A K9 electric bus parked on a street in downtown Montevideo. Credit: Inés Acosta/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Mar 24 2014 (IPS)

Uruguay plans to gradually replace oil-based fuels with electric energy in its public transport system, and is currently assessing the costs and benefits of the shift.

Tests indicate that the running costs of electric buses can be six- to eight-fold lower than for diesel buses.

For the last two years, studies have been under way on the potential benefits of adding electric vehicles to the public transport fleet in Montevideo, where half the country’s 3.3 million people live.

In late 2013, performance and range trials were carried out on an E6 model car and a K9 model bus made by the Chinese company BYD. The results were presented on Mar. 13.

The economic analysis of the performance of the electric vehicles, carried out by the city government, was positive. But mechanisms must be designed to face the initial investment and redefine the scope of subsidies and taxes.

The overall economic advantage of an electric bus over one running on diesel is 1.7 to one, according to this study, which took into account costs of purchase, maintenance and operation of different types of vehicles under the present subsidies and taxes.

For taxis, the difference is 1.8 to one between electric and gasoline-fuelled vehicles, and 1.4 to one between electric and diesel taxis.

Electric motors expend six times less energy than diesel motors. But there is a state subsidy of 65 percent on diesel fuel for buses, so unless the subsidy structure is changed, bus companies will not find it profitable to switch to electricity.

The initiative is part of Uruguay’s energy policy, which aims for half of the country’s energy mix to be made up of renewable sources by 2015, much of that wind energy.

The Electric Mobility Group, made up of several national bodies and the Montevideo city government, has worked since 2012 on the introduction of this technology, which has the advantage of zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The electric vehicles in question function with a bank of lithium iron phosphate batteries, which are biodegradable and do not include heavy metals. When fully charged, the cars and buses have ranges of 300 and 250 kilometres, respectively.

Charging them takes a 10-kilowatt power source, while Uruguayan homes are usually supplied with two to six kilowatts of power.

Electric vehicles cost up to five times more than those using conventional fuels in Uruguay. An electric bus costs 500,000 dollars and a car 60,000 dollars. But operating and maintenance costs are only 10 percent of those for diesel motors.

The national energy director, Ramón Méndez, told Tierramérica that fully charging a car battery would cost 10 dollars at standard Uruguayan rates.

He also said the country would be able to absorb the additional energy consumption, as by 2015 it would become an exporter of electricity.

Since 2005, “Uruguay has installed as much new electricity generating capacity as it did in the previous 100 years of history of its energy industry,” Méndez said.

Transport consumes one-third of the country’s energy resources. “Over two billion dollars a year are spent on fuel,” he said. For this reason, measures taken “in this sector could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in savings for the country,” Méndez said.

Electric vehicles “are the way ahead for the world in general and Uruguay in particular,” he said.

Transport is currently dependent on fossil fuels, but once electric vehicles are introduced it would be based on sources like wind energy, biomass and photovoltaic energy.

“That means lower costs and greater sovereignty,” stressed the head of the National Energy Directorate.

“Unless we strike oil in our country, instead of depending on what we have to import at high prices with complete uncertainty, we can guarantee our energy supply by installing more wind parks, and at the same time we can satisfy transport needs,” he said.

But further adjustments are also needed.

Uruguay spends 100 million dollars a year on diesel subsidies for public transport, Néstor Campal, the city government’s director of transport, told Tierramérica.

“If these funds were spent instead on, say, improving infrastructure for electric vehicles, which have lower operating costs, we would gain a technology with a great many environmental and other benefits,” he said.

In his view, the law should be changed “so that subsidies are applied in a balanced way to both systems.”

Transport Minister Enrique Pintado said “transport subsidies cannot be based on the contradiction that ‘the more you spend the more you are subsidised’; they should instead reward reductions in consumption.”

Bus fares “should come down not because of subsidies, but due to lower real prices. That means much more efficient management of bus companies and lower energy, parts and unit costs,” he said.

“We are laying the foundations for the next departmental (provincial) and national governments to be capable of bringing to fruition what we are launching today,” Pintado concluded at the presentation of the report on the evaluation of the electric vehicles.

Tax costs are another aspect that needs to be reviewed in order to promote electric transport.

Import duties on electric buses are 23 percent, compared to six percent for diesel buses. In addition, diesel buses are exempt from the domestic tax known as IMESI.

In contrast, imported electric taxis pay a preferential IMESI rate of 5.75 percent, compared to 11.5 percent for diesel taxis.

The Finance Ministry will be joining the Electric Mobility Group to contribute to decisions on tax benefits to promote the new technology.

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

“We are making history: Uruguay approves the regulation of marijuana” reads this poster by an advocacy group that lobbied for state regulation and control of marijuana. Credit: Courtesy Proderechos.

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 12 2014 (IPS)

Uruguay, about to become the first country in the world where the state will fully regulate production, sale and distribution of marijuana, will spend the next few months selecting a good quality strain of the crop that can be sold at a price similar to current illegal prices.

Uruguayan President José Mujica signed law 19.172 on the regulation of marijuana on Dec. 23. But it won’t go into effect until April, 120 days after it was approved by Congress on Dec. 10, and once the government has established specific regulations for the new legislation.

Since the 1970s, consumption and possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use have not been penalised in this South American country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil. But cultivation, sale and distribution of the drug have been illegal up to now.

When the 44-article law enters into force, the entire sector will be under the regulation and oversight of the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis, a new government institution created by the law.

But there is much to do before April. Among the most important steps are to decide the type of marijuana to be planted, who will grow it and at what cost, and what price it will fetch in the pharmacies.

The registries of users and others involved in the different marijuana-related activities also have to be created, as well as the so-called cannabis clubs, to ensure the traceability of the legal strain of marijuana.

Social organisations and activists are studying the best way to produce competitively-priced high-quality marijuana while involving small and medium Uruguayan producers and preventing foreign companies from taking over the activity.

The aim of the law is to “put the availability of marijuana for users in the hands of, or under the control of, the state,” Senator Roberto Conde of the left-wing governing Broad Front told IPS.

“A free market of marijuana or other drugs is not being created here,” Conde explained. “People will have access to marijuana by planting it themselves, in cannabis clubs, or from pharmacies, by presenting their ID card.”

Legal marijuana – up to 40 grams a month (around 40 joints) – will only be available to residents of Uruguay who have signed up for a federal registry.

Individuals will be allowed to grow up to six plants or 480 grams a year.

“That is what is technically estimated as reasonable, to keep someone from falling into problematic use of the drug,” the senator said.

Martín Collazo, with the Proderechos human rights group, said public health will be the area that most benefits from the law. “Eighty-five percent of users of illegal drugs in Uruguay only consume marijuana,” which means the illegal market could shrink by a similar percentage, he argued.

“Contact with the clandestine market facilitates access to other substances, like cocaine or ‘pasta base’ [a cheap cocaine derivative], which are sold in the same places,” said Collazo, who also belongs to the Responsible Regulation coalition, made up of organisations and personalities in favour of the regulation of marijuana.

The price of marijuana to be sold in authorised pharmacies has not yet been set. Collazo estimates that the price per gram should be between 1.00 and 1.50 dollars – the current cost of illegal cannabis.

“There is a big comparative advantage in terms of quality, because illegal marijuana is very bad,” the activist said. But he warned that it can’t be more expensive than on the illegal market, “because there would be a segment of the population that would continue to buy it on the black market.”

Proderechos has been working with agronomists and economists since November, and has formulated production models that confirm that marijuana could be produced in Uruguay at that price.

The Drug Policy Research Centre based in Santa Monica, California says illegal production and sale of drugs is more expensive because of the high costs of security, transport and protection of merchandise.

Collazo believes practice will show to what extent that is true. If marijuana has to be cheap, he said, the quality is likely to be inferior to what is sold in the Netherlands, where the drug is legally sold in special coffee shops.

“But we don’t have to reach that level of quality in the first year,” he said. “This has to be seen as a gradual process of developing the chain of production.”

He explained that the production of one ton of good-quality marijuana could cost around 250,000 dollars – between 0.25 and 0.30 cents per gram – “in a low-tech setting, with one or two harvests a year.”

The expert said that in the current clandestine market, the marijuana comes from Paraguay, and includes “leaves, stems, really bad quality flowers, and additives like ammonia, which are put on the compact bricks to keep them from drying out in transportation.

“Now we’re talking about selling buds,” without leaves or stems, which, “even if they are not big and beautiful are an excellent quality flower,” he said.

“We are generating our own information, with the support of different professionals, and we are coming up with proposals that we will formally present later,” Collazo said.

The aim, he said, “is to generate production schemes that can easily be followed by small and medium producers at a reasonable cost, and that will put marijuana on the market at a price similar to those on the black market.”

There are already people planting marijuana in Uruguay, producing supposedly standardised varieties.

Regarding the possibility of guaranteeing traceability of the drugs circulating in the new regulated market, Collazo suggested “trying to get growers who produce for the pharmacies to always plant the same strains.

“If the growers take the authorised strains and use cuttings from the mother plant, they’ll always have the same crop, genetically,” he said.

That traceability would only be lost when producers introduce new varieties, he added.

Collazo said it would be easy to maintain traceability in sales through pharmacies in the tightly regulated and controlled new market.

But “other solutions would have to be studied for people who grow their own pot, and for the cannabis clubs, because those are much more difficult to control,” he added.

Senator Conde, on the other hand, said it would be easy “because from a scientific point of view, the advances made today are so huge that molecular traceability of the substance is possible, and in Uruguay we have sufficiently developed technology, and whatever we don’t have, we can ask for.

“Instead of setting a price, a fee will be set for users to pay for the public service of making a product that is chemically controlled from every point of view available to users,” he said.

Conde added that whether or not the state will subsidise marijuana in any form “is being debated” in the government.

“This will be decided within the 120 days we have for creating the regulations for the law. I don’t know if a subsidy will be necessary to implement it. If it is, it wouldn’t be an isolated subsidy, but just one more cost in our overall health policy,” he said.

There are between 18,000 and 20,000 habitual consumers of marijuana in Uruguay, and between 79,000 and 100,000 people who use it a few times a month.

Paulina Nuza, Ernestina Ochoa and Petra Ermillo Martínez (left to right) discussing issues raised at the global congress of domestic workers in Montevideo. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

“We have come together to join forces, to be heard, because we want to speak for ourselves,” said Ernestina Ochoa, a Peruvian domestic worker, at the close of the founding congress of the International Domestic Workers Federation in the Uruguayan capital.

Uruguay was chosen to host the Oct. 26-28 meeting because it was the first country to ratify Convention 189 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which establishes basic labour rights that the great majority of domestics around the world do not enjoy. The congress was attended by union leaders from more than 50 countries.

But even in Uruguay or other Latin American countries with ground-breaking national laws aimed at protecting domestic workers, enforcement is a major problem. And in Asia and the Middle East, the situation is much more critical.

“For many years only non-governmental organisations spoke for us, through studies and research…but we domestic employees and our unions have done the day-to-day hard slogging,” said Ochoa, vice president of the International Domestic Workers Network (IDWN), which changed its name to Federation at the congress.

“Now we have said ‘enough’s enough’, let’s found a large federation that unites us, let’s work together to organise ourselves, defend our rights, create unions, improve the laws and help countries where there are no laws, empower domestic workers, train leaders and have a voice vis-à-vis governments and employers,” she said in an interview with IPS.

The IDWN was founded after the first global congress of domestic workers was held in 2006 in Amsterdam. The umbrella organisation, which currently has member unions in 87 countries, was established to fight for the adoption of ILO Convention No.189 on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189), which went into effect in September.

Map of progress made by domestic workers. Credit: Courtesy of Human Rights Watch (click to enlarge)

At that time, Ochoa said, they had no idea how much they would grow. She said it had become necessary to create a federation to achieve independence, especially in negotiations with global institutions.

Progress has been made in many Latin American countries, such as Uruguay. But most countries in the world do not have legislation on domestic workers, the Peruvian trade unionist lamented.

C189 establishes “the first global standards for the more than 50 million domestic workers worldwide – the majority of whom are women and girls, and many of whom are migrants,” says the report “Claiming Rights: Domestic Workers’ Movements and Global Advances for Labour Reform”, presented at the congress in Montevideo.

“According to the ILO, almost 30 percent of the world’s domestic workers are employed in countries where they are completely excluded from national labour laws,” adds the study published jointly by the IDWN, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and Human Rights Watch.

The report says live-in domestic workers, girls and migrants face a heightened risk of abuse. And while child labour declined in other sectors, child domestic labour actually grew by nine percent from 2008 to 2012.

Nisha Varia, senior women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch, said change was slow in Asia and the Middle East.

And she told IPS that while advances have been made in Latin America, the challenge in this region is in translating the new legislation into actual improvements in the lives of domestic workers.

The basic rights established by the C189 include weekly days off, limits to hours of work, a minimum wage, overtime compensation, and social security.

So far, C189 has been ratified by Bolivia, Germany, Guyana, Italy, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa and Uruguay.

The report also notes that the Philippines, as well as Argentina, Brazil, Kenya, Spain and Venezuela, which have not yet ratified the convention, adopted labour reforms that protect domestic workers.

Graciela Espinoza, with the Uruguayan union of domestic workers, STUD, said “we still have to put our house in order,” referring to her country, despite the adoption of a law on domestic labour, the ratification of C189, and three collective bargaining agreements negotiated with employers.

“There have been many improvements,” Espinoza told IPS. “But there are still domestics who are not officially recognised as workers, and until they are, we have to continue fighting.

“The day society as a whole recognises our work as domestic employees will be the day when we can say: we have reached one goal, now we have to move on towards the next.”

The trade unionist said the most significant changes have been seen since 2006, when a law on domestic labour went into effect, and especially in 2008, when the first national collective bargaining agreement was signed. “That was when the revolution happened in Uruguay,” Espinoza said.

The proportion of domestic workers registered in Uruguay’s social security system climbed from 32 percent in 2004 to 66 percent today. And over half of the registered domestics have labour accident insurance.

Her colleague Lucía Gándara said that “even though Uruguay was the first to ratify C189, rights here are violated, including the right to organise,” which protects labour activists from being fired or abused by their employers because of their trade union activity.

“Domestic workers who form part of the STUD secretariat cannot attend meetings if they are held during their working hours, because they are fired,” Gándara said.

As Espinoza explained, “we work in isolation from each other, a situation that works against us as a union; for example we cannot carry out an occupation of a building – we can’t occupy a family’s house – as a protest measure.”

“The most we can do is explain to the employer the rights and duties of domestics, and that’s what we’re doing. In these cases, the domestics sometimes continue working, and in others they’re fired,” she said.

Despite the lingering problems faced by domestics here, Paulina Nuza, a member of Peru’s Training Centre for Domestic Workers (CCTH), told IPS that “Uruguay is a model.”

“Domestic workers in Peru do not earn decent wages and do not have the same conditions as other workers,” she said. “Although there is a gender equality plan that says that 50 percent of the one million domestic workers in the country are to be insured by 2017, not even six percent of us are currently insured.”

Female cannabis plant. Credit: Bokske/CC BY 3.0

By Emilio Godoy and Inés Acosta
MEXICO CITY/MONTEVIDEO, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

In Latin America, where marijuana is the most widely consumed illegal drug, there is basically no home-grown research into its effects and properties. But possible legalisation in Uruguay and the Mexican capital could open the door to new studies.

“We can’t close our eyes to serious research in other parts of the world,” Rodolfo Rodríguez, a scientific researcher at the department of pharmacology in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) medical school, told IPS.

Rodríguez, who has been studying different psychotropic substances for 45 years, is one of six experts making up the Marijuana and Health Group at the National Academy of Medicine who are completing a theoretical study on the medicinal and therapeutic effects of Cannabis sativa.

One of Rodríguez’s interests is to learn about the drug’s effects in patients with chronic or terminal diseases, such as fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, or certain kinds of cancer.

The results of their work, set to come out in October or November, will inform the debate that Mexico City authorities are holding with a view to legalising the medical use of marijuana.

The left-wing city government of Miguel Mancera and the Mexico City legislative assembly are assessing the health, economic and security aspects of legalisation.

“It’s a plant with more than 400 chemical substances and more than 70 cannabinoids,” Rodríguez said. “When it is consumed, the effects aren’t only due to the delta-9 [tetrahydrocannabinol or THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana], but to the combination of all of the chemical compounds.”

Marijuana is mostly grown in the western and southern states of Mexico, largely to supply the lucrative U.S. market. Tens of thousands of small and large farmers and rural workers depend on the illegal crop for a living.

It is used by four million people in this country of 118 million, making it the most widely consumed drug, followed by cocaine, according to the health ministry’s National Addiction Survey 2011.

In Uruguay, far to the south, it is also by far the drug of choice, consumed by slightly over eight percent of the population. But almost all of the marijuana used in the South American country is smuggled in from outside, especially from Paraguay.

Consumption and possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use are not penalised in Uruguay, a country of 3.3 million people sandwiched between Argentina and Brazil.

And the lower house of Congress has approved a draft law that would legalise and put the production, distribution, and sale of marijuana in the hands of the state. It is expected to make it through the Senate shortly and be passed into law, with the votes of the ruling left-wing Broad Front party.

More than 6,000 studies on the properties and effects of cannabis were published in scientific journals from 2010 to 2012, according to NORML, an organisation that advocates the legalisation of marijuana.

Uruguayan biologist Cecilia Scorza, assistant researcher at the Clemente Estable Institute for Biological Research, said “it’s not worth working on something that has been studied for so long, because it would not be original research.

“With marijuana, there can be differences in terms of the quantity of the active ingredient. But it’s always the same ingredient, and the effects are the same too,” she told IPS.

She pointed out that this is not at all the case for the cheap cocaine derivative known in South America as basuco, paco or pasta base, which poses a great potential risk to the user’s health.

The drug’s impact on the region and the lack of scientific research on it have made it a prime focus of studies. “In 2005, we began to research the chemical composition of the drug and its pharmacological effects on the central nervous system,” Scorza said.

But she said it would be original to study the chemical composition of the marijuana that has begun to be produced in Uruguay, “because it would give us a notion of what people will be consuming under the new law.”

Psychologist Gabriela Olivera, a technical adviser to Uruguay’s National Secretariat on Drugs, said research was indispensable to help users stay safe.

The draft law foresees the provision of “information and education that would make it possible, for example, for a person in certain health conditions who consumes marijuana to know that if they use such and such a quantity there is an active ingredient that could provide benefits, but would also have negative consequences,” Olivera told IPS.

To carry out experiments with psychoactive substances, a permit is currently needed from the National Secretariat on Drugs, which only exceptionally makes available a small quantity from drugs that have been confiscated.

“That makes systematised research impossible,” Olivera said.

Once it is passed, the law will create the Institute for the Regulation and Control of Cannabis (IRCCA), whose mission will include advising the government and providing scientific evidence.

The evidence would involve “all aspects, from the chemical composition of the marijuana that will be sold, to the effects on people, depending on its different uses – medicinal or recreational,” Olivera said.

In addition, the Technical Forensic Institute, the Technical Police laboratory, and the Chemistry Faculty of the University of the Republic are designing a research protocol on the potency of THC and other components of the marijuana that is trafficked illegally today, the director of the Uruguayan Observatory on Drugs, Héctor Suárez, told IPS.

Research on the varieties produced and sold legally would be regulated once IRCCA was up and running, he said.

In Mexico City, meanwhile, even if the medicinal use of marijuana is legalised, patients would not start receiving prescriptions overnight, Rodríguez said.

“We are not prepared for that,” the UNAM researcher said. “We have the knowledge and the infrastructure, but it would imply an educational process in health institutions.”

Treatment with marijuana “cannot be within reach of just any doctor, and learning about it can take months or even years,” he added.

May 2013 protest march in downtown Montevideo against large-scale mining. Credit: Inés Acosta/Tierramérica

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 26 2013 (IPS)

A bill that would regulate large-scale mining operations is making its way through Uruguay’s two houses of parliament, despite a lack of political consensus and vocal opposition from environmental organisations and other sectors of civil society.

The proposed legislation, submitted by the executive branch and backed by the ruling Frente Amplio (FA) or Broad Front coalition, declares that large-scale mining would serve the “public interest”. But critics charge that the bill was drafted to serve the interests of the Aratirí project planned by the Indian mining group Zamin Ferrous, aimed at the production of 18 million tons of iron ore annually, with a promised investment of three billion dollars.

Opposition to these plans by environmentalists, farmers and other residents of the areas that would be affected by the mining operations is becoming increasingly louder. In the last demonstration against large-scale mining in Uruguay, held on May 10, more than 10,000 participants marched down 18 de Julio Avenue, the main thoroughfare in downtown Montevideo.

Meanwhile, in a survey conducted by the Radar consulting firm, which asked the question, “Are you in favour of open-pit mining activities in Uruguay, such as the Aratirí project?”, 46 percent of respondents said that they were opposed, 28 percent were in favour, 12 percent had no opinion on the matter, and 14 percent said they knew nothing about the subject.

The Aratirí project would occupy 4,300 hectares and encompass five open-pit mines on 500 hectares, associated logistics facilities, a processing and beneficiation plant, and a 212-km concentrate slurry pipeline to transport the ore to a deepwater export terminal that the company plans to build on the Atlantic coast, in an area where tourism plays a major role in the local economy.

But the entire undertaking, including the “buffer zones”, will take up 14,505 hectares in three departments in central and eastern Uruguay: Durazno, Florida and Treinta y Tres. The project also includes the installation of five new high-voltage power lines to supply power to the mining facilities and the port.

Opposition has also taken the form of proposals and local campaigns to declare the departments of Treinta y Tres and Lavalleja, in eastern Uruguay, and Rivera and Tacuarembó, in the northeast, as “mega mining-free” territories. In Tacuarembó, where there are requests for prospecting permits involving 300,000 hectares of land, activists say they have collected the number of signatures necessary to demand the calling of a referendum, under Uruguayan law.

“Tacuarembó has no tradition of mining. It is a region of very fertile land, with tremendous capacity for producing living things, and it lies over the Guaraní Aquifer. Its natural conditions are much better suited to producing biodiversity,” farmer Daniela Pírez of the Tacuarembó for Life and Water committee, which headed up the collection of signatures, told Tierramérica*.

The new bill, which would modify the current Mining Code, contains “provisions and exceptional benefits that are aimed at enabling the (Aratirí) project,” according to the Movement for a Sustainable Uruguay (Movus).

“This law has a first name and a last name: Aratirí. That’s where the whole thing started, regardless of whether there may be other mining projects,” Senator Sergio Abreu of the opposition National Party told Tierramérica.

Frente Amplio senator and former minister of industry Daniel Martínez denied the accusation. The proposed law “was conceived in the framework of large-scale mining in general, because there are many projects coming into Uruguay, and the idea was to have a special law that would demand greater environmental protection measures and ensure more resources for the state,” he told Tierramérica.

For the moment, however, the other mining projects in the country are one tenth the size of Aratirí, according to the Uruguayan Chamber of the Mining Industry.

The Aratirí project will represent the biggest foreign direct investment in the country’s history. According to the company, its implementation will generate gross value added of around 1.5% of GDP throughout the 20 years of its life cycle and 1.4 billion dollars in exports annually.

The company also claims that it will create 1,500 direct jobs, 10,500 indirect jobs and between 3,000 and 4,000 jobs during construction.

With regard to taxation, the bill expressly establishes that mining and related activities will not be eligible for the application of promotional tax regimes that grant corporate income tax (IRAE) exemptions.

But it does allow the application of exemptions for various other taxes, as established in the law on investments, which could add up to between 700 million and one billion dollars for the Aratirí project.

The bill also stipulates that prospecting, exploration and environmental assessment costs incurred prior to the concession, which are directly linked to the large-scale mining project covered by the respective contract, can be shown as losses in the first business year in which production begins or amortised on a fixed instalment basis over a five-year period.

Martínez believes that the new bill establishes “a very significant increase in the tax burden,” although “this project has exemptions which may or may not be debatable. Any investment in the country has exemptions for the value-added tax on imports and the IRAE.”

Another controversial aspect is the plan for the closure of the mines. As far as Movus is concerned, no precise limits have been set. Moreover, “Aratirí told the Senate committee that its plan is for these enormous craters to be filled with rainwater over a period of 80 years.”

“Uruguay Natural” or Natural Uruguay, the “brand” used to promote the country abroad as a tourism destination, does not seem compatible with large-scale mining activity.

Martínez, however, stressed that “there are people who confuse Natural Uruguay with an agrarian country, a country of poverty and exploitation, and there is nothing that contaminates more than poverty. Either we diversify productive activities and pursue advances in sectors with higher technology and value added, or we will be a poor country forever.”

Journalist Víctor Bacchetta, of Movus, does not believe that this small South American country has the potential to be a “mega mining” nation.

“Uruguay is poor in mineral resources. It does not have the huge reserves of countries like Chile or Peru. Aratirí is proposing 12 years of extraction activities, according to what can be gathered from its Environmental and Social Impact Assessment, and after that it will all be over,” Bacchetta told Tierramérica.

“This makes the project even more absurd for Uruguay, because it is a country with a privileged ecosystem in terms of its fertile land and water resources, which are not found in the (Andes) mountains, where nothing else can be done,” he added.

The government has still not approved the environmental impact assessment for the project. The company has also said that it will wait for the final outcome of the legal text before signing a contract with the government to initiate operations.

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

Excerpt:

Students at Public School 124 in Melilla lining up to buy snacks during recess. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Oct 10 2012 (IPS)

Uruguayan schoolchildren are learning that cookies, candy, potato chips and soft drinks are bad for their health.

Some schools have taken the initiative and banned junk food from school snacks.

The authorities announced a ban on unhealthy food in schools but have not yet enforced it.

In the meantime, a bill presented by the opposition to prohibit the promotion and advertising of junk food on school premises was passed by the Chamber of Deputies on Sep. 11 and is expected to be approved by the Senate as well.

“We can’t bring chips and those kinds of things to school anymore, and that’s really good, because we’re children and if we eat a lot of junk food we could get a disease now or when we’re older,” declared Luciano, a student at Public School 124 in Rincón de Melilla, an area of vineyards and orchards in northwest Montevideo.

“Sometimes I get a craving for that kind of stuff, and sometimes on Sunday we go to the store and buy chips,” he confessed.

At Luciano’s school there is no privately run canteen, which means children bring their snacks from home. The school actively promotes healthy eating by prohibiting junk food, a ban that has been in effect since last year, principal Teresa Conti told Tierramérica*.

“At first we ran into some resistance from the parents, but eventually they and the children got used to not sending packaged treats. They had to accept it, because it’s now a school rule,” she explained.

“It’s much easier for parents to buy a bag of potato chips or a package of cookies, but this habit has been changed, especially since the teachers have been teaching about and promoting healthier ways of eating,” she added.

For the last several months, students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grade have been bringing in food made at home and selling it to raise funds for end-of-year trips.

Luisa, a sixth-grade student, explained that the homemade snacks they offer for sale include meat pies, cheese bread and loaf cakes, as well as fruit. “Everything gets sold,” she said while serving food at the canteen, where there was almost nothing left to buy.

In February, Óscar Gómez, who was then the director of the Board of Early and Primary Education and is now an undersecretary at the Ministry of Education and Culture, announced that the sale of unhealthy food would be banned in schools.

“The idea was that we shouldn’t act as agents for the promotion of bad habits,” Gómez told Tierramérica. The initiative, which was supposed to go into effect mid-year, was being pushed forward in line with a bill in the works since 2011, he added.

“But it was interrupted, because I moved to the ministry,” said Gómez. For now, the public education authorities are offering awareness raising and training sessions for school staff and supporting initiatives undertaken by individual schools to promote healthy eating, he said.

The head of the School Food Program at the Board of Early and Primary Education, Graciela Moizo, told Tierramérica that efforts are being focused on “an educational approach.”

“Education needs to be adapted to the social reality, which is the fact that children are being constantly bombarded with advertising for certain products,” she said. “Without a strong educational counter-response that helps children understand the things that are harmful, it would be very difficult to achieve healthy eating habits,” she stressed.

Moizo said that visits to primary schools demonstrate that there is very little unhealthy food.

There are normally no canteens in public schools, said Moizo. The few that do exist “are organised by the children or school cooperatives to raise funds for a specific purpose, and usually sell homemade food.”

“The problem with snacks is the food sold outside the schools,” she said.

In the meantime, through the School Food Program, the government provides food assistance to 67 percent of public school students, ranging from a lunch, breakfast or snack to four daily meals.

Of the 248, 590 students served daily, around 24,000 receive food purchased from outsourced companies. The rest are served food prepared in the kitchens of traditional school cafeterias, explained nutritionist Caren Zelmonovich.

According to Gómez, the vast majority of private schools have privately operated canteens. “This is where we see the highest rates of consumption of junk food, because it is also where there is greater buying power,” he commented.

Julieta, a student at the Santa Elena Institute of Education, a private Catholic school in Ciudad de la Costa, which borders on Montevideo to the east, told Tierramérica that healthy eating is discussed in her class.

“We interviewed some of the kids at the school, and most of them said they ate packaged food, but also some healthy food, and that they mostly drank water. A lot of the food in the canteen is healthy and homemade,” she said.

It is better not to eat unhealthy things at school, she admitted, but “every now and then you might get a craving for junk food, because it’s yummy… at least once a week.”

If Uruguay adopts a law, the rules and incentives would be the same for everyone.

The proposed Law on Healthy Eating in Educational Centres is aimed at protecting the health of children and adolescents in both public and private schools, but without prohibiting the sale of any products.

According to figures gathered by the sponsor of the bill, Javier García, a doctor and a member of the Chamber of Deputies from the opposition National Party, “70 percent of deaths in Uruguay are the result of chronic non-communicable diseases… basically cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases and cancer,” in which unhealthy habits are a major factor.

One quarter of children in Uruguay are overweight or obese.

García told Tierramérica that the bill “prohibits the promotion or advertising of harmful foods in school canteens,” but does not ban their sale.

“I opted for this educational route because, otherwise, the discussion was going to be much longer,” he said. In his opinion, the educational community will become involved and eventually “the sales margin of these projects will become smaller and smaller until they are no longer sold.”

The proposed law tasks the Ministry of Public Health with providing information to be disseminated in the educational community, including a list of unhealthy foods, such as those with high fat, sugar and salt contents.

The bill is expected to be passed by the Senate during the current session and to enter into effect in March 2013, when the new school year begins.

* 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:

Wind farm in Sierra de los Caracoles, in the department of Maldonado, southeast Uruguay. Credit: Courtesy of UTE

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Aug 28 2012 (IPS)

Uruguay needs to reinforce and expand its electric power grid to absorb the 1,200 megawatts of wind energy that it plans to generate by 2015.

This wind power target forms part of a larger goal for the same year: to generate half of the energy consumed in the country from renewable sources.

Investment in the production of wind energy is undergoing a major boom. And as a result, the state-owned electric power company, UTE, is faced with the need to improve Uruguay’s power transmission infrastructure.

At the moment, wind energy contributes only one percent of the small South American nation’s electricity, with three wind farms that generate a total of 43 megawatts in the southeast: one publicly owned farm in the department (province) of Maldonado and two privately owned facilities in the department of Rocha.

When the 1,200 megawatt target is met, wind energy will account for 29 percent of the electricity supply, UTE chairman Gonzalo Casaravilla told Tierramérica*.

Six contracts have already been signed and 12 more will be signed soon for the generation of 930 megawatts in facilities to be installed over the next few years, reported Casaravilla.

These ambitious plans encompass 21 new wind farms in 11 departments in the northwest, west, centre, south and southeast of the country.

According to Casaravilla, construction of these new facilities will begin at the end of the year and be completed in 12 to 18 months. In addition, UTE plans to generate another 180 megawatts through an agreement with the Brazilian state-owned electric power company, Eletrobras.

While the entire country offers good wind energy potential, the density of its electricity grid is not as homogeneous.

“The grid was designed many years ago to take electricity to where the people are, not to bring electricity from those places,” explained the director of the National Energy Office at the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining (MIEM), Ramón Méndez.

Uruguay has the highest rate of electrification among all the countries of Latin America, with 98.8 percent service coverage. But with a population of just under 3.3 million people and almost half of them concentrated in the capital, Montevideo, there are large stretches of very sparsely populated areas. In these areas, “the electric power lines are designed solely to satisfy the needs of those few customers,” said Méndez.

And when big wind farms are installed, “much longer lines are needed to connect to a sufficiently powerful first node to discharge all of that energy,” he added.

This means that the ideal wind energy project is one that is located “in a place where there are good winds and good electric grid infrastructure at the same time.”

This has turned out to be the main challenge. “In the beginning it was easy because there was room everywhere, but as distributed generation gradually became denser, it became more difficult to select appropriate locations,” explained Casaravilla.

Two of the 18 wind farm projects proposed and approved faced difficulties in connecting to existing networks in the sites originally chosen, in the departments of Tacuarembó and Florida. But both were relocated to areas with better connections, he noted.
“We have managed to find locations for all of the projects for which bids were presented in the tender held by UTE. There were really very few places remaining with leftover capacity,” he added.

As a result, UTE plans to develop the power grid infrastructure needed for the installation of new wind energy facilities in the next ten years. “We have plans to expand the grid in the north, to make it possible to continue incorporating distributed generation in accordance with the demand,” said Casaravilla. Over the next five years, around one billion dollars will be invested in power lines and substations.

Right now, however, six companies want to build eight wind farms in Pueblo Peralta, in the northern department of Tacuarembó. This would involve a total investment of 20 million dollars, which would allow for the generation of 300 megawatts in an area “with excellent wind potential,” Ricardo Pretz, the director of one of the companies, PTZ Bioenergía Uruguay, told Tierramérica.

The winds in this site “will make it possible to install wind turbines with much longer blades, to produce more energy. The result will be much more profitable projects, allowing UTE to buy the electricity at lower prices,” argued Pretz, whose company forms part of the Brazilian group PTZ Bioenergy.

Unfortunately, in this particular area of the country “there are no possibilities of connection to the grid, because the closest substation is saturated,” he said. The companies are determined to stick with this location, however, and have met with Casaravilla and Energy Minister Roberto Kreimerman for this purpose.

Casaravilla said that “today we cannot offer a solution, because we need to see how the contracts already signed develop.” The country will need to continue installing wind farms after 2015 “and we will have to study the best way to do it,” he added.

Méndez does not believe that the current limitations of the power grid have dampened private sector interest in wind energy, which he described as “enormous”. “During this term of government alone (which began in 2010) we have surpassed 6.5 billion dollars in investment.”

For each tender held, around 20 projects have been proposed through various international companies. “Contracts are negotiated for periods of 20 years, and thanks to this boom in the market, we have managed to obtain very good prices, 50 percent below average prices in Europe,” he said.

This results in costs of “around 60 dollars per megawatt-hour, with no subsidies of any kind, which is a key issue,” he stressed. These investments will make it possible to reduce the country’s electricity costs by an estimated 30 percent by 2015, he added.

Uruguay’s current energy policy was adopted in 2008 for the next 25 years; in 2010 it was endorsed by all of the country’s political parties.

The changes began in the electricity sector with the first incorporations of wind energy (in 2008 there was a single turbine) and the large-scale incorporation of biomass, said Méndez.

“In a short time we achieved very significant change, given that we ended last year with a 46 percent share of renewable sources in the energy mix as a whole,” he reported.

Hydroelectricity accounts for 20 percent, waste biomass represents 12 percent, firewood makes up another 12 percent, and the remaining two percent is contributed by biofuels, solar power and wind energy.

Achieving a 50 percent share of renewable sources by 2015 is an “extremely ambitious” target, said Méndez, since renewable energies currently account for less than 12 percent of the global energy mix.

The development of renewable energy is key for a country that has no hydrocarbon production and depends on imported crude oil for its fuel supply. In this area as well, however, there are an increasing number of international companies exploring for oil and natural gas in different geological formations in Uruguay.

* 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.

A boy and his mother watch through glass as a green sea turtle receives treatment at the Karumbé rehabilitation center. Credit: Victoria Rodríguez/IPS

By Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Jul 24 2012 (IPS)

A record number of sea turtles are turning up on Uruguayan beaches along the Atlantic Ocean and Río de la Plata this Southern hemisphere winter, suffering from cold shock and hypothermia.

While specialists are still investigating the causes, they speculate that an abrupt change in sea temperature may have prevented the green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) from migrating to warmer waters.

At press time, close to 100 turtles found on the beaches of Uruguay’s southern and eastern coast had been taken to marine rescue centers.

The green sea turtle, classified as an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), normally grows and develops on the coasts of Uruguay and then migrates to Brazil in the winter in search of warmer waters.

The turtles are commonly spotted on the rocky points along the Atlantic coast in the departments (provinces) of Rocha and Maldonado, although they can also be found on the beaches along the Rio de La Plata or River Plate, a wide estuary that flows into the sea.

Adult specimens can grow to up to a meter and a half in length and weigh up to 500 kilograms. But the green sea turtles that visit the coasts of Uruguay are juveniles, measuring around 40 centimeters in length.

“There have been records in the past of beached turtles due to cold winter temperatures, but the average was around 10 turtles during the entire winter,” Andrés Estrades, a specialist at the Karumbé sea turtle center, told Tierramérica *. “We had never reached such a high number before, and the cold weather has only just begun.”

Karumbé (which means turtle in the Guaraní indigenous language) was born in 1999 as an initiative undertaken by a group of young researchers, students, biologists and veterinarians, aimed at the conservation of Uruguay’s marine species, with a special emphasis on the study of turtles.

A Karumbé turtle rehabilitation center and a small museum are located on the grounds of the Villa Dolores Zoo in Montevideo.

So far this winter, the center has taken in 32 rescued turtles, young specimens between the ages of two and 12 years and weighing between four and 15 kilograms, said Estrades. A team of Karumbé volunteers is working hard to diagnose their condition and help them to recover.

The rest of the roughly 100 rescued turtles have been distributed among similar centers in Rocha and Maldonado, and around 20 have been discovered dead.

According to Karumbé, an average of 120 sea turtles are found beached in Uruguay every year. Half of them have swallowed plastic objects, 15 percent have become entangled in garbage or fishing nets, another 15 percent are suffering from cold shock, and the remainder are victims of different diseases.

Karumbé has launched an information and awareness campaign on Facebook, in order to explain to the public what they should do if they find a sea turtle stranded on the beach. The main recommendations are to not return the turtles to the water, to keep them warm with blankets or warm water, and to contact the specialists.

On Jul. 16, 50 specimens had appeared in a period of just three days. At the Karumbé center in Montevideo, two foreign students were working as volunteers alongside veterinarian Virginia Ferrando to treat them.

The pools and tanks could not hold the large number of turtles arriving, and the heaters were also unable to keep the water temperature high enough. Visitors to the zoo – of whom there were many, since it was the second week of school vacation – were met with the surprise of a rehabilitation center full of action and overflowing with turtles.

Two youngsters who had come to deliver a rescued turtle observed the process: first the turtle was placed in a pool of warm water, and then it was examined in order to make a diagnosis.

“Some of them are already doing quite well and with a bit of liquid feed and heat they can fully recover,” Ferrando told Tierramérica. The turtles are also being studied to determine if they had contracted some sort of disease before they were beached.

“Most of them appear to be in good physical condition. We have 32 at the center, and half of them are floating, which means they have some other problem, like pneumonia, a viral infection or plastic in their intestines. We are assessing them, and this will require more work,” said Estrades.

The turtles will have to remain at Karumbé until spring, when the weather conditions are adequate for them to be released back into the sea.

“Every turtle we release is an event. We would like to acquire some satellite monitoring equipment to see if we are doing things right,” he added.

Karumbé, which is represented on the board of directors of the International Sea Turtle Society, is participating in a doctoral thesis study through an agreement with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Gustavo Martinez, a Brazilian researcher, is studying the year-round permanence and seasonal migration of sea turtles on the Uruguayan coasts and their movements to Brazil.

“Many of them migrate, but others stay,” explained Estrades.

One hypothesis regarding the large number of beached turtles this year is that the specimens that had travelled farther inland along the Río de Plata did not make it back to the ocean in time, “and when the water temperature dropped suddenly, they went into cold shock,” he said.

The sea water temperature is currently 10 degrees. While this is not a record low temperature, it is below the average for this time of year, which is 12 degrees. According to Estrades, this difference could be fatal for some turtles.

“We are seeing changing trends in maximum and minimum temperatures, possibly due to climate change. We had a rather warm autumn, and winter arrived very suddenly. This might have disoriented the turtles,” he said.

The specialists have also observed “a sort of tropicalization of the Uruguayan coast: the water is becoming increasingly warmer, and animals that are unusual for this region are appearing.” One example is the hawksbill sea turtle, for which there were no previous records of sightings in Uruguayan waters.

The hawksbill sea turtle commonly inhabits the warmer waters off the coast of Brazil, but in 2007, a specimen turned up in Uruguay, followed by a number of others in the following years. In 2011, six of them were found, “all of them very weak and full of plastic,” said Estrades.

* 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.

By - - and Inés Acosta
MONTEVIDEO, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Excerpt:

Uruguay took a giant step towards more democratic media when it passed a law on community radio broadcasting in 2007. But although regulations for the law were approved in late 2010, many broadcasters are now off the air and waiting to be assigned a frequency.

Community radio operator at La Cotorra. Credit: Courtesy of La Cotorra FM

Law 18.232 on Community Radio Broadcasting Service, promoted by civil society organisations, “is innovative and is regarded as one of the best of its kind,” Gabriel Kaplún, head of the degree course in communication sciences at the state University of the Republic, told IPS.

“It establishes a community radio broadcasting sector which is assigned one-third of the radio spectrum in every frequency band,” he said. A draft decree on digital television being prepared by the government also “reserves one-third for community broadcasters.”

Martín Prats, head of the Honorary Advisory Council for Community Radio Broadcasting (CHARC) as the representative of the Ministry of Industry, told IPS the law “establishes a transparent process for assigning frequencies in different parts of the country, which is the stage we are at. It is a process that has just begun; the results will be more visible next year.”

Based on the law, a census was carried out in 2008 to assign frequencies to community radio stations that were already on the air. A total of 413 projects applied, but only 92 of them met the legal requirements.

This process ended in 2010, and it was only in 2011 that calls were opened for applications in different parts of the country to assign frequencies to radio stations that had not necessarily been on the air before.

Stations that apply – on the understanding they must not broadcast until they have been approved by the competent authorities – are scrutinised by CHARC, after which public consultations are held. If selected, they must wait to be assigned a frequency.

So far, calls for applications have been issued in five of the country’s 19 provinces, and the most headway has been made in Durazno, in the centre, Flores in the southwest and Lavalleja, in the southeast. In these provinces public hearings have already been held, and the stations are awaiting the assignment of frequencies.

“The plan is to finish the application process throughout the country this year. It’s a very gradual process,” said Prats. Only one frequency is made available in each geographic location, which “to a certain extent limits the aspirations of applicants,” but the political goal is “to regulate use of the spectrum.”

In 2013, “when the spectrum has been regulated, further calls for applications will be issued,” he said.

In March, public hearings will be held in the eastern provinces of Treinta y Tres and Cerro Largo.

José Imaz, of the Coalition for Democratic Communication and a member of the La Cotorra FM radio station in the Cerro neighbourhood of Montevideo, told IPS that “the law has set some very important precedents in terms of the democratisation of speech, which have been taken up in various decrees.”

But implementation of the application procedure “is excessively slow, and a major hurdle for future calls.”

Prats acknowledged there were administrative difficulties. “CHARC is an honorary body,” and therefore suffers from a “lack of resources,” he said.

Mega FM, a radio station in Vergara, a town of 4,000 people in the province of Treinta y Tres, had been broadcasting since 2008, one of the station’s members, Cristián Rodríguez, told IPS.

Two other community radio stations were also operating in Vergara. They all applied for frequency assignment and are awaiting a public hearing in March. “All three stations have shut down, they are all off the air,” Rodríguez said.

But “local people miss them, because Vergara is a small town and is accustomed to relying on the community radio stations,” he complained.

While it is unable to broadcast, Mega FM is posting on its web site videos of music concerts, sports events and other local activities on YouTube.

It is noteworthy that the Uruguayan law does not stipulate power limits for the frequencies, Kaplún said. “The limits will be set according to need and advisability.”

However, putting this guideline into practice raises difficulties. “The frequencies assigned in the first round are short range. Use of a 30-metre antenna and a power of 30 watts were established as general principles.”

In rural areas, where more wave bands are available and higher power is needed, “this general rule for frequency concession does not seem reasonable,” Kaplún said.

In contrast, in the capital city it is not easy to assign new frequencies on a spectrum that is overcrowded with private and public radio stations. “The spectrum should be redistributed, but this option was not chosen; instead, gaps in the spectrum are being used so as not to displace commercial and public broadcasters. This is untenable,” said Kaplún.

In Imaz’s view, the state should promote community radio stations and provide “economic aid for their installation, as well as distributing official advertising more widely to include community stations as well as commercial broadcasters.”

Prats said that in order to achieve “better implementation of the law, more economic and administrative resources should be allocated to CHARC.”

In future, he said, community radio stations “face a challenge: to be committed to playing a role in and for the community, without broadcasting political or religious propaganda.”

* This article was produced with the support of UNESCO. (END)

The government of the Uruguayan capital plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the solid waste produced by its 1.3 million inhabitants, through a project set to enter into operation in March. The carbon credits generated will be purchased by the World Bank.

Trucks unloading trash at the Felipe Cardoso Final Waste Disposal Site, Montevideo. Credit: Inés Acosta/IPS

The Landfill Gas Recovery Project being undertaken by the Intendencia de Montevideo (IM), the city government, encompasses the design, construction, operation and monitoring of a plant for the capture, extraction, treatment and burning of methane gas released by a municipal urban waste landfill.

“Work on the plant should be completed in March, and the company responsible, Aborgama SA, will operate and monitor the system for a year, during which time we will determine whether it is performing up to its expected capacity,” Jorge Alsina, the technical coordinator of the IM Department of Environmental Development, told Tierramérica.

Around 2,200 tons of solid waste are dumped daily at the Felipe Cardoso Final Waste Disposal Site, a vast area with numerous treatment plants located in the southeastern Montevideo neighborhood of Malvín. An endless stream of garbage trucks drive around the site clearing a path through thousands of seagulls scavenging for food.

The waste is then compacted and buried with special machinery, which implies the constant growth of the landfill.

The green mountain

Two processing plants at the Felipe Cardoso complex were permanently shut down in the late 1990s because they had reached their full capacity, leading to the creation of what is now a sort of “green mountain” 40 metres in height.

This mountain of waste gives off methane gas, which is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide (CO2) released by the burning of fossil fuels, according to specialists on the subject.

“The methane gas is captured through a system of wells constructed on the site, and is then extracted and transported through a series of pipes where it is subsequently cleaned and burned,” Manuel Luengo, senior specialist at the World Bank Carbon Finance Unit, explained to Tierramérica.

When the methane is burned, CO2 is released into the atmosphere, but since it has a less harmful greenhouse effect, the environmental impact and contribution to climate change is reduced.

For his part, Juan Canessa, director of Environmental Development at the IM, told Tierramérica that “solid waste is the second leading source of emissions (of greenhouse gases in Montevideo) after electricity generation.”

“The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) project agreement signed between the IM and the World Bank is aimed at reducing the greenhouse effect produced by the release of this gas,” said Luengo.

Under the terms of the agreement, the World Bank will purchase 377,500 carbon equivalent credits, which is 50 percent of the projected value of the emission reductions that the IM will achieve when it extracts and burns the methane gas during the 2012-2017 period.

Luengo added that the agreement also includes “the option to purchase the remaining 50 percent if the estimated amount is produced, although historically in CDM landfill projects the generation of credits has been less than foreseen.”

However, if 100 percent of the credits stipulated are produced, “the World Bank would be interested in purchasing them,” he said.

Alsina explained that each ton of CO2 equivalent that is prevented from being released into the atmosphere generates one carbon credit. The price of these credits could drop by the end of the year due to the uncertainty looming over the market in the absence of an international agreement on climate change.

There is also the possibility of generating electricity with the captured methane, although, according to Canessa, a concrete agreement in this regard has yet to be reached, and it will partly depend on the amount of gas that is successfully captured.

Sorting and recycling

The IM is currently working on a number of other projects to improve waste management. This month construction will begin on a treatment plant for the liquid waste resulting from the leaching process, at a cost of 75 million pesos, Canessa reported.

A plant is also being constructed for the disposal of hazardous industrial waste, financed and managed by the Uruguayan Chamber of Industry, and another for public works waste, which cannot be compacted and is not biodegradable.

But these advances are not enough to ease the concerns of city authorities, who are worried by the limited space left for the continued growth of the sanitary landfill at the Felipe Cardoso site. Alsina estimates that there will be room to continue processing waste until 2018.

Canessa, however, is confident that the IM will be able to reduce the volume of solid waste transported to the municipal dump through the sorting and separation of trash in households to facilitate recycling.

At the Felipe Cardoso disposal site there is a cooperative of waste sorters who carry out this task. Every day they process the contents of between 10 and 14 garbage trucks, according to Richard Rodríguez, president of the Felipe Cardoso Cooperative (COFECA).

“There are mountains of garbage that we have to dig through by hand, because of the lack of infrastructure and machinery,” Rodríguez told Tierramérica. “All we have is the manpower and the desire to progress. We are warriors against pollution,” declared the leader of the cooperative created five years ago, now made up of some 60 members.

When questioned by Tierramérica about the social impact of the Landfill Gas Recovery Project, Ricardo Schusterman, a consultant and social specialist for the CDM project, maintained that “in all projects financed by the World Bank, we verify that actions to be undertaken will not lead to negative social impacts or, failing that, the impacts will be minimised and compensated.”

“I understand that COFECA is facing difficulties in its organisation as a cooperative, and as a result the IM has not disbursed the financial assistance that had been allocated to it to improve working conditions,” he explained.

According to Schusterman, “the World Bank will continue supervising the strengthening of COFECA by the IM in order for its members to benefit from improvements in working conditions,” as well as to meet the IM’s own goal of reducing the amount of solid waste buried in the landfill.

*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.

Unregulated population growth along Uruguay’s southern coast has hurt the Río de la Plata (River Plate) along an extensive stretch where the freshwater mixes with the Atlantic’s salty seas, warn scientists.

Coastal degradation hurts fish and fisherfolk alike. Credit: Inés Acosta/IPS

“The coastal zone and the flows of freshwater are extremely important ecosystems, where actions directly affect the marine ecological conditions, and vice versa,” Omar Defeo, a professor with the marine science development unit at the public University of the Republic, told Tierramérica.

Defeo said that in places like Costa de Oro, in the Uruguayan department (province) of Canelones, “there are bird breeding and feeding areas, and a great deal of socioeconomic activity… They are ecosystems that are in a dynamic balance with the ocean, where there are different sources of interchange.”

The population of Ciudad de la Costa, adjoining Montevideo, shot up 93 percent in the 1990s — the largest demographic growth in Latin America in that period. It is now home to 120,000 people.

That expansion was not accompanied by urban planning or sanitation infrastructure, which had a dramatic effect on the coastal strip, say experts. However, they recognise that plans are emerging — with assistance from multilateral agencies — that can help mitigate the damages.

Biologist Pablo Muniz, assistant professor of oceanology at the University of the Republic, told Tierramérica that if those ecosystems are altered, “there is nothing left from the biological perspective, and because it affects the freshwater that flows into the Río de la Plata, that has negative repercussions in the Atlantic.”

The marine environment, which includes oceans, seas and coastal areas, is an essential component for sustaining life and is a valuable resource for sustainable development — a notion highlighted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit.

In Uruguay, the importance of marine ecosystems is well known, and experts are concerned about the deterioration that persists along the more than 700 kilometres of coastline along the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic, where more than 70 percent of the country’s 3.3 million inhabitants live.

Fishing, tourism, shipping and industry are concentrated along that strip, accounting for 75 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the report GEO 2008: Assessment of the State of the Environment in Uruguay, of which Defeo was a co-author.

The biggest problems are changes in habitat from contaminating agents, erosion, extraction of sand, and the interference in the natural movement of sediments, states the report, produced for the UN Environment Programme and the Ministry of Housing and Environment, with the support of other agencies.

The shrinking beaches have resulted in destroyed houses and streets in many of the towns along the coast, while others suffer the opposite problem — sedimentation — with sand dunes invading residential areas.

The disappearance of Ciudad de la Costa’s beaches is the result of poor management of rainwater runoff, which flows directly into the sea. In the past, it was channelled naturally into the wetlands, which have disappeared as a result of unregulated urbanisation.

Scientific studies show that contamination — from organic materials and heavy metals — is also a problem in other critical areas, such as the Santa Lucía and Pando rivers flowing through the Montevideo metropolitan area, which includes the neighbouring departments of Canelones and San José.

Another victim is the Bay of Montevideo, although actions by local authorities have been successful in reducing the volume of contaminants discharged into it by the Miguelete river, which crosses the capital.

Biologist Muniz said that today, 10 years after a university study carried out at the behest of the city government, the discharge of lead and chromium has decreased 90 percent. That reduction is evident in the improved aquatic environment, he said.

Along the banks of the Miguelete and Pantanoso rivers in Montevideo, “there were leather tanneries that discharged their chromium-based chemicals… shipping traffic in the port of Montevideo” and other industries contributing to the contamination, explained Muniz, who was part of the research team.

But in recent years, “there has been an intensification of environmental laws and controls on industry dumping, as well as a reduction in tanneries and improvements in water treatment,” he said.

Defeo, meanwhile, warned that the freshwater sources and the coastal zone of southern Uruguay are still compromised.

“We have to generate integrated management strategies for the coast that include the various factors affecting them. The issue needs the presence of the government and the creation of long-term policies,” he said.

José Luis Genta, national director of water and sanitation, told Tierramérica that greater effort is being made to improve environmental regulation of the Río de la Plata.

He cited the example of the joint effort with Argentina in the Río de la Plata Environmental Protection Project, to reduce pollution and restore wildlife habitats.

However, environmental director Jorge Rucks acknowledged in a conversation with Tierramérica that stronger coastal management is needed.

“Integrated management of the relationship between the sea and the coast, affected by the development of human activities, has not be regulated to the extent necessary,” he said, “It is a policy we are now trying to develop.”

(*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.)

The waters of the Río de la Plata (River Plate) estuary flowing into the Atlantic Ocean suffer the effects of poor management along the Uruguayan coast, though there are some signs of improvement.

Coastal degradation hurts fish and fisherfolk. - Inés Acosta/IPS

“The coastal zone and the flows of freshwater are extremely important ecosystems, where actions directly affect the marine ecological conditions, and vice versa,” Omar Defeo, a professor with the marine science development unit at the public University of the Republic, told Tierramérica.

Defeo said that in places like Costa de Oro, in the Uruguayan department (province) of Canelones, “there are bird breeding and feeding areas, and a great deal of socioeconomic activity… They are ecosystems that are in a dynamic balance with the ocean, where there are different sources of interchange.”

The population of Ciudad de la Costa, adjoining Montevideo, shot up 93 percent in the 1990s — the largest demographic growth in Latin America in that period. It is now home to 120,000 people.

That expansion was not accompanied by urban planning or sanitation infrastructure, which had a dramatic effect on the coastal strip, say experts. However, they recognize that plans are emerging — with assistance from multilateral agencies — that can reverse the situation.

Biologist Pablo Muniz, assistant professor of oceanology at the University of the Republic, told Tierramérica that if those ecosystems are altered, “there is nothing left from the biological perspective, and because it affects the freshwater that flows into the Río de la Plata, that has negative repercussions in the Atlantic.”

The marine environment, which includes oceans, seas and coastal areas, is an essential component for sustaining life and is a valuable resource for sustainable development — a notion highlighted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, known as the Earth Summit.

In Uruguay, the importance of marine ecosystems is well known, and experts are concerned about the deterioration that persists along the more than 700 kilometers of coastline along the Río de la Plata and the Atlantic, where more than 70 percent of the country's 3.3 million inhabitants live.

Fishing, tourism, shipping and industry are concentrated along that strip, accounting for 75 percent of the country's gross domestic product, according to the report GEO 2008: Assessment of the State of the Environment in Uruguay, of which Defeo was a co-author.

The biggest problems are changes in habitat from contaminating agents, erosion, extraction of sand, and the interference in the natural movement of sediments, states the report, produced for the UN Environment Program and the Ministry of Housing and Environment, with the support of other agencies.

The shrinking beaches have resulted in destroyed houses and streets in many of the towns along the coast, while others suffer the opposite problem — sedimentation — with sand dunes invading residential areas.

The disappearance of Ciudad de la Costa's beaches is the result of poor management of rainwater runoff, which flows directly into the river. In the past, it was channeled naturally into the wetlands, which have disappeared as a result of unregulated urbanization.

Scientific studies show that contamination is also a problem in other critical areas as a result of organic materials and heavy metals, such as the Santa Lucía and Pando rivers, which flow through the Montevideo metropolitan area, which includes the neighboring departments of Canelones and San José.

Another victim is the Bay of Montevideo, although actions by local authorities have been successful in reducing the volume of contaminants discharged into it by the Miguelete river, which crosses the capital.

Biologist Muniz said that today, 10 years after a university study carried out at the behest of the city government, the discharge of lead and chromium has decreased 90 percent. That reduction is evident in the improved aquatic environment, he said.

Along the banks of the Miguelete and Pantanoso rivers in Montevideo, “there were tanneries that discharged their chromium-based chemicals… shipping traffic in the port of Montevideo” and other industries contributing to the contamination, explained Muniz, who was part of the research team.

But in recent years, “there has been an intensification of environmental laws and controls on industry dumping, as well as a reduction in tanneries and improvements in water treatment,” he said.

Defeo, meanwhile, warned that the freshwater sources and the coastal zone of southern Uruguay are still compromised.

“We have to generate integrated management strategies for the coast that include the various factors affecting them. The issue needs the presence of the government and the creation of long-term policies,” he said.

José Luis Genta, national director of water and sanitation, told Tierramérica that greater effort is being made to improve environmental regulation of the Río de la Plata.

He cited the example of the joint effort with Argentina in the Río de la Plata Environmental Protection Project, to reduce pollution and restore wildlife habitats.

However, environmental director Jorge Rucks acknowledged in a conversation with Tierramérica that stronger coastal management is needed.

“Integrated management of the relationship between the sea and the coast, affected by the development of human activities, has not be regulated to the extent that we should have done so,” he said, “It is a policy we are now trying to develop.”

Water-borne diseases and illness related to natural disasters are on the agenda for plans of officials and civil society to help the precarious settlements in the outskirts of the metropolitan area of Montevideo and in other Uruguayan cities.

Flood victims in Mercedes, Uruguay trying to salvage what they can. Credit: Inés Acosta/IPS

Studies indicate that these poor neighbourhoods, many in low lying zones, are the most exposed to diseases resulting from flooding and other weather events that are occurring with greater frequency and intensity as a result of climate change.

Training the residents is essential so that “they can identify the problems and create an early warning network,” Leonardo Herou, director of environmental management for the government of the southern Uruguayan department of Canelones, told Tierramérica.

The departmental governments of Canelones, Montevideo and San José, through their Metropolitan Agenda, are pursuing a project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to the effects of climate change, sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

It is the first such experiment at the local level for analysis and application of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.

The metropolitan programme includes land-use zoning, with specific proposals for roads and passenger transport, sanitation and solid waste treatment, a regional health plan, as well as the designation of protected natural areas.

This experiment, along with others related to climate change, will be evaluated at the 3rd World Summit of Regions on Climate Change, Apr. 20-22, in Montevideo, under the auspices of the global network of Local Governments for Sustainability. More than 450 people representing all of the member regions are expected.

It will be an occasion for greater awareness of the problem and for continuing the process of initiatives and actions being developed at the regional level, according to spokespersons from the organisation of the 19 departmental leaders of Uruguay, who are hosting the forum.

Several extreme weather events have revealed the climate vulnerability of this South American country located between Argentina and Brazil. Sixty-six percent of Uruguay’s population of 3.3 million lives in Montevideo and the metropolitan zone, which extends into neighbouring Canelones and San José.

The intensification of rainfall in the last 13 years has meant the evacuation of 100,000 people across the country, with many thousands more affected, and damages in the millions, according to studies by the University of the Republic of Uruguay.

The most devastating floods were in 1959, when almost every coastal city was hit. More recently, storms and flooding in 2005 and 2007 caused costly damages to homes, infrastructure and services.

Colder-than-normal temperatures in the austral winter of 2007, one of the country’s coldest on record, had a strong impact on public health, with high economic costs in part driven by higher energy demand as residents tried to stay warm.

In late 2009 and early 2010, in contrast with the previous year’s drought, rains were so intense that they forced thousands of people from their homes – who ultimately returned to begin a seemingly interminable process of rebuilding.

Luis Alberto Agüero lives in the neighbourhood of La Calera, in the central department of Durazno. He was a victim of the latest big floods. The rise of the Yi River destroyed his house in 2007, sweeping away most of his belongings.

Reconstruction was difficult, and little by little his life returned to normal. But two years later the river flooded again. “To recover things we have to make a huge sacrifice. I hope this doesn’t happen again,” Agüero told Tierramérica.

“Families face great insecurity – they lose their belongings and they don’t know how their lives will continue after a flood. It is a time of great emotional instability,” Gabriela Garrido, director of social development in Canelones, explained to Tierramérica.

Eduardo Méndez, representative of the Ministry of Social Development in the National Emergency System, said it is essential to develop contingency plans that attend to the needs of the most exposed populations.

“The poorest, some who are settled along riverbanks and subsisting on fishing, selling firewood and sand (for construction), are the most vulnerable to new diseases,” he said.

“That is why, if we are to prepare for climate change, we have to take this into account,” he added.

In Méndez’s opinion, awareness of the problem is just beginning. “There is a very direct effect on certain sectors of society, and between all of us we have to provide a response.”

He believes that the Emergency Housing Plan of the national government of leftist President José Mujica, which is to begin a pilot project this year, is “an effective and rapid firsthand response to an emergency that the country faces.” But he also noted “it is not enough.”

(*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.)

A global forum in Uruguay is evaluating the country's plans for dealing with the problems that arise from increasing variability and unpredictability of the climate, especially for poorer populations.

Flood victims in Mercedes, Uruguay, trying to salvage what they can. - Inés Acosta/IPS

Studies place these poor neighborhoods, many in low lying zones, as the most exposed to diseases resulting from flooding and other weather events that are occurring with greater frequency and intensity as a result of climate change.

Training the residents is essential so that “they can identify the problems and create an early warning network,” Leonardo Herou, director of environmental management for the government of the southern department of Canelones, told Tierramérica.

The departmental governments of Canelones, Montevideo and San José, through their Metropolitan Agenda, are promoting a project for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and vulnerability to the effects of climate change, sponsored by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). It is the first experiment at the local level for analysis and application of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures.

The metropolitan program includes land-use zoning, with specific proposals for roads and passenger transport, a regional health plan and for sanitation and solid waste treatment, as well as the designation of protected natural areas.

This experiment, along with others related to climate change, will be evaluated at the 3rd World Summit of Regions on Climate Change, Apr. 20-22, in Montevideo, under the auspices of the global network of Local Governments for Sustainability. More than 450 people representing all of the member regions are expected.

It will be an occasion for greater awareness of the problem and for continuing the process of initiatives and actions being developed at the regional level, according to spokespersons from the organization of the 19 departmental leaders of Uruguay, who are hosting the forum. Several extreme weather events have revealed the climate vulnerability of Uruguay. Sixty-six percent of the country's population of 3.3 million lives in Montevideo and the metropolitan zone, which extends to neighboring Canelones and San José.

The intensification of rainfall in the last 13 years has meant the evacuation of 100,000 people across the country, with many thousands more affected, and damages in the millions, according to studies by the University of the Republic of Uruguay.

The most devastating floods were in 1959, when almost every coastal city was hit. More recently, storms and flooding in 2005 and 2007 caused costly damages to homes, infrastructure and services.

Lower-than-normal temperatures in the austral winter of 2007, one of the country's coldest on record, had a strong impact on public health, with high economic costs in part deriving from higher energy demand.

In late 2009 and early 2010, in contrast with the previous year's drought, rains were so intense that they forced thousands of people from their homes – who ultimately returned to begin a seemingly interminable process of rebuilding.

Luis Alberto Agüero lives in the neighborhood of La Calera, in the central department of Durazno. He was a victim of the latest big floods. The rise of the Yi River destroyed his house in 2007, sweeping away most of his belongings.

Reconstruction was difficult, and little by little his life returned to normal. But two years later the river flooded again. “To recover things we have to make a huge sacrifice. I hope this doesn't happen again,” Agüero told Tierramérica.

“Families face great insecurity – they lose their belongings and they don't know how their lives will continue after a flood. It is a time of great emotional instability,” Gabriela Garrido, director of social development in Canelones, explained to Tierramérica.

Eduardo Méndez, representative of the Ministry of Social Development in the National Emergency System, said it is essential to develop contingency plans that attend to the needs of the most exposed populations.

“The poorest, some who are settled along riverbanks and subsisting on fishing, selling firewood and sand, are the most vulnerable to new diseases,” he said.

“That is why we understand that if we are to prepare for climate change, we have to take this into account,” he added.

In Méndez's opinion, awareness of the problem is just beginning. “There is a very direct effect on certain sectors of society, and between us all we have to provide a response.”

He believes that the Emergency Housing Plan of the national government of leftist President José Mujica, which is to begin a pilot project this year, is “an effective and rapid firsthand response to an emergency that the country faces.” But he also noted that “it is not enough.”

More and more Uruguayans are keen on building ecological homes. The problem is that there is hardly any market or specialised labour for what is known as “bio-building.”

View of the Guyunusa neighbourhood Credit: Courtesy of Silvana Delfino

Homes made from earth mean energy savings and contribute to fighting climate change, because their very construction emits less greenhouse gas than the usual commercial building techniques.

Inside these homes there is a pleasant environment, insulated from extreme temperatures and humidity. But perhaps most important is that they allow people to build their homes and to produce the necessary components themselves – making the dwellings more economical.

All told – with labour costs, architectural consulting and other expenses -, an earth home in Uruguay costs between 500 and 600 dollars per square metre, while a standard cinder-block house costs almost twice as much, at 900 to 1,000 dollars per square metre.

It was once common in the countryside of this small South American country between Brazil and Argentina for houses to be built with the materials provided by nature: dirt, wood, and straw. Those techniques, which are now known as bio-construction or bio-building, were passed down from generation to generation, and even today there are a few who maintain that tradition.

In the 1990s, a group of architects here began studying the use of earth in construction, at the same time the ideas and techniques were being incorporated into the curriculum at the University of the Republic’s school of architecture.

This meant that the approach could be replicated in different parts of the country – but they were isolated projects, and the government showed little interest in supporting the efforts.

Over the past 15 years, around 100 of these bio-homes have been built with the participation of the architects, and another 100 by the residents themselves.

The demand for environmentally sustainable construction techniques is on the rise, but there are no policies to guide it, no market for production and sales of eco-materials, and few construction workers familiar with the techniques.

Those are the basic elements needed to promote alternative construction, according to architect Rosario Etchebarne, an expert in bio-building and professor and researcher at the University of the Republic’s school of architecture.

“There is great public demand, and many people are interested in experimenting. But the authorities are still hesitant because we need technical standards for the construction processes, and they fear the experimental approach,” she told Tierramérica.

Etchebarne explained the three most popular techniques for building a bio-home: adobe, or sun-dried bricks; compressed earth blocks (CEB) produced by a machine; and what is known here as “fajina”, a wood frame filled in with soil stabilised with straw and other components.

“Bio-construction incorporates many concepts of sustainability. The basis of everything is that there are energy savings,” Etchebarne said.

“We would be helping to mitigate climate change because we would not be emitting any carbon dioxide into the environment; the amount of cement used is minimal,” she added.

One of Uruguay’s recent experiences in earth construction is Guyunusa, a housing cooperative in Ciudad de la Costa, in the southern Uruguayan department (or province) of Canelones, on the River Plate (Río de la Plata). The 10 homes, which were built using mud, were paid for with a loan from the Ministry of Housing.

“We chose this type of construction because we wanted cheaper and healthier housing. We researched different techniques and concluded that an earthen home was healthier and better insulated, more economical and within everyone’s means,” Silvana Delfino, a member of the cooperative, told Tierramérica.

“It’s nothing new: human beings have lived in earth homes here and in other parts of the world,” she added.

The Guyunusa housing complex also includes an ecological sanitation system. It is located in an area that is not connected to the sewage network, so the cooperative created its own, with financing from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

According to Delfino, the idea behind the cooperative is “to show that with little money we can have decent housing that respects the environment.”

On the outskirts of Montevideo, in the self-managed Comunidad del Sur and La Wayra, several families built their ecological homes with the help of German architect Heiner Peters, who visited Uruguay to share his expertise.

This approach has also been used for building summer homes near the sea, as well as large houses on rural estates.

“There is no great mystery with this type of construction. It used to be that people settled in a place and built their homes with what they found around them. The problem is, perhaps, that we have ‘unlearned’ some things,” Hugo Costa, who lives in La Wayra, told Tierramérica.

(*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.)

Soil and straw from the Uruguayan plains were the raw material for the homes of the indigenous peoples over the millennia, and they are in demand again.

View of the Guyunusa neighborhood - Courtesy of Silvana Delfino

Homes made from earth mean energy savings and contribute to fighting climate change, because their very construction emits less greenhouse gas than the usual commercial construction techniques.

Inside these homes there is a pleasant environment, insulated from extreme temperatures and humidity. But perhaps most important is that they allow people to build their homes themselves and to produce the necessary components – making these structures more economical.

All told – with labor costs, architectural consulting and other expenses -, an earth home in Uruguay costs between 500 and 600 dollars per square meter, while a standard cinder-block house costs almost twice as much, at 900 to 1,000 dollars per square meter.

It was once common in the countryside of this small South American country for houses to be built with the materials provided by nature: dirt, wood, straw. Those techniques, which are now known as bio-construction or bio-building, were passed down from generation to generation, and even today there are a few who maintain that tradition.

In the 1990s, a group of architects began studying the use of earth in construction, at the same time the ideas and techniques were being incorporated into the curriculum at the University of the Republic's school of architecture.

This meant that the approach could be replicated in different parts of the country – but they were isolated experiences, and the government showed little interest in supporting it.

Over the past 15 years, around 100 of these bio-homes have been built with the participation of the architects, and another 100 by the owners themselves.

The demand for environmentally sustainable construction techniques is on the rise, but there are no policies to guide it, no market for production and sales of eco-materials, and few construction workers familiar with the techniques.

Those are the basic elements needed to promote alternative construction, according to architect Rosario Etchebarne, an expert in bio-building and professor and researcher at the University's school of architecture.

“There is great demand from the population, and many people are motivated to experiment, but the authorities remain hesitant, because we are lacking technical standards for the construction processes and they fear the experimental approach,” she told Tierramérica.

Etchebarne explained the three most used techniques: adobe, which is a brick that is not baked; the compressed earth block (CEB), which is made by a mechanical press; and “fajina”, a wood frame with soil stabilized with straw and other components.

“Bio-construction incorporates many concepts of sustainability. The basis of everything is that there is energy savings,” Etchebarne said.

“We would be making a contribution to mitigating climate change, because we would not be emitting any carbon dioxide into the environment, because the cement used is minimal,” she added.

One of the most interesting experiences recently in earth construction is Guyunusa, a housing cooperative in Ciudad de la Costa, in the southern Uruguayan department of Canelones, on the River Plate (Río de la Plata). The 10 homes were built using mud and paid for with a loan from the Ministry of Housing.

“We chose this type of construction because we wanted cheaper and healthier housing. We researched different techniques and concluded that a mud home was healthier and better insulated, more economical and within everyone's means,” Silvana Delfino, a member of the cooperative, told Tierramérica.

“It's nothing new: human beings have lived in earth homes here and in other parts of the world,” she added.

The Guyunusa housing complex also includes an ecological sanitation system. It is located in an area that is not connected to the sewage network, so the cooperative created its own, with financing from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

According to Delfino, the idea behind the cooperative is “to show that with little money we can have decent housing that respects the environment.”

In the outskirts of Montevideo, in the self-managed Comunidad del Sur and La Wayra, several families built their ecological homes with the help of German architect Heiner Peters, who visited Uruguay and shared his expertise.

This approach has also been used for building summer homes near the sea, or large homes on rural estates.

“There is no great mystery with this type of construction. It used to be that people settled in a place and built their homes with what they found around them. The problem is, perhaps, that we have unlearned some things,” Hugo Costa, who lives in La Wayra, told Tierramérica.

Marisabel’s modest home had no plumbing, like the rest of the dwellings in this poor suburb on the outskirts of Montevideo, the capital of this small South American country.

The family made up of 44-year-old Marisabel and her seven children is one of 30 beneficiaries of the “appropriate sanitation for vulnerable sectors in the metropolitan area of Montevideo” project, financed by the European Union and carried out by the non-governmental Uruguayan Centre for Appropriate Technologies (CEUTA).

The project helps local residents install dry toilets – an ecological sanitation solution that saves water, separates urine from solid waste, and returns nutrients contained in human feces to agriculture, by converting waste into manure after a special treatment process.

It also separates so-called gray water – from sinks, washing machines and showers, for example – for reuse. In addition, rainwater is collected and compost heaps are created for other kinds of organic waste.

Another aspect of the project is the creation of small-scale constructed wetlands, as biological filters of the previously separated waste water.

The aim of ecological sanitation is to recover nutrients that would otherwise be discarded.

“I joined the project, where they taught us how to build a dry toilet,” Marisabel told IPS. “We’re really happy. The kids asked what this or that is for. I used to give them a bath in a big metal tub. When I put Esteban, my six-year-old son, under the shower, he screamed that he was drowning because he didn’t know what it was; now he loves it, and washes up all by himself.”

The two-year programme, which got underway in May, involves families living in Barros Blancos, an eight-square-km area of slums and semi-rural areas that is home to around 30,000 people and forms part of greater Montevideo.

Architect Igmarrey Pacheco, an expert in environmental studies and coordinator of CEUTA’s ecological sanitation team, explained to IPS that an important aspect of the project is to generate, in institutions and agencies working in sanitation, know-how on appropriate technologies as viable alternatives adapted to specific local conditions.

“First we carried out a study with people who work in the different institutions. The ecological sanitation approach was introduced, and already functioning systems were visited and studied. Then on that basis, we began to design, with this inter-institutional team, a strategy to get the community involved,” he said.

“In February we will complete the construction of the new alternative sanitation systems for the first group of families, some of whom have begun to use them in their homes, and in March we’ll start working with the second group of families,” said Pacheco.

Different approaches

In the province of Montevideo, 85 percent of the population has sanitation. But in the country’s other 18 provinces, coverage is just 46 percent on average.

The province of Canelones has two major areas with low sanitation coverage: the numerous informal settlements and slums on the outskirts of Montevideo, and Ciudad de la Costa (City of the Coast), which is basically a series of overlapping commuter suburbs and small beach resorts that stretch out along the coast of the Río de la Plata estuary to the east of the capital.

The pace of growth of Ciudad de la Costa over the last decade or so has outstripped infrastructure and generated serious environmental impacts on the coastal dunes.

Pacheco said there are many people living without conventional sanitation systems, and they often come up with their own solutions.

The most widely used in Uruguay is the unlined seepage pit, which allows untreated sewage to seep into the earth and often overflows when it rains, with the resultant contamination of soil and groundwater.

Although there are other alternatives to the traditional sanitation system, ecological sanitation is not merely a new technology, but a whole new approach, which sees human excreta as a reusable resource rather than a waste product, said Pacheco.

“Ecological sanitation sees human feces as a potential source of natural fertiliser, to be reused in the soil,” he said.

“There are cultures that have a tradition of, and accept, the management of human excreta, as in the case of Asia and the East, and others, like the West, where there is a cultural rejection of human feces,” said Pacheco.

Alternative systems like dry toilets provide various benefits, he pointed out. “They don’t require major investments in pipe networks and treatment plants, and because of their high level of efficiency in filtering out impurities, they avoid contamination of soil and water sources.”

In addition, he said, “if we collect the urine, store it, treat it, and later use it as a natural fertiliser in agriculture, we are generating an alternative to chemicals and tapping into an available resource.”

Change of mind set

In Pacheco’s view, policy-makers and those in charge of sanitation tend to see conventional systems as the only possible alternative.

He also believes there is prejudice against alternative systems due to the lack of familiarity with them and failure to promote them.

“Information on these kinds of sanitation systems should be included in academic courses, and in the training of public employees that work in areas directly related to these questions,” he said.

“Ecological sanitation not only depends on the expertise of engineers, architects or sanitation technicians, but should also be included in other disciplines, like health or social sciences, anthropology and environmental education. A shift in mind set towards our feces must involve a cultural and social, and not just technical, change,” he said.

The United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of Sanitation to boost progress towards fulfilling the seventh Millennium Development Goal (MDG), one of whose specific targets is to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation, from 1990 levels.

The eight MDGs, meant to be achieved by the year 2015, were adopted by the United Nations member states in 2000. They also include ensuring universal primary education, reducing by half the proportion of people in the world suffering from poverty and hunger, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

A total of 2.6 billion people in the world still lack basic sanitation, which has a direct impact on human health and development.

“A population without a sanitation system is a population at permanent social and environmental risk, and the hardest hit are children who live in those areas, whose cognitive development is affected,” said Pacheco.

Ecological sanitation systems are a low-cost, efficient, appropriate technology alternative to help solve the crisis, he said.

“If we complement the existing conventional systems with decentralised, autonomous alternative systems, we can achieve broader coverage, especially when conventional sanitation is not viable,” he said.