest marches in Bolivia’s main cities Wednesday, and roadblocks have been set up in La Paz, where teachers, doctors and other unions have joined the strike.

Labour Minister Daniel Santalla said there was no reason for the protest measure, since President Evo Morales already announced on Monday that work on the road had been suspended until voters in the affected provinces decided the fate of the project.

But the COB is demanding that Morales completely cancel that stretch of the road being built by Brazil through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), which is self-governed by indigenous communities.

On Tuesday, Interior Minister Sacha Llorenti became the second minister to resign over the incident. Defence Minister Cecilia Chacon had already resigned on Monday in protest over the police action.

When hundreds of police were called in Sunday to clamp down on the native protesters in Yucumo, in the lowlands 330 km north of La Paz, TV cameras captured images of women with their hands tied and with tape over their mouths and protesters wounded by fierce blows by the police, which drew howls of outrage across the country.

Dozens of protesters, many of them injured in the crackdown, were detained, and on Monday the search continued for adults and children who had fled into the surrounding jungle when the police arrived.

The demonstrators were trying to regroup, to continue the march they began on Aug. 15 from the Amazon jungle to La Paz, to demand a halt to the construction of the road through TIPNIS in central Bolivia.

Llorenti, a powerful minister in the left-wing president’s cabinet, had initially blamed a prosecutor, and later his second-in-command, for ordering the police to crack down on the indigenous march. Both of them denied responsibility, although Deputy Minister Marcos Farfan also handed in his resignation.

In addition, the director of the country’s migration agency, María René Quiroga, resigned in protest over the violent incident.

Morales, Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president, announced the suspension of work on that stretch of the road until a national debate and a provincial vote are held, and called the police violence “unforgiveable.”

But the second highest-ranking chief of the Chiquitano people, Emigdio Poiché, told IPS from a sit-in at a cathedral in the central city of Santa Cruz that “We do not believe in the president’s words, and we demand that a law be passed that says the road will not run through indigenous territory.”

Bolivia’s ombudsman, Rolando Villena, visited Yucumo, where he found a scene of desolation and people still searching for some 20 adults and children who were still missing since Sunday.

“We are the legal owners of the land, and it is us who should make the decision on the road,” Isidro Yujo, a grassroots leader from TIPNIS, told IPS, rejecting Morales’s call to a national debate on the issue.

One 177-km stretch of the new road running from northeast to southwest across Bolivia, providing a link between Brazil’s Atlantic coast and Chile’s Pacific coast, is to cross TIPNIS.

The national park covers more than one million hectares and is collectively owned by some 15,000 people from three indigenous groups.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands.

The native people of the tropical regions marched for the first time in 1990 – 600 km from the city of Trinidad in the northern province of Beni to La Paz. Since that landmark event, they have held eight other marches, including the current one.

Yujo said Llorenti’s resignation was the ethical thing to do since in his opinion the former minister was responsible for ordering that the march be broken up.

Last week, Llorenti, a former human rights activist, accused the protesters of having ties to former right-wing president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997 and 2002-2003), who was toppled in his second term by massive popular protests.

Chiquitano chief Poiché said the contract that the Brazilian construction company OAS signed with the Morales administration envisions a road cutting through the heart of TIPNIS.

“The road will cross through our land over our dead bodies,” he said, adding that the marchers are regrouping in Yucumo and will continue on to La Paz, where university students and workers have held demonstrations in solidarity with the indigenous protesters and against the rainforest highway.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Sep 6 2011 (IPS)

A richly biodiverse rainforest the size of 3,000 soccer fields in central Bolivia will be the first victim of the road planned to run through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), say environmental activists.

Giant water lilies (Victoria amazonica) in Bolivia's Moxos plains. Credit: Photostock

The national park, created in 1965, was demarcated in 1990 to cover a total of 12,362 square km, while the 10,910 sq km indigenous territory was officially established in 2009.

The forests and savannahs of TIPNIS extend from the Moxos plains in the northeastern department (province) of Beni to the sub-Andean mountain ranges of Cochabamba, ranging across different environmental strata from lowlands to altitudes of 2,700 metres above sea level.

In September of 2008, the Bolivian Highway Administration (ABC) estimated a total budget of 3.8 million dollars for the clearing of trees and clean-up of irrigation channels and land in a 1,530-hectare area of forest.

The road will stretch 306 km between Villa Tunari in the central department of Cochabamba and San Ignacio de Moxos in Beni, with a width of 7.3 meters, two-metre shoulders on each side, and a double-layer asphalt surface. The 177-km section that would run through TIPNIS requires an environmental permit that has yet to be issued.

At a total cost of 415 million dollars, 80 percent of it financed by Brazil, the Bolivian government’s main argument for the road is that it will integrate the 1.7 million inhabitants of Cochabamba and Beni while forming part of an international corridor for the transport of goods from Brazil to the Pacific Ocean.

For environmental analyst Teresa Flores, this high cost implies “the use of huge amounts of materials like cement and iron and the operation of heavy machinery to clear the forests, which will have enormous impacts,” she told Tierramérica.

The risks to the area, home to 714 different species of fauna and 3,400 species of flora, are enormous, according to Gastón Cornejo, a former senator from the governing Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement to Socialism) party. The road will pave the way for the entry of projects to develop biofuels and transgenic crops, as well as herbicides and chemical products for the processing of marijuana and cocaine, which will also lead to increased crime and insecurity, he told Tierramérica.

An analysis conducted by the Bolivian Forum on the Environment and Development, made available to Tierramérica, compared the impact of the road with “the passage of a tornado that would destroy everything in its path, with the expected disappearance of the 64 communities who live in TIPNIS,” comprising some 15,000 people from the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane indigenous ethnic groups.

Bolivia is among the countries with the highest deforestation rates in the world. Every year, around 320 square metres of forest per capita are cleared, which is 20 times more than the estimated global average of 16 square metres per capita annually, according to Andrea Urioste, coordinator of the sustainable biotrade programme at the Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza (Friends of Nature Foundation).

The world loses around 130,000 sq km of forests – an area the size of Nicaragua – every year, added Urioste.

Bolivia “does not recognise the position it occupies as one of the countries with the highest rates of deforestation per capita” and lacks any kind of real proposal to “move towards a genuine plan of sustainable development,” Urioste states in the report “Deforestación en Bolivia: Una amenaza mayor al cambio climático” (Deforestation in Bolivia: A major threat to climate change), published in September 2010.

In May, the United Nations resident representative in Bolivia, Yoriko Yasukawa, said that “while Bolivia is not one of the countries mainly responsible for global warming, we do not believe that it has sufficiently contributed to reducing emissions, when we consider that 300,000 hectares of forest are destroyed in the country every year.”

For Flores, the road represents “opening up the area to settlement and coca cultivation.” The government has allocated land to coca growers in the northern department of Pando, but according to Flores, the concentration of alkaloids in coca plants grown there is lower, which is why the growers have their sights set on TIPNIS.

In Bolivia, it is legal to grow coca for traditional use of the leaves as food, medicine and in religious ceremonies, but there are large areas where it is illegally grown for the production of cocaine.

On Sep. 28, 2009, officials from the National Service for Protected Areas and indigenous leaders reported the presence in TIPNIS of armed men, presumably linked to illegal drug trafficking, who were blamed for acts of violence that left one person dead and two wounded.

A day later, then vice minister of land Alejandro Almaraz voiced his suspicion that new settlements and coca plantations were associated with drug trafficking and that there were between 4,000 and 5,000 hectares of illegal coca crops on the reserve. On Feb. 2, 2010 he resigned from his post and is now one of the activists opposed to the road.

The coca growers believe it is “legitimate” to dispossess the indigenous peoples of the lowlands of their territory because they view them as “savages” who are incapable of producing food, said Flores.

In fact, the expansion of coca growing in the tropical region of Cochabamba, particularly in the area of Chapare, forced the Yuracaré to abandon lands that are now covered in coca crops and take refuge in TIPNIS, added Flores. “The impact is not only environmental, it is also cultural,” she stressed.

The government believes that the road will make it possible to combat illegal activities and reach a consensus among all parties for the preservation of the territory, ABC general secretary Antonio Mullisaca told Tierramérica.

But there has still been no prior consultation with indigenous communities regarding the construction of the road. The right to prior consultation is guaranteed by the constitution and numerous laws, but the regulations for this mechanism are not yet in place.

In the opinion of Juan Ramón Quintana, former minister of the presidency and current director of the governmental Agency for the Development of Macro Regions and Border Areas, the protest march to La Paz being carried out by around 1,000 Amazon indigenous people has been spurred on by non-governmental organisations who espouse the environmental policies of the developed world.

Quintana, a retired army major and close aide to President Evo Morales, went so far as to accuse the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) of promoting the 600-kilometer march to create a climate of destabilisation, and called for the agency’s expulsion. The government has not followed up on his recommendation.

* The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Aug 24 2011 (IPS)

The lack of regulations for consulting indigenous communities in Bolivia on initiatives that affect their territories is at the heart of a dispute over a road to facilitate traffic from Brazil, which would run through an enormous tropical national park self-governed by indigenous communities.

Caricature of President Evo Morales saying "More development, more roads!" Credit: Subcentral Tipnis

The government argues that exporters in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay need the roads, to be able to cross this landlocked country of 1.09 million square km in west-central South America, to reach Pacific Ocean ports in Chile and Peru and ship their goods to China.

One of the roads runs from northeast to southwest, linking Brazil’s Atlantic coast with Chile’s Pacific coast.

Bolivian President Evo Morales says that “if we don’t do it now, other projects will not come to fruit,” the head of Bolivia’s national road administrator (ABC), Antonio Mullisaca, told IPS.

Under the glass top on his work table is a colourful map showing roads running across the country east to west and northeast to southwest, like veins and arteries.

The government is seeking to facilitate traffic from the state of Rondônia in northwest Brazil to Chile.

The 1,400-km route would run from Rondônia to Puerto Ustárez on the Iténez border river in northeast Bolivia, through the city of Trinidad, the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), and Cochabamba in central Bolivia, continuing along trunk roads to the Tambo Quemado-Chungara mountain pass on the border between western Bolivia and the extreme northeast tip of Chile.

One 300-km stretch along the route, between San Ignacio de Moxos in the northern department (province) of Beni and Villa Tunari in the central Bolivian department of Cochabamba, looks small in comparison to the rest.

But it is of extreme significance. It now takes 16 hours to drive between those two points, by a roundabout route through the eastern city of Santa Cruz. The new road would cut the trip to just four hours.

And one 177-km stretch of the road would cross the TIPNIS national park, which covers more than one million hectares and is collectively owned by some 15,000 people from three indigenous groups: the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimane Indians.

“Our rights are not negotiable,” Adolfo Moye, a spokesman for the TIPNIS communities, told IPS from San Ignacio de Moxos, where the more than 1,000 indigenous protesters marching to La Paz made a halt.

The protesters are opposed to the construction of any road running through the park. But rerouting it around the edges would add 850 km to the route.

The cost of the road, being built by Brazilian construction firm Construtora OAS, is 415 million dollars, 80 percent of which is to be financed by a 332 million dollar loan granted to Bolivia by Brazil’s national development bank BNDES, while the remaining 20 percent is being funded by the Bolivian government.

“If Brazil is granting the loan, it obviously has an interest,” Mullisaca said.

Bolivia’s total road budget for this year is 500 million dollars, one-third of the annual budget for public works, and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans continue to pour in from different sources, he said.

But critics say the road construction project runs counter to the new constitution that went into effect in 2009, which grants broad rights to Bolivia’s historically downtrodden indigenous majority.

It also violates National Land Reform Institute (INRA) rules and laws that declare TIPNIS and other collectively-owned land the “inalienable and indivisible” property of indigenous communities, Franz Barrios, an expert on legal matters, told IPS.

According to Barrios, the project also goes against the forestry law, the environment law, the regulations for protected areas, the decree that recognised indigenous territories in Bolivia, the penal code, and International Labour Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which requires prior, free and informed consultation of indigenous peoples regarding laws or projects like mines, oil drilling or logging that affect their territories.

“The government and the sectors interested in fomenting ‘development’ do not seem to understand the content and reach of the constitution,” sociologist Raúl Prada, who took part in the process of rewriting the constitution, told IPS.

The indigenous philosophy of “Buen Vivir” – which roughly translates as living well or collective well-being and is recognised by the constitution – refers to living in harmony with nature while pursuing material, social and spiritual well-being for all members of society, but not at the cost of other members or the environment.

For the final design of the stretch of road that is to run through TIPNIS, the National Service of Protected Areas (SERNAP), the agency responsible for the enforcement of the country’s environmental laws, must grant ABC an environmental permit, after delivery of an environmental impact study that has not yet been carried out.

Mullisaca said that in recent years, so many dirt roads have been carved out in TIPNIS that only one 50-km stretch has no road.

These informal roads, the work of outsiders coming in to clear land to plant coca illegally, show that laws designed to protect the environment in Bolivia are not enforced: one more argument in favour of building a paved road through the park, while coming up with a solution to preserve the area, with all the concerned parties, he said.

The local communities are actually divided over the road, because coca growers and some trade unions defend the project on the argument that it will boost development.

The ABC official proposed, among other measures, sharing revenue from vehicular and cargo traffic through the park with the local communities, and establishing an environmental management plan for TIPNIS.

But the central issue is the question of prior consultation with indigenous communities, which should form part of the process of approving the environmental permit, although the regulations for doing so are not yet in place, lawyer Waldo Albarracín, a former ombudsman, told IPS.

The right to prior consultation is guaranteed by several articles of the constitution, and by ILO Convention 169 and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, both of which have been ratified by Bolivia, Albarracín explained.

He added that it is the ABC that is responsible for organising a consultation process that respects indigenous traditions and customs.

President Morales and Vice President Álvaro García Linera have urged the leaders of the TIPNIS native communities to engage in talks with the government. But the authorities refuse to suspend work on the road, which has already begun.

According to Albarracín, previous consultations with indigenous communities on mining projects were held “using discretional procedures.”

He himself advised the association that groups the leaders of native communities from the country’s highlands region, the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu, during the drafting of the bill on prior consultations with indigenous peoples that was introduced in Congress.

The bill outlines procedures to be followed in a binding prior consultation process on actions that could affect indigenous rights and interests, ranging from legislative and administrative measures to any infrastructure project or initiative for the exploitation of natural resources, like mining, logging, oil drilling or the construction of hydroelectric dams.

But given the current dispute between the government and indigenous communities from TIPNIS, Albarracín does not believe the bill will pass any time soon.

Prada said the road forms part of the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), which has bolstered Brazil’s presence in sectors like the oil, hydropower and construction industries, in the face of an attitude of “subordination” on the part of the Bolivian government, in his view.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Aug 12 2011 (IPS)

Indigenous people in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia are again preparing to make the long march to La Paz, 21 years after their first such protest. They have vowed to make the trek in defence of their lands, which they say are threatened by plans for a highway to be built with the backing of the Brazilian government.

The 600-km march in repudiation of the projected road for heavy vehicle traffic through Bolivia’s Amazon region will set out Monday, Aug. 15 from Trinidad, the capital of the northeastern province of Beni, to La Paz in the western highlands, the seat of the Bolivian government.

The decision to mount the protest march follows the breakdown of talks between the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) and the authorities in charge of the road project, which will affect a vast area between Beni and the central province of Cochabamba that is rich in biodiversity and where coca leaf cultivation is expanding.

The goal of the protest is to protect 13,000 people belonging to the Yuracaré, Trinitario and Chimán ethnic groups living in the area to be traversed by the road, indigenous leader Adolfo Moye of the autonomous Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) told IPS. He is an outspoken opponent of the 306-km road that would link Villa Tunari, in Cochabamba, to San Ignacio de Moxos, in Beni.

The indigenous peoples of the Amazon region make up 10 percent of the 10 million inhabitants of Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population are native people, mainly belonging to the Quechua and Aymara ethnic groups concentrated in the western highlands.

In September 1990, indigenous people from the Bolivian Amazon region marched for a month to the highlands of La Paz, and secured government recognition of four indigenous territories that were then being threatened by logging companies and the exploitation of other natural resources.

The goal of the march now being planned is to demand respect for that recognition of indigenous territory, which was confirmed by supreme decree 22610 in September 1990 and is supported by the new constitution rewritten in 2009 under Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president.

In 2009 Morales gave indigenous communities provisional title to TIPNIS, conferring collective property rights over an area of 1.09 million hectares.

The February 2009 Bolivian constitution enshrines respect for the autonomy, culture, land and traditional forms of government of Bolivia’s native peoples. But the new constitution has not served as a shield against the companies and landowners who are plundering the natural wealth of the country’s northeast Amazon region and destroying the way of life of its indigenous communities, according to activists.

On Tuesday Aug. 9, International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay reported that “many of the estimated 370 million indigenous peoples around the world have lost, or are under imminent threat of losing, their ancestral lands, territories and natural resources because of unfair and unjust exploitation for the sake of ‘development.'”

In August 2009 the U.N. General Assembly named Morales “World Hero of Mother Earth,” citing him as the leading exponent and a model for defence of the earth and the environment.

Morales hosted the April 2010 World People’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Tiquipaya, Cochabamba, which drew some 30,000 participants. At the close of the meeting a declaration was issued on “the rights of Mother Earth and human rights.”

However, the campaigns coordinator of the Bolivian Forum on Environment and Development (FOBOMADE), Patricia Molina, told IPS that government policies were recently showing signs of contradiction, because of “pressure from groups of coca farmers who want to expand their production areas.”

According to U.N. studies, Bolivia is the third largest producer of coca leaf in Latin America with 30,900 hectares planted, after Colombia with 68,000 hectares and Peru with 59,000 hectares.

The planned route of the road to be built in Bolivia led former presidential candidate for the opposition José Serra to nickname it the “cocaine highway”.

Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised financial backing for the road project in 2009, offering a credit of 332 million dollars.

Last week the Brazilian ambassador to Bolivia, Marcel Fortuna Biato, made payment of the loan through the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) conditional on agreement being reached on the road between the Morales government and the indigenous communities.

The 2009 Constitution recognises the integrity of indigenous territories, obliges the state to consult indigenous peoples about the use of their natural resources according to their customary law and procedures, and guarantees protection of the environment.

But Minister of the Presidency Carlos Romero said consultations would not change the government’s decision to build the road.

Indigenous lawmaker Pedro Nuni, of the governing coalition, declared he would defend the demands of the native people of the Amazon region, saying he was not afraid of losing his seat in Congress which was won with the votes of his “brothers and sisters.”

Taking another view of the controversy, Molina questioned the involvement of Brazil, which he called “an imperialist power” because of its interests in extracting crude oil, raising food crops to make biofuels, exercising control over electricity generation and influencing the Bolivian economy.

“Its geopolitical interests are plain to see. The fact is, the Amazon region in this country contains a wealth of resources that Brazil does not plan to miss out on,” Molina remarked.

In an unfortunate turn of phrase, Morales told Bolivia’s young people to court young Yuracaré and Trinitario women and persuade them not to oppose the road project. The Coordinadora de la Mujer, a non-governmental women’s organisation, demanded a public apology from the president.

The president’s statements were “offensive, and (expressed) a worrying macho-type vision that promotes the conquest of our ideas and bodies,” says an open letter from the women’s organisation, published in the local press this week.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 19 2011 (IPS)

In the midst of heated debate with agribusiness, the Bolivian government has launched an agricultural production model aimed at boosting food sovereignty by supporting small farmers, in order to generate surpluses to cushion the swings in international food prices.

A new “law on a productive community-based agricultural revolution” combines modern scientific farming standards and techniques with ancestral indigenous traditions aimed at producing and storing food during periods of climate adversity.

The law is focused on bolstering food production in rural indigenous communities in South America’s poorest country, where native people make up 60 percent of the population.

The law, signed this month by leftwing President Evo Morales, has unleashed fears in the export-oriented agribusiness sector. But it has also drawn sharp criticism from environmentalists and indigenous leaders because it allows the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO) in parts of the food production chain.

The head of Agriculture and Livestock Production and Food Sovereignty, Germán Gallardo, one of the sponsors of the law, told IPS it embodies an “inclusive policy that recognises private, mixed, individual and collective farm producers.”

Early this year, persistent drought, repeated frosts, contraband and government policies restricting exports discouraged investment by large companies, and food production went down and the government was forced to import food in order to avoid shortages. Gallardo said there was no deficit in food production in Bolivia. However, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) classifies Bolivia among those countries with “serious” nutrition problems and assigned it 10.9 points on its scale of 0 (no hunger) to 100 (most hunger) on the Global Hunger Index (scores between 10 and 19.9 indicate a “serious” problem).

A report by the Technical Committee of the National Council for Food and Nutrition (CONAN), presented in 2010 at the First National Food Sovereignty Forum, says that 26.8 percent of Bolivians suffer from chronic malnutrition, the highest level in the region, followed by Ecuador (26.4 percent), Peru (25.4), Colombia (15.5) and Paraguay (14).

According to the report, people affected by malnutrition in the country face problems like anaemia, deficiencies of micronutrients such as vitamin A, zinc and iodine, obesity, and chronic non-communicable diseases.

The full results of the new food policy will be seen in five years’ time, said Gallardo, who emphasised the role that will be played by communities, a sector which deserves recognition as the producers of 80 percent of domestically consumed food, he said. “We are not harming agribusiness; we are strengthening small farmers, but not to the detriment of large producers,” Gallardo said, adding that equal opportunities for access to bank credits, technology and seeds will transform Bolivia into a country with reserves of surplus food.

One popular type of bread in Bolivia is made with imported flour. In 2010, national production of wheat was only 271,330 tonnes, while consumption was 631,000 tonnes, according to the Rural Development Ministry.

“The revolutionary law was drawn up by farmers and intellectuals working for the state,” said Gallardo, stressing that the proposed model of food production does not follow formulas imposed from abroad.

“The international agencies were pointing us in the direction of food policies that would not be under our control,” he complained, while highlighting the law’s national identity and break with external dependence, quipping that while it was being drafted, “we paid for everyone’s lunches ourselves.”

But the strategy for ensuring food security for Bolivia’s population of 10.4 million must be translated into a system of bank loans for farmers, who are no longer allowed by law to use their small plots of land as collateral.

Once these barriers have been overcome, the Morales administration has announced plans to introduce technology into small-scale farming, and then build a food storage network, based on the traditional indigenous “pirwa”, food storage structures made from the local materials in each region that are capable of preserving food in its natural state for long periods of time.

Morales, Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president, is very popular among the country’s peasant communities.

But one aspect of the new law has drawn the wrath of the influential National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ), a confederation of traditional governing bodies of highland indigenous communities in Bolivia, which has called for the elimination of the use of GMOs in food production.

“Transgenics will have a social impact on health, because they cause health problems like cancer,” said CONAMAQ leader Rafael Quispe, an outspoken opponent of importing GM seeds.

The scientific community has not yet reached a consensus on the potential health effects of transgenic crops.

Quispe argues that using transgenic seeds generates dependency on the transnational companies that produce them.

Edwin Alvarado, a spokesman for the Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA), told IPS that article 15 of the law is aimed at protecting the genetic heritage of native Bolivian crops like potatoes and quinoa, a grain-like food crop that was also first domesticated in the Andes. But it is being interpreted as allowing other species, like sugarcane and cotton, to enter the country.

Alvarado, who explained that LIDEMA is opposed to GMOs, called for specific legislation to protect local varieties of food crops that can adapt to climate change and could make Bolivia a model of agricultural biodiversity.

Pointing out that 85 percent of soy produced in Bolivia is genetically modified, he acknowledged that this is an irreversible trend, but insisted the rest of the country’s food crops must be preserved in their natural state.

Gallardo agreed with Alvarado that specific legislation must be adopted, and declared that eradicating transgenic soy is impossible, because of a “multi-ministerial” resolution approved during the administration of former president Carlos Mesa (2003-2005).

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 7 2011 (IPS)

Efforts to combat pollution in Lake Titicaca, which straddles the borders of Peru and Bolivia high up in the Andes mountains, have shown slightly better results in Puno Bay on the Peruvian side, but have barely made a difference in Cohana Bay on the Bolivian side, according to local fishers and specialists interviewed by Tierramérica.

Lake Titicaca seen from Copacabana, Bolivia. Credit: Public domain

Its deep blue waters are a source of livelihoods for 400,000 people who make a living from fishing, harvesting its vegetation for use as livestock feed, and building boats from the totora reeds that grow in the lake, using techniques that date back to pre-Columbian times.

But the inhabitants of the Puno region in southeastern Peru are deeply concerned by the current state of the lake’s waters.

In May, Aymara indigenous communities in the region staged a two-week roadblock on the international highway used to transport Bolivian export goods through Peru to the Pacific Ocean. The roadblock was aimed at protesting new mining concessions that could lead to even further contamination of Lake Titicaca, which already receives the waste effluents of six Peruvian gold and uranium mines.

“There is insufficient treatment of wastewater and the capacity of the plants (to purify it) has been surpassed due to population growth,” technical specialist Javier Bojorquez told Tierramérica. Bojorquez heads up a water quality control project that has been carried out since 2009 by the Peruvian non-governmental organisation Suma Quta (which means “Good Lake” in the Aymara language).

With the participation of the local population, the project monitors the waters of the Ramis and Coata Rivers, which flow into Lake Titicaca, identifies contaminants, and designs strategies to eliminate or reduce them at their sources. Laboratory studies have detected fecal waste with a high presence of the Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacterium.

On the other side of the border, Bolivian fishermen Roberto Villcacuti and Ricardo Chasqui declared almost in unison that there are no efforts being made to clean up the lake’s waters. The two men are leaders of Aymara communities in the provinces of Camacho and Los Andes, in the western Bolivian department of La Paz, where they make a living from fishing and harvesting forage plants from Lake Titicaca.

The lake’s water is “dark, gelatinous and full of oxide residues” which pose a lethal threat to the fish that live there, they told Tierramérica. They believe that the source of the toxic waste and mineral residues is the Suches River, which springs from a lagoon in Peru and flows south into Lake Titicaca.

The decline in fish stocks has been dramatic, said Valentín Calisaya, a 69-year-old fisherman from Camacho. He remembers a time, three decades ago, when he could cast his nets overnight and harvest as many as 40 kilograms of the fish known locally as karachi (of the genus Orestias).

Today, over the course of two nights the nets yield barely 10 fish. “The lake has changed, the climate and the people too,” Calisaya commented to Tierramérica.

The extinction of native species was confirmed in a study carried out as part of the Project to Support Integrated and Participatory Water Resources Management in the Lake Titicaca, Desaguadero River, Lake Poopo and Coipasa Salt Marsh System, jointly carried out by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Lake Titicaca Binational Authority (ALT)

The study notes the disappearance of the native species known as humanto or amanto (Orestias cuvieri) and boga (Orestias pentlandii). Other native species – suche (Trichomycterus rivulatus), yellow karachi (Orestias albus) and ispi (Orestias ispi) – are currently endangered, as a result of overfishing, predation by introduced species, and the impacts of intensive production in trout farms.

In one week, the Villcacuti family catches around 20 kilograms of ispi and sells the fish in urban markets for roughly three dollars, money they need to buy staple foods that cannot be produced in the high Andes plains, such as rice and beans.

Lake Titicaca has been the “most studied aquatic ecosystem in the region for several decades,” according to the UNEP report. Nevertheless, the level of pollution is “troubling and dangerous,” especially in the “lesser lake” or Wiñay Marka section on the Bolivian side, where Cohana Bay is located.

Since the foreign ministries of the two countries agreed in October 2006 to join forces in rehabilitating the most contaminated areas of the lake, the ALT has directed the clearing of fat duckweed (Lemna giba) from the water’s surface.

The duckweed’s capacity to absorb nutrients from the abundance of decomposing matter in the lake has caused it to proliferate and turn into a threat, since it blocks out the sunlight, to the detriment of other life forms in the lake, ALT specialist Néstor Loayza told Tierramérica.

In Puno Bay, technicians and workers aided by machinery removed 40,000 tons of duckweed from an area spanning 500 hectares. The results were almost immediate: the fish and birds returned to the area, and now oxygen is being pumped into the depths of the lake to help promote further recovery.

Around 1,200 hectares of the lake’s surface are contaminated with duckweed in the Puno area.

But in Cohana Bay, on the Bolivian side, there are around 5,000 hectares affected and only 5,000 tons of the troublesome plant have been removed, while the Bolivian Foreign Ministry’s approval of a 16-million-dollar project to continue with the clean-up efforts is still pending, said Loayza.

In the meantime, around 4,000 liters of sewage and industrial wastewater, with high levels of cadmium, arsenic and lead, are discharged into this area of the lake every second, from the cities of El Alto, Viacha and Laja, home to a million people.

In Lima, the head of the Titicaca National Reserve, Víctor Hugo Apaza, described the progress made in bird and plant conservation thanks to awareness-raising work with local peasant communities.

So far, a total of 109 bird species have been recorded, including the Titicaca grebe, a flightless bird that feeds off small fish in the lake. As its name suggest, the bird is endemic to the region, and was in danger of extinction several years ago, Apaza told Tierramérica.

Although the ALT was established 18 years ago, it has done relatively little to address the environmental challenges facing Lake Titicaca.

As a result, in October 2010, Peruvian President Alan García and Bolivian President Evo Morales agreed to create a binational committee to lay the groundwork, over a six-month period, for an institutional, regulatory and operational overhaul of the Binational Authority.

The six months elapsed in April. “The recent elections in Peru have prevented this task from being completed within the timeframe established,” Peruvian Foreign Ministry official Luis Felipe Isasi admitted to Tierramérica.

* Franz Chávez is an IPS correspondent. Additional reporting by Milagros Salazar (Lima). This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jul 4 2011 (IPS)

A non-governmental organisation set up by five women 25 years ago in Bolivia gave birth to what is now the largest microcredit bank in the country, catering to those otherwise marginalised from the financial system.

The Banco FIE S.A. began its history as a small microfinance NGO in a modest office in the city of La Paz, with just one computer. From these humble origins emerged a new system for providing assistance to small productive units, offering microloans as small as 13 dollars at the bank’s 150 branches around the country – nearly double the number of offices of the second-largest microfinance bank in the country.

“We developed a credit technology of our own. The first customer registrations were done by hand,” the institution’s general manager Elizabeth Nava, one of the pioneers of microfinance in Bolivia, told IPS. “This is a bank that was created with sheer hard work and dedication.”

Last year, the Banco FIE won the Inter-American Development Bank award for best practices in social performance for its business outreach to segments of the population that traditionally have no access to the financial system.

Nava spoke with IPS at an office set in a bustling commercial area where hundreds of food vendors, farmers and craftspeople struggle for a small space to display their wares on roughly constructed stands or even just a sheet of plastic stretched out on the asphalt.

The history of the bank dates back to a quarter century ago, when the Centre for the Development of Economic Initiatives (FIE) set out in search of that army of potential small businesspeople, including many of the workers laid off as part of a draconian structural adjustment programme in an economy facing runaway inflation of 25,000 percent a year.

In 2010, FIE became a bank. Its files still record the smallest loan granted, of just 13 dollars, as well as the largest, 1.2 million dollars – only two of the 825,884 loans awarded since the organisation was founded.

Nava says her original idea of recognising women as generators of opportunities, and as having an innate ability to negotiate prices and analyse market demand and adapt the offer of food or other goods to the requirements of the public has been confirmed by the bank’s experience. Today, 55 percent of Banco FIE’s clients are women.

Family businesses specialised in making clothing, carpentry or other areas gave men the leading role in production while playing down the contribution of women who marketed and sold the products, managed the money and kept up-to-date on market trends, Nava said.

The economic activities focused on by the microfinance institution start out with seed capital of as little as 10 dollars, and the families involved are unfamiliar with complex tools for calculating their income or projecting sales, profits or payment capacity.

While the traditional banking system excluded this segment of the population due partly to the difficulty in assessing creditworthiness, the staff at Banco FIE recognised the opportunity to create a very simple credit assessment model, the bank’s assistant national credit manager, Óscar Vedia, told IPS.

To illustrate, he cited the example of assessing the creditworthiness of a small family-run neighbourhood store. The assessor puts especially high value on the experience of the shopkeeper, who knows which food products are in high demand and sell fast, such as soft drinks, bread, sugar, rice and candy.

The location of the small business is also taken into account, and with this information the assessor produces graphs showing income levels over the course of one week and one month, to illustrate the sales cycle. To that is added the business’s transportation costs and other expenses.

And because it is a family business, household expenditure like transportation, education, utilities and rent are included in the assessment to provide a complete picture, Vedia explained.

“We do everything possible to grant the loan, and we offer advice instead of simply saying ‘no’,” he said, smiling.

The casually dressed executive now runs the programme that has extended the bank’s operations to Argentina and Haiti.

The Banco FIE has a net worth of 62.3 million dollars, and charges an annual interest rate of between 8.5 and 21 percent, which Vedia said are the lowest rates in the international microfinance market.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Jun 23 2011 (IPS)

Hundreds of women belonging to mining cooperatives in Bolivia are striving for the right to mine seams of tin and silver in the country’s western highlands, where an age old superstition maintains that the presence of women “scares away” the minerals.

In these freezing high-altitude mineral-rich but impoverished areas, native women have been assigned a secondary economic role for centuries. But now they are seeking to make headway in traditionally male domains, say researchers interviewed by IPS.

Growing international demand for metals and soaring prices for the tin, silver and gold that are abundant in Bolivia have encouraged thousands of mainly indigenous peasant farmers and people from outside the altiplano region to go down the mines, organised in cooperatives.

The mining cooperative model in Bolivia, which dates back to 1968, is based on the principles of social solidarity, equal opportunity, respect for individuals and the elimination of exploitation, according to a declaration by the National Federation of Mining Cooperatives (FENCOMIN).

But these principles only applied to men, to the extent that the organisation’s Women’s Secretariat was headed by a man, the coordinator of the project on children and families in mining at the Centre for the Promotion of Mining (CEPROMIN), Cecilia Molina, told IPS.

“Women had to fight for the leadership of their own secretariat in the organisation of cooperatives,” Molina said.

After years of struggle, women won a first victory at the congress of representatives of mining cooperatives in 2001, when they achieved recognition as partners and shareholders, privileges that had previously been denied to them, José Antonio Condori, author of the book Historia del Cooperativismo Boliviano (History of the Bolivian Cooperative Movement), told IPS.

Bolivia’s cooperative system of mining is unique. In principle there is equality among shareholder members, but this becomes open to question when some members accumulate several mining concessions, rise to power on the cooperative governing bodies and hire labourers, as if they were private companies.

Since the 1980s, these entrepreneurial cooperative members have gained ground with the expansion of mine-working areas belonging to the state Bolivian Mining Corporation (COMIBOL), and have gained influence in the political sphere, replacing the once-powerful union of COMIBOL workers, who shrunk from 27,000 in the mid-1980s to nearly none as a result of layoffs.

Some 650 mining cooperatives operate in the country, extracting tin, tungsten, silver, zinc and gold. They have about 62,000 stakeholding members, and adding the number of labourers without shares brings the total to 75,000, the deputy minister for Mining Cooperatives, Isaac Meneses, told IPS.

Women cooperative members work up to 14 hours a day in tunnels dug into the side of mountains and deep underground to extract mineral ore. Often their only aid to endure fatigue and hunger is the ancestral practice of chewing coca leaf.

Under the former rules, a cooperative member’s shares were not bequeathed to his widow upon his death, but to his eldest son. If a woman was widowed and had no sons, she lost the stake in the cooperative, Condori said.

The governing bodies of cooperatives would admit women only as “palliri”, who collect and sort metal ore from waste rock from the mines. Only their struggle to gain recognition as stakeholder cooperative members with speaking and voting rights has changed women’s status, Molina said.

Condori said there are now all-women cooperatives that reject male members, such as a cooperative of 200 women in Chorolque, in the south of Potosí province.

Although there is light at the end of the tunnel for women cooperative members, there are still plenty of hurdles to be overcome, Molina said.

In Atocha, a mining area in Potosí province, women held the Education and Culture Secretariat of the male-led cooperative for three consecutive terms. However, they still face discrimination, by being assigned to mineral-poor areas, and even excluded from some mines, she said.

Molina cited the ban on women’s access to Cerro Rico in Potosí, the mountain that was a symbol of fabulous silver wealth and power during the Spanish colonial era.

Molina organises workshops and classes for women miners about their rights. She explains that their status as cooperative shareholders means they are “owners of the means of production, without bosses to answer to.” She also underscores the importance of contributing to the social security system, which many women do not join, in order to draw a pension when they stop working.

She said women miners with little schooling and limited knowledge of financial matters are at a disadvantage when selling minerals to intermediary buyers, who offer them low prices.

Excerpt:

By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, May 19 2011 (IPS)

Occupations of land for agriculture over the last four decades in Bolivia, whether by individuals or in organised collective initiatives, have led to severe ecological damages and low levels of productivity because of the intensive use of machinery and the failure to take into account the limitations of the soil, said environmentalist Marco Ribera.

“To this aggressive approach towards ecosystems is added the irregularity of many processes of obtaining land, in murky periods in which the phenomenon flourished under dictatorships or in a context of political favours,” Ribera, research coordinator for the Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA), a local environmental group, told IPS.

Ribera is an interdisciplinary biologist who, after reviewing statistics, land occupation records, and studies on environmental damages, concluded that misguided state management and land occupations carried out without adequate planning continue to occur today in the process of colonisation of the Amazon jungle in the northern province of Pando.

Of Bolivia’s total area of nearly 1.1 million square kilometres, 25 percent is Andean highlands, 15 percent is made up of valleys, and the rest is lowland plains and rainforest.

Since the second half of the 1980s, the Bolivian economy has been driven by intensive agribusiness in the lowlands, where soy has become the star crop.

Soy exports brought the country 554 million dollars in export earnings in 2010, making the crop the third-biggest foreign exchange earner after natural gas and minerals. Bolivia’s total exports in 2010 amounted to 6.96 billion dollars, just over one-third of GDP.

“There are a growing number of eco-regions and ecosystems in critical condition in this country, due to pressure from the advance of the agricultural frontier, extensive use of the slash-and-burn technique, large-scale pollution and megaprojects (hydroelectric dams and roads),” said Ribera.

He warned about the risk faced by the Alto Madidi region in the northwestern province of La Paz, an area consisting of valleys and ridges ranging from 300 to 2,000 metres above sea level, which are rich in flora and fauna and have abundant water resources.

The areas at risk of the worst environmental damages include the Amboró National Park in the eastern province of Santa Cruz, an area of subtropical rainforest with a great diversity of ecosystems, and the neighbouring Carrasco National Park, in the central province of Cochabamba.

The Isidoro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory in Cochabamba and the extensive semi-tropical area of Los Yungas, in La Paz province, are included in the regions facing the greatest threats.

Both areas, according to newspaper reports, have been invaded by coca growers, and coca production is displacing other crops, like fruit.

In the Isidoro Sécure National Park, indigenous people are fighting a battle with settlers from outside the park who have encroached on their land.

The native residents are also fighting a government plan to build a highway linking the towns of Villa Tunari in the province of Cochabamba and San Ignacio de Moxos in the northern province of Beni – an infrastructure project jointly undertaken by Bolivia, Brazil and Peru that will split the protected area in two and bring in even more people from outside.

“Besides the impacts of deforestation and pollution, the indigenous people of the Isidoro Sécure National Park are worried about alcohol consumption and trade that would alter their traditional way of life,” the representative of the Kandire environmental group, Daniela Leytón, explained to IPS.

The activist has gathered testimony from the leaders of the Chimán, Mojeño and Yuracaré indigenous communities, who expressed their concern over the road project. In their opinion it violates the constitution, which protects their territory and form of life and government.

In Leytón’s view, the prior consultation with the indigenous groups who will be affected by the infrastructure project, which is mandated by law, has become a “technical” exercise involving nothing more than informational workshops. She said the views of the local people on the impacts on their way of life were not actually being heard.

Ribera’s study assessed the extent of destruction of rainforest and established that “the intensification of the change of soil use (deforestation) means Bolivia’s (greenhouse gas) emissions have grown from 0.02 to 0.3 percent of the global total. That change is indicative of how serious the matter is.”

By 1995, the expansion of the agricultural frontier had caused an annual deforestation rate of between 80,000 and 168,000 hectares. And according to a 2010 study by the authors Z. Villegas and J. Martínez, agribusiness activities in the last few years have led to an increase in deforestation, to up to 500,000 hectares a year.

Excerpt: