Continuous upgrading and a “vocation” for farming are two keys to the success of a cooperative that could serve as a model for boosting agriculture in Cuba.

There are 46 women among the 195 workers at Vivero Alamar. - Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“We offer flexible hours, relatively high wages, and professional upgrading, among other benefits that make the cooperative an attractive option. This is how we attract high quality human resources, who are crucial today in order to produce more organic food,” said Salcines, the president of Vivero Alamar, where production has been chemical-free since 2000.

The cooperative’s recipe for success also includes transparent accounting, equitable profit sharing, interest-free loans for the workers, free lunches, and support for women workers with young children or others in their care: they are allowed to arrive up to an hour later than the official beginning of the work day, at seven in the morning, Salcines told Tierramérica.

Human capital played a decisive role in raising production at this urban agriculture venture, founded in 1997 on an initial 800 square metres of land in the community of Alamar, around 15 kilometres east of downtown Havana. This is why Salcines believes that the key to achieving food security in Cuba lies in agricultural workers with a “vocation” for farming, as well as training.

In 2012, world food prices skyrocketed as a result of poor crop yields in various centres of agricultural production, such as the United States. The Caribbean countries, which are net food importers, suffered the greatest impact in the region, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

Less than five percent of the population of Cuba suffers from malnutrition, but the country was forced to spend over 1.633 billion dollars on food imports last year, an unsustainable expenditure for an economy in crisis for more than 20 years, specialists say.

Reducing this massive expenditure by raising domestic food production remains a challenge for the government of President Raúl Castro. In fact, in the first quarter of this year, the National Office of Statistics and Information reported a 7.8 percent decrease in agricultural production other than sugar cane.

“There is a big demand that needs to be met, which is why we are able to sell everything we grow,” said Salcines, one of the founders of the cooperative, which now covers a total of 10.14 hectares and produces more than 230 different crop varieties (primarily garden vegetables, as well as some fruits, grains and tubers) in greenhouses and open fields.

In the midst of a generally inefficient agricultural sector, Vivero Alamar has achieved consistent growth for more than 15 years, thanks to the constant upgrading of its organic farming methods, which have even earned the praise of the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), José Graziano da Silva, who visited the cooperative earlier this month.

In 2012, they produced 400 tons of vegetables, 5.5 tons of medicinal and “spiritual” plants (used in religious rituals), 2.6 tons of dried herbs and spices, and 350 tons of worm manure.

They also produced 30,000 ornamental plant and fruit tree seedlings and three million vegetable seedlings, some for their own planting needs, others for sale to other farmers, reported Salcines.

Fresh vegetables, especially lettuce, are the products most sought after by the local residents in Alamar, who have begun to learn in recent years – like people in the rest of the country – about the benefits of including more greens in the traditional Cuban diet of rice, beans, “viandas” (starchy tubers and plantain) and pork.

“The first time we planted cauliflower, in 2000, it all get left in the fields, because nobody knew what it was,” plant health engineer Norma Romero told Tierramérica. In her view, one of the most important contributions made by the more than 33,000 urban and suburban farms in Cuba has been the expansion of access to and consumption of vegetables.

Thanks to a new initiative at Vivero Alamar, recipes for the preparation of different vegetables and mushrooms accompany the lists of products available at the cooperative’s sales outlet, as part of its business and educational strategy. The shelves also stock pickled vegetables, fruit preserves and garlic paste, produced through its own small industry sideline.

Although organic produce can be prohibitively costly in other countries, the organic fruits and vegetables sold by Vivero Alamar are actually priced lower than those produced with agrochemicals and sold in private farmers markets, where the prices are set in accordance with supply and demand.

“The affordable prices are the biggest attraction. A head of lettuce costs four Cuban pesos (five cents of a dollar) here, and everywhere else they charge 10 pesos,” regular customer Sonia Ricardo told Tierramérica. “The vegetables here are fresh, they have no pesticides, and the service is really fast,” she added.

Despite these low prices, the cooperative is able to earn good profits, production chief Gonzálo González assured Tierramérica. Eighty-five percent of its products are sold directly to the population, and the rest go to restaurants like La Bodeguita del Medio, a major tourist attraction in Havana.

Since it first started out with just five people, Vivero Alamar has progressively moved towards a closed-loop farming system that reduces waste and environmental damage.

“We try to buy as few inputs from outside as possible,” explained González, which is what led to “the idea of producing our own manure and various bio-pesticides and fertilisers.”

Vivero Alamar raises bulls to obtain manure, has set up “worm bins” to produce earthworm castings, another organic fertiliser, and breeds mycorrhizal fungi (which attach themselves to the roots of plants and promote their growth) as well as insects and microorganisms that can boost crop yields naturally. The cooperative has also established links with 17 scientific centres for the incorporation of new organic farming techniques and products.

Today, the 195 people who work here are striving to raise production by 40 percent to reach the farm’s full potential output, and have also expanded into raising rabbits and sheep, in order to include meat in its sales to the public and improve protein consumption among the neighbouring population, some 30,000 people.

The staff is made up of 175 cooperative members and 20 employees, and boasts a high overall level of education, with 92 university graduates and 42 technical college graduates. Women currently account for only 46 of the 195 workers.

“A farm can do much more than produce food,” commented Salcines, as he watched a group of foreign tourists who had booked a guided tour and organic lunch at Vivero Alamar.

The landless peasant farmers occupying large landholdings in Pará, the Brazilian state where the land conflict is most violent, face threats ranging from intimidation by armed private guards to the spraying of toxic agrochemicals over their homes and crops.

Children at the MST’s Frei Henri des Roziers Camp in Pará, Brazil - Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

“My dream is a small plot of land. Our goal is to bring an end to hunger in this country, which is falling off the precipice of need,” he told Tierramérica. As a child, Santos fled the drought-stricken northeast Brazilian state of Bahia and migrated to the northern state of Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region.

His family is one of the 280 families living in the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp, established by the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) in Aug. 8, 2010. The camp is named after a Dominican friar and lawyer from the Catholic Pastoral Land Commission who continues to fight in defence of human rights in the region at the age of 82.

The landless peasants are occupying a 400-hectare estate known as Fazendinha, located off federal highway BR-155 roughly 100 kilometres from the city of Marabá. They say that the purported owners of the estate, formerly a cattle ranch, created it by invading and illegally deforesting public land, and that at the time of the occupation, it had been left idle and unproductive.

This is the justification for almost all of the land occupations by social movements demanding agrarian reform in Brazil.

In the southeast of Pará, where the struggle over land is most violent, over 500 settlements of small farmers have been legalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). But there are still more than 100 camps of families living in tents and straw huts waiting for the federal government to grant them legal ownership of the land.

It takes an average of five years to get the government to confiscate a property and allocate the land to agrarian reform.

To reach the Frei Henri camp, you need to drive along a long stretch of the dusty BR-155, full of potholes and trucks loaded with minerals that block the road day and night.

The region was once rich in cashew trees, which were razed to make way for cattle pastures. Right in the heart of the Amazon, the towering green canopies and exuberant vegetation of the rainforest were replaced with the flat monotony of grassland years ago.

The occupation of Fazendinha has led to bitter conflicts with local ranch owners, who have joined forces and hired private armed guards to intimidate the landless farmers and destroy their crops.

“We plant crops to grow healthy food. The ranch owners don’t produce anything and claim that their lands are productive. We face constant threats. Justice in Pará is very slow. We wait and despair,” said Dos Santos.

“Here, land is power,” declared Maria Raimunda César, 39, a member of the MST coordinating committee in Pará. “The conflict is never-ending. In Pará, people are gunned down like animals. A side of beef for export is worth more than a human life. There is tremendous injustice, and growing oppression and violence.”

According to César, agrarian reform is ignored in national policies. Both the current government of Dilma Rousseff and that of her predecessor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) “removed the issue from the agenda.”

Changes in land use tend to follow a similar perverse pattern, said César. First the rainforest is opened up to make way for mining and logging for charcoal production. This is followed by the invasion of public lands by private landholders, who destroy the forest and plant grasses for cattle grazing.

On average, there is one head of cattle per hectare, she noted.

Also along highway BR-155, but close to Marabá, there is another camp of landless peasant farmers, the Helenira Resende Camp, which was set up on Mar. 1, 2010 and is now home to 150 families. In addition to intimidation by armed men, these farmers also face airborne threats: toxic agricultural products sprayed over their homes and fields.

Raúl Montenegro, an Argentine activist who participated in an international mission in solidarity with the landless peasants of Pará, told Tierramérica that “the combined use of bullets and poisons is tantamount to chemical warfare against these communities.”

“The large landholders claim that they are spraying these chemicals on their own lands, but this is a way of evading responsibility,” said Montenegro, the president of the Foundation for the Defence of the Environment, based in Córdoba, Argentina, and a recipient in 2004 of the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize”.

“We were not only able to confirm that groups of armed men laid siege to an entire community and subjected them to a nightly hail of gunfire and loud bombs at the Frei Henri des Roziers Camp. We also witnessed how companies like Santa Barbara conduct aerial spraying of pesticides,” he denounced.

“This poison reaches children, adolescents and adults, with total impunity, with no government control, and no epidemiological or environmental testing,” he added.

“Our motto is to occupy and resist, but they are an extremely powerful group. The men at the ranch are heavily armed and they shoot,” said Aldemir Monteiro de Souza, 28, a resident of the Helenira Resende Camp, which occupies 50 hectares within the Cedro ranch, an estate covering a total area of almost 15,000 hectares.

The “powerful group” he is referring to are the owners of the cattle company Agropecuária Santa Barbara. One of the company’s biggest shareholders is banker Daniel Dantas, who was arrested in 2008 for financial crimes and money laundering.

According to the MST and the Pastoral Land Commission, in the last 10 years alone, the Santa Barbara Group has bought up 800,000 hectares of land in six municipalities in Pará.

“The group appropriates public lands, uses slave labour, and commits environmental crimes,” said Charles Trocate, an MST coordinator in Pará.

The landless peasants are waiting for INCRA technicians to inspect the Cedro ranch to determine if it is productive and legal. If irregularities are detected, the process for its expropriation will begin, and the land will subsequently be allocated in parcels to the farmers.

A hearing with the INCRA agrarian oversight committee has been scheduled for May 22 at the Justice Forum in Marabá. This will be the first step, after years of occupation and the establishment of the landless farmers’ camp.

In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.

Nanti women and children, members of an indigenous community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. - INDEPA

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information- sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

The Honduran government’s announcement of its plans to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has raised expectations as well as doubts, particularly due to the speed with which it aims to complete a process that has taken several years in other countries of the region.

Artisanal miner panning for gold in Choluteca, Honduras. - Thelma Mejía/IPS

Honduras is not yet an official EITI candidate country, as Guatemala and Trinidad and Tobago have been since 2011, much less a fully fledged EITI compliant country, a status attained by Peru in 2012 after a process that began in 2004.

These are the only nations in Latin America and the Caribbean that currently form part of this initiative which now encompasses 35 countries, half of them in Africa.

Honduras does not even appear on the EITI website among the countries that intend to implement the initiative. Nonetheless, its government has announced that it plans to complete the initial stage of adhesion to the EITI in a year and a half.

“Nobody could be opposed to transparency, but we have been rather taken aback by how these plans for adhesion have come about, without any consultation with the sectors involved, such as the communities where mining activities are carried out,” activist Pedro Landa of the National Coalition of Environmental Networks of Honduras commented to Tierramérica.

Landa said that his organisation will announce a public position in the coming weeks, “because transparency and accountability are essential, and we feel that up until now, the EITI process has not been sufficiently transparent.”

When the Honduran Congress passed a new mining law in January, a generic article referring to the EITI was included at the last minute. “This came as a surprise, because no one knew the country was even trying to join the initiative,” said Landa.

The Coalition, which includes more than 40 community-based environmental groups, played a prominent role in the debate over the new law, whose draft text was submitted for consultations with different stakeholder sectors for over a year.

When it enters into force, the new law will bring an end to a six-year moratorium on the issuing of mining permits, in place since the Supreme Court of Justice declared 11 articles of the previous law to be unconstitutional.

According to congressional deputy Donaldo Reyes Avelar of the ruling National Party, the novelty of the newly passed legislation lies in the fact that communities will directly participate in deciding whether or not mining projects will be given the green light. It also raises the royalties paid by mining companies from one to two percent, he told Tierramérica.

But the Coalition withdrew from the final stage of consultations because the draft text “is not clear on community participation in decisions regarding the authorisation of mining activities, and the mechanisms for transparency and accountability are not defined,” stressed Landa.

In fact, some 400 protestors took part in a 10-day march this month from the northern community of La Barca to the Congress building in Tegucigalpa to demonstrate their opposition to the new legislation.

Francisca Valle, from the western department of Santa Bárbara, was one of the participants in the “Dignity and Sovereignty Step by Step” march. She called for “greater transparency in terms of the scope of the law, where we were not taken into account.”

Her fellow marchers included representatives of indigenous, women’s and religious organisations.

“During these days of walking, staying overnight in community centres, we have received incredible support from the people. The government consulted on the law with its own ‘activists’ in the municipalities it controls, but the grassroots communities, the people, are angry, because they were not taken into account,” Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno told Tierramérica.

The protestors called for a 90-day period for changes to be incorporated into the draft legislation, based on wide social participation, and for President Porfirio Lobo to veto the bill approved by Congress. But when the marchers reached Tegucigalpa, “they told us we were too late,” said Moreno.

Lobo is expected to pass the law in the coming weeks.

“The problem is that neither the government nor the members of congress are properly reading the country, and when a mining company comes in to set up operations, for example in Santa Bárbara, where people are angry, instead of being a solution, this law will be a source of conflict and violence,” warned Moreno.

When they arrived in Tegucigalpa, the marchers also learned about the government’s plans to join EITI.

But Omar Rivera, executive director of the Civil Society Group, made up by a number of non- governmental organisations, has been closely monitoring the EITI process.

The main challenge, he said, is to strengthen the institutions in charge of controlling mining activity, in terms of taxation as well as the environmental impacts and potential violation of the rights of communities where mining operations take place.

“At present, the state and municipal government institutions responsible for enforcing the legislation related to the mining industry are insignificant, with poor technical capacities and no political power,” said Rivera.

The government has other expectations with regard to the EITI.

Roberto Herrera Cáceres, the high representative and national coordinator for the EITI in Honduras, told Tierramérica that one of the goals is to make the rules for exploration and exploitation in the extractive industries more transparent, with the assistance of the World Bank.

Vice President María Antonieta Guillén reported that the government has complied with all of the requirements to join the initiative, including the creation of a consultative board with participation by the academic, business and civil society sectors.

The objective is for everyone to know how much is paid in taxes and what these resources are invested in. “We want to lay the foundations for genuine transparency in this sector,” the vice president stated at a local press conference.

The Coastal Highway is meant to connect one end of Chile’s long, narrow territory to the other, running north to south as close to the Pacific Ocean as possible.

Luis Aillapán and his wife Catalina Marileo faced criminal charges in 2002 for defending their land. - Marianela Jarroud/IPS

The Coastal Highway is meant to connect one end of Chile’s long, narrow territory to the other, running north to south as close to the Pacific Ocean as possible. The completed highway would be more than 3,340 km long, of which more than 2,600 km have already been built.

This highway project has become one of the main challenges facing numerous successive governments in Chile, who have consistently come up against the opposition of native communities.

In the Araucanía region, 674 km south of Santiago, the Coastal Highway would encompass 41.6 km of the Puerto Saavedra-Toltén section, precisely where the Budi Indigenous Development Area is located.

The authorities maintain that the initiative will help to integrate isolated areas, decrease travel times and promote the development of new tourism destinations.

Studies by the Universidad de la Frontera note that the area is home to “a long cultural history and clear links to this history through archeological testaments and continued cultural practices, with a high prevalence of aspects that reflect the identity and world vision of the region.”

The ancestral inhabitants of the area are the Lafkenche, a branch of the Mapuche indigenous people whose name means “people of the sea”.

Leonardo Calfuneo is a Lafkenche “lonko” (chief) in the community of Konin Budi, made up of some 60 families.

“We are opposed to this megaproject because, for the Mapuche people, it will not bring progress or development, but rather the irreparable destruction of our culture,” he told Tierramérica.

Calfuneo lives with his wife on a small parcel of land in a cozy wood house, where they offer the bitter herbal tea known as “mate” and “sopaipillas” (deep-fried flatbread) to their guests.

“We make a living from small-scale farming, we are peasants, we are a people with a centuries-old culture and we have always lived off of the land,” he said.

Calfuneo has personally confronted the advances made by the highway project, which is not being undertaken by a construction company, but rather by the Military Work Corps, a branch of the Chilean armed forces.

In March, the military corps and their machinery carried out work on his land without authorization, destroying hedges made up of medicinal plants as well as one of the community’s sacred religious sites.

“They are coming through here and destroying everything in their path to widen the road. We are not only losing our lands, but also medicinal plants and drainage areas,” he reported.

In his community, “each family has three, five or 10 hectares to live on,” a small area of land considering that only a few decades ago this entire area was made up by Mapuche communal lands.

Through Decree Law 2568, passed in 1979, the Pinochet dictatorship divided up these communal lands into individual properties. Many of these were acquired by private parties, largely companies in the tree plantation, energy and fish farming sectors.

Local authorities claim that the Coastal Highway will enhance interconnection along the coast and thus promote the economic development of the region.

“This is a project that has taken a long time to complete, and we would like to be able to overcome the obstacles it has faced,” Andrés Molina, the governor of Araucanía, told Tierramérica.

“We support this project for various reasons. But, in practice, we have not been able to conduct an assessment of the social and economic profitability of these roads,” he admitted.

Although the quality of roads in the area has improved, “now we are working towards a social profitability study in order to be able to move forward with paving. We won’t be able to do anything until we have internally conducted a social assessment that will make it possible for us to invest as a country,” he said.

Molina’s goal is to “move forward with this as soon as possible and hopefully get the project started by the end of 2013.”

These deadlines frighten Luis Aillapán, who is the “gempin” of the community of Konin Budi – the guardian of knowledge on the culture, religion and philosophy of the Mapuche people. For him, the construction of the highway represents “great suffering”.

“We are used to our natural surroundings, to walking a short distance to the sea and fishing for the resources we need,” he told Tierramérica.

Aillapán grows crops and raises a few animals. He and his family feed themselves with what the land and sea provide for them. From his house he looks out to the Pacific Ocean on one side, green fields on the other, and a few hills that form part of the coastal mountain range.

But on the edge of his lands, the military workers and their machinery are clearing the way for the highway.

“Some of our own people have turned against us, and during the night we hear gunshots that are meant to intimidate us,” he charged.

His wife, Catalina Marileo, and their four-year- old son were charged in 2002 with assaulting civil servants from the Ministry of Public Works who were carrying out feasibility studies for the project.

Later, Aillapán, his wife, his sister-in-law Margarita Marileo and Marileo’s husband were charged and tried under the country’s anti- terrorism law, which was passed during the dictatorship and is now used almost exclusively to penalize Mapuche resistance.

The municipality of Saavedra, covering some 401 sq km between the Pacific Ocean and Lake Budi, a saltwater lake, had a population of 13,481 in 2009. More than 80 percent of its inhabitants live in rural areas, and 73.2 percent identify themselves as Mapuche.

There are 3,295 people living in the Budi Indigenous Development Area, who make up 24.4 percent of the municipality’s total population. And on Huapi Island, located in Lake Budi, there are 43 communities inhabited by some 5,000 Mapuches.

A study by the Universidad de la Frontera commissioned by the government in 2001 reported that 45.2 percent of the population was in favor of the Coastal Highway while 52.9 percent opposed it.

The situation changed when the former mayor of Puerto Saavedra, Ricardo Tripainao, traveled around the communities to explain the benefits of the highway, such as the higher prices they could charge for their products and the millions that the government would pay them for expropriating their lands.

Tierramérica observed that today, many people are angered over the government’s failure to comply with these payments and by the increase in the width of the land to be expropriated, which was initially 13 meters, but in many parts has reached 20 or even 25 meters.

But among the inhabitants of the municipal capital of Puerto Saavedra, an urban area with numerous tourist attractions, feelings towards the highway are favorable, since it will attract more visitors and reduce the town’s isolation.

The Military Work Corps camp in charge of the highway construction is moving to one of the shores of Lake Budi, a cultural heritage protected area.

Governor Molina says that there are “plans” for consultation with the indigenous communities, as established by International Labour Organization Convention 169, since “the idea is for the project to be carried out on a participatory basis.”

Convention 169, which was adopted in 1989 and entered into force in Chile in 2009, establishes guarantees for indigenous communities, and in particular the right to be consulted on activities or projects in their territories.

However, said Molina, “We are not going to carry out consultations until the project has been fully approved.”

The Chilean government claims that delays in the installation of power lines due to legal proceedings and obstacles to the issuing of environmental permits will keep electricity prices high until at least 2016. Energy Minister Jorge Bunster declared that during the next four years “we will be facing restrictions in power transmission, which are leading to higher energy costs, greater vulnerability of the systems, and higher rates of service interruption.”

But the director of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts, Lucio Cuenca, told Tierramérica that the minister’s statements merely reflect “the pressures exerted by the mining companies to obtain cheap energy, with no regard for the environmental or social impacts on the areas where the lines are installed.”

The situation in the country “demonstrates that people are not prepared to provide the mining companies with cheap energy at any cost, which is the reason behind the legal actions,” he added.

A change in forage crops and the search for new sources of water are among the climate change adaptation measures implemented as part of an initiative undertaken by eight cattle farming cooperatives in Camagüey, 534 km from the Cuban capital. “New grass species have been introduced in accordance with the conditions of each particular area, new sites have been identified to drill more wells, and other natural sources of water that have been untapped until now have been incorporated,” said Mayda Álvarez, the gender focal point for the initiative, which is also aimed at promoting gender equity.

These measures have been adopted in an attempt to maintain livestock production in “areas facing extreme drought,” Álvarez, a professor at the University of Camagüey, told Tierramérica. Local farmers who carry on the longstanding tradition of cattle raising in this area of Cuba are currently struggling to confront lengthy dry spells.

Only six percent of research on climate change and biodiversity conducted worldwide since 1990 addresses the impacts of these changes on biodiversity in Brazil, according to a literature review carried out by the Boticário Group Foundation. Over the course of one year, a total of 948 articles published around the world on climate change and biodiversity were identified. Of this total, 59 addressed the subject of climate change impacts on biodiversity in Brazil, 19 referred to “projected changes in the future”, and 11 to “recorded changes and monitoring”.

The most commonly addressed issues are geographic distribution of species, biological diversity and ecosystem services. Terrestrial environments were the subject of 87 percent of the studies, and none of them analyzed the impact of climate change on microorganisms and fungi.

“The number of studies needs to increase. The lack of knowledge hinders the effectiveness of strategies for climate change adaptation,” Malu Nunes, the executive director of the foundation, told Tierramérica.

Rómulo Gallegos, a municipality in the southwestern plains of Venezuela where cattle ranching is an economic mainstay, has become the first of the country’s 333 municipalities to adopt legislation on ecologically oriented land management. The bylaw passed by the local government on Oct. 29 states that this measure is aimed at ensuring “an environment that is safe, healthy and ecologically consistent with the dynamic balance imposed by nature” on its 23,148 sq. km of territory.

In addition, it “establishes a map of priorities, sets guidelines for the creation of municipal protected areas, such as gallery forests, and could be extended to other municipalities in the plains region,” said Lila Gil, the director of foreign affairs for Latin America at The Nature Conservancy, which has provided on-the-ground support for the initiative.

The municipality, bathed by tributaries of the Orinoco River, is home to more than 220 species of flora and 700 of fauna, as well as the Cuiva and Pumé indigenous peoples, who account for 4,000 of the municipality’s 29,000 inhabitants.

Every cubic meter of wood extracted from the Amazon and prepared for use in construction releases between 6.5 and 24.9 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), from the time the trees are cut down until their final transportation to the market in the former of boards, panels and other timber products. These estimates were reached through research conducted by architect Érica Ferraz de Campos, from the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo. Her research took into account both legal and illegal logging, and was based on data gathered from the literature and from logging companies.

“Every hectare of forest contains between 200 and 425 tons of dry biomass, which store between 98 and 208 tons of carbon. When the trees are removed this carbon is released. In addition, the processing of the wood and the burning of fossil fuels, particularly during transportation, also produce CO2 emissions,” Ferraz de Campos told Tierramérica.

Environmental organizations are carefully monitoring the consequences of a toxic cloud that spread over downtown Buenos Aires on Dec. 6, and have warned of a lack of preparation to deal with a major chemical disaster. The Foundation for the Defense of the Environment (FUNAM), one of the organizations that denounced the potential risks, claims that the city “is not protected against chemical accidents and much less against nuclear accidents.”

On Dec. 6 a cloud with traces of the insecticide thidiocarb, released from a container in the port of Buenos Aires, spread over the Argentine capital, causing a nauseating odor and irritation of the eyes and upper airways.

Raúl Montenegro of FUNAM told Tierramérica that “the government did not distribute means of protection with the necessary urgency,” and that the authorities need to “revise disaster prevention plans” to deal with chemical as well as nuclear accidents.

Beginning in 2013, seven protected areas in Honduras will be managed by seven environmental organizations, who will be officially responsible for their protection. The seven areas are in the north, center, west and south of the country, and their management has been granted to the NGOs by the governmental Forest Conservation Institute (ICF), said environmentalist Jorge Varela of the Committee for the Defense and Development of the Flora and Fauna of the Gulf of Fonseca, on the country’s Pacific coast.

The areas encompassed are the mangrove forests of southern Honduras, the mangrove forests on the Gulf of Fonseca, La Tigra National Park, Cerro Azul Meámbar Park, Yojoa Lake, Montaña de Santa Bárbara National Park, and Colibrí Esmeralda Park.

The ICF vice minister of Protected Areas and Wildlife, José Galdámez, told Tierramérica that the contracts with the NGOs are for one year and will be renewed if the established targets are met. Honduras currently has a total of 91 protected areas.

Environmental organizations are calling for an adequate budget for the mitigation of climate change and adaptation to its impacts. “There has been a decrease in the budget for climate change-related institutions, and adaptation and mitigation programs have been reassigned or eliminated,” Gabriela Niño, the public policies coordinator of the non- governmental Mexican Center for Environmental Law, told Tierramérica.

“The budget is heavily weighted towards mitigation, when the law says that the priority should be adaptation,” she added.

The 2013 budget bill currently being debated in Congress allocates some 2.6 billion dollars for climate change-related measures.

But no resources have been allocated for the creation of a fund aimed at adaption and mitigation actions, as stipulated by the General Law on Climate Change.

The Chilean government has decided to adopt a model developed by South Africa to explore pathways to a low-carbon economy.

The glaciers of the Andes Mountains are threatened by global warming. - Julieta Sokolowicz/IPS

The Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) initiative, being promoted in Chile by the government of Sebastián Piñera, is a collaboration among developing countries to explore each individual nation’s options for mitigating climate change while fostering economic development and poverty alleviation.

The aim is to develop “a solid base of evidence and information on what the country can do to reduce GHG emissions in different sectors of the economy,” Hernán Blanco, who is leading the MAPS process in Chile, told Tierramérica.

MAPS grew out of the experience of the government- mandated Long Term Mitigation Scenarios (LTMS) process that took place in South Africa between 2005 and 2008.

The LTMS informed South Africa’s position for negotiations at the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 15), held in 2009 in Copenhagen.

"It was very successful, because it allowed them as a country to develop their position in a way that was solidly based on scientific research and on a process involving the participation of all of the relevant stakeholders from the South African economy,” said Andrés Pirazzoli, the executive coordinator of MAPS Chile.

This success gave rise to MAPS International, directed by the University of Cape Town’s Energy Research Centre in partnership with the NGO SouthSouthNorth, and with financial support from the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, based in the United Kingdom.

In the search for developing countries interested in solutions for mitigating their GHG emissions, the initiative came to Latin America, and MAPS country projects are now underway in Brazil, Colombia and Peru, as well as Chile.

Although Chile is a minor contributor to global GHG emissions (0.2%), the country’s emissions have grown at an alarming rate, increasing by 232 percent between 1990 and 2006, according to the Ministry of Environment.

In response, the South American country made a voluntary commitment at the COP in Copenhagen to reduce its emissions by 20 percent by 2020.

The “exponential growth” in GHG emissions is a result of the expansion of the energy sector. “There has been very high development of thermoelectric power generation, while the share of hydroelectric power in our energy mix has decreased for various reasons,” explained Pirazzoli.

For environmental activist Juan Pablo Orrego, president of the Chilean NGO Ecosistemas (Ecosystems), this trend “is very troubling and is due to an extreme lack of caution, but also, and above all, to the sharp rise in the carbon intensity of the energy mix.”

“Obviously, Chile’s emissions are insignificant compared to those produced by countries like the United States and China,” said Orrego. Nevertheless, “we all know that the central region of the country is suffering from desertification, that there are 104 municipalities facing emergency situations in terms of water supply, and that the glaciers in the south are melting,” he said.

Orrego, who holds a Master’s degree in environmental studies and was the winner of a 1998 Right Livelihood Award (considered the “Alternative Nobel Prize”), believes that MAPS does not reflect “a sense of urgency proportional to the problem we are facing in terms of climate change.”

“I don’t see alarm, I see something very superficial,” he stated.

Pirazzoli, for his part, stressed that MAPS Chile involves the participation of seven different ministries (environment, foreign relations, energy, mining, finance, transportation and agriculture), “something unprecedented in the country, which demonstrates the political importance that the government has given to it.”

For the moment, MAPS Chile is focusing on laying the groundwork for the project, assessing potential emissions trajectories under two possible scenarios.

The first is the “business as usual” scenario, in which no changes are made to the current situation. The other is the “required by science” scenario, which would entail following the most stringent recommendations of climate experts to limit and reduce GHG emissions.

Orrego criticized the fact that a business as usual scenario is being assessed as a potential option, because he believes that the situation is much more complex than it seems.

“These types of projects are totally out of synch with the views of the scientific community. What is being done is still very superficial, and is presented as if there were different options, when there are none,” he maintained.

During the first phase of MAPS Chile, these two trajectories are being studied to establish an emissions baseline.

“In addition, and in order to gather essential background, we have commissioned two preliminary studies, one of which evaluates the state of development of climate models to determine what will happen with the climate in the particular case of Chile, and this work has been completed,” said Blanco.

The second study theoretically estimates future volumes of Chilean GHG emissions based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The second phase of the project will involve the development of alternative pathways to the mitigation of emissions.

Finally, the third phase, scheduled for late 2013, will focus on the dissemination of the findings and the analysis of mitigation initiatives, both public and private, with decision makers in the government, private sector and civil society.

“MAPS Chile is not a binding project, it does not constitute an obligation and will not be converted into a public policy or new legislation,” explained Pirazzoli.

It is essentially “an exploratory exercise” aimed at “generating relevant information so that decision makers can adopt the measures they deem appropriate in the future,” he added.

The project also provides space for participation, in which different stakeholders can form part of a group for the development of scenarios and a working group.

“The level of complexity, of the information and knowledge required, has led us to design a process in which specialists and representatives from different productive and institutional sectors actively participate,” said Blanco.

But participation should begin at the grassroots, with prior consultations, because it is the Chilean people who live with the devastating impacts of climate change, stressed Orrego.

They work with the precision of technicians and the enthusiasm of volunteers. They are indigenous inspectors documenting the damages caused by oil industry activity in three river basins in the Peruvian Amazon region.

Environmental monitors inspecting an old oil well. - Courtesy of Amazon Indigenous Peoples United in Defense of their Territories

Sandi is the coordinator of the Environmental Monitoring Program created by the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes River (FECONACO), which focuses its efforts on Lot 1AB and Lot 8, operated by the Argentine oil company Pluspetrol Norte.

Using GPS equipment, photographs and video recordings, the monitors document oil industry- related environmental liabilities that date back many years, as well as new oil leaks in rivers, streams and soils on which indigenous communities depend for their survival.

Since FECONACO began implementing the program in 2006, 120 leaks have been documented. Together with two other indigenous organizations in the vast territory of Loreto, in northeastern Peru, they have discovered environmental liabilities that even the government had not detected, and which are therefore not included in official records.

All together, the monitors from FECONACO, the Quechua Indigenous Federation of the Pastaza River (FEDIQUEP) and the Federation of Native Communities of the Alto Tigre River (FECONAT) comprise more than 40 inspectors who travel up and down these three river basins.

They are the trained eyes of the communities, who accumulate technical evidence to back up the denunciations and demands made by indigenous leaders to the government and the company, within a general climate of mistrust.

“This is the best mechanism that we have adopted as organizations,” Quechua leader David Chino, the vice president of FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica.

A fourth organization, the Cocama Association for the Development and Conservation of San Pablo de Tipishca (ACODECOSPAT), will soon replicate the initiative in the Marañón River basin to fill the large void left there by the government.

After four decades of oil drilling in Loreto, Peru has not managed to compile a complete and up-to- date registry of the environmental liabilities created by this industry in the region, much less in the rest of the Amazon region and the country as a whole.

Some 9,000 abandoned oil wells have been documented, mainly in the northern area of the country. More than 6,000 were improperly sealed and represent some type of environmental impact. Of the total, only 300 of the abandoned wells recorded are in the rainforest, engineer Jorge Villar from Peru’s energy and mining investment regulator, OSINERGMIN, told Tierramérica.

The government has made very little progress in locating abandoned and poorly sealed wells in the rainforest. As a result, “we are doing what the authorities should have dealt with a long time ago,” Sandi commented to Tierramérica.

Through their monitoring and documentation efforts, the indigenous leaders succeeded in capturing the government’s attention. A parliamentary delegation visited the area earlier this year and prepared a report on the situation.

They also managed to get the environmental control authorities to initiate the administrative processes for a field investigation and the environmental mapping of these river basins in Loreto. The ultimate goal is the updating of the registry of liabilities and new damages.

When Pluspetrol Norte began to operate in the area, the damages left behind in Lot 1AB by the U.S. oil transnational Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) had not been fully documented, as anthropologist Peter Rodríguez, an advisor to FEDIQUEP, told Tierramérica.

As a result, Pluspetrol could not be held responsible for the remediation of the damages it had inherited, and accurate monitoring of the damages caused by its own activities could not be implemented.

For the moment, the compilation of a full inventory of environmental liabilities, mandated by a law passed several years ago, remains at a standstill because OSINERGMIN and the new environmental regulatory agency created within the Ministry of Environment, the OEFA, cannot agree upon which agency should be responsible for this task.

Frustrated with this bureaucratic limbo, indigenous communities decided to take matters into their own hands, said Sandi.

“In the past the company would say, this picture could be from Ecuador. Who knows where it was really taken? But now all of our photographs and videos are stamped with coordinates. We don’t lie,” he added.

As a result of legal proceedings initiated by indigenous communities, the Dorissa Agreement was signed in October 2006 between Pluspetrol Norte, FECONACO and the regional government of Loreto, under which the company was to undertake remediation and development work in the areas affected. Among the commitments assumed by the company was financing of the indigenous environmental monitoring program.

In addition, the company is obliged to supply information in order for the monitors to carry out their work.

The indigenous organizations provide ongoing training for the monitors on matters related to environmental engineering, hydrocarbons, the operation of equipment, and other subjects.

And today it is these organizations who have the most complete databank of environmental damages. FECONACO alone has compiled 22,500 digital files.

The work of the monitors is grueling. For two weeks out of every month, they make their way through endless kilometers of dense rainforest, and their work day rarely lasts a mere eight hours. While the monitors initially took part as volunteers, those who work in the Corrientes River basin now receive a symbolic salary of just under 300 dollars a month.

All of the monitors are selected by their own community, and most have completed secondary school studies. They range in age between 18 and 60.

They are also given ongoing encouragement to keep up their efforts, so as to continue gaining ever greater skills and knowledge. This is important, since some younger monitors have been lured away by Pluspetrol to work on its own monitoring teams, or tempted with new jobs in the city, said Rodríguez.

Now the organizations are pushing for official recognition of this program by the Loreto regional government and adoption of a proposed law on indigenous environmental monitoring.

The political context is interesting. The first prior consultation undertaken in Peru in compliance with the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries is scheduled to take place in Loreto.

Indigenous leaders see this as an opportunity to demand that the government provide solutions for the environmental damages that have accumulated here over the course of decades.

Researchers at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil are collecting and storing genetic material from monkeys in the genus Saimiri, commonly known as squirrel monkeys, to prevent the extinction of a sub-species endemic to the Amazon rainforest. The black squirrel monkey (Saimiri vanzolinii) is classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. It lives within a range of about 870 km of rainforest in the center of the Amazon. This whole area is protected by the Mamirauá Institute, which estimates the monkey’s current population at about 45,000.

“These monkeys live in lowland areas near rivers, which makes them vulnerable to climate change,” biologist Fernanda Pozzan Paim told Tierramérica.

"If the water level of these rivers rises, the already reduced population could disappear. The samples we are taking will help to understand the reproductive cycle of this primate, to define strategies for its conservation, and in the future, to conduct in vitro fertilization,” she added.

The World Bank will be advising Honduras on the requirements to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). In late November, the government adopted a decree on EITI membership, reported presidential aide Roberto Herrera Cáceres. Now a World Bank mission will guide the country through the necessary requirements to be admitted to the initiative.

The EITI is an international coalition of governments, the private sector and civil society aimed at enhancing governance in countries rich in natural resources through the publication and verification of payments made by companies and tax revenues earned from the oil, gas and mining industries.

In a year and a half, the Honduran authorities plan to present a report to the EITI Board in order to gain admission, Herrera told Tierramérica. The funds received will be used for sustainable and human development projects.

Environmental organizations in Chile have expressed outrage over the ministerial approval granted for the construction of the Punta Alcalde thermoelectric power plant in the municipality of Huasco, 645 km north of Santiago. This “mistaken” decision demonstrates that “pressure from the mining sector has won out over the common good of the people of the Huasco Valley, who already face critical levels of pollution,” activist Alex Muñoz, the director of the NGO Oceana, told Tierramérica.

In November 2011, the Ministry of Environment declared a temporary moratorium on further energy sector development in the Huasco Valley, and on June 25 of this year, the project submitted by energy company Endesa-Enel was rejected by the Environmental Assessment Commission of the region of Atacama.

However, the ministers accepted the mitigation plan presented by the company for the area, where the Guacolda thermoelectric power plant and an iron mill run by the Compañía Minera del Pacífico already operate.

Communities along the banks of a tributary of the São Francisco adopt innovative measures to adapt to the diversion of the famous river’s course.

One of the small dams near the Dos Cochos River with water from a recent rainfall. - Mario Osava/IPS

That was three decades ago, before sedimentation and the loss of its sources turned the 38- kilometer-long river into an intermittent stream. Although returning the river to its original conditions may seem like an impossible task, concerted efforts have succeeded in recovering at least part of its former flow.

“Where I live, it only dried up for around three weeks this year. In the past it disappeared for four or five months,” reports Jaci Borges, a local resident and activist with Caritas, a Catholic organization that supports this and many other solidarity-based development initiatives in the area.

Saving the Dos Cochos and other small rivers is key to revitalizing the São Francisco River, the largest waterway in northeastern Brazil. Nine large and medium-sized hydroelectric dams on the São Francisco provide the region with electricity. The Dos Cochos, a sub-tributary, forms part of its watershed.

Of the 36 direct tributaries of the São Francisco, known as the “river of national integration” because it flows through the center and northeast of Brazil, 16 were already intermittent in 2005, according to journalist Marco Antonio Coelho, the author of a book about the river’s evolution, “Os Descaminhos do São Francisco”.

The population living along the banks of the Dos Cochos – 300 families or around 1,500 people – began to react to the deterioration of their river in 2001. Preparations for taking action, which included the creation of the Dos Cochos River Sub- Watershed Association and discussion of what to do, lasted three years.

Beginning in 2004, they constructed 850 “barraginhas”, small circular dams near highways and other roads where the water from river flooding or heavy rains flows. This prevents sediment, which is abundant because of the sandy soil in the area, from being washed into the river and continuing to block it.

In addition, the land around these small dams becomes moist and feeds the water table in an area where rain is scarce and serious droughts are frequent, such as the one afflicting the semi-arid Brazilian northeast since last year.

The Dos Cochos River flows through the municipalities of Cônego Marinho and Januária, in the north of the state of Minas Gerais. Here the climate is similar to that in the rest of the interior of northeastern Brazil, where the average annual rainfall ranges from 250 to 750 millimeters.

In addition to the dams, work has been underway for the last three years to restore the forests along the river, by building a fence 30 meters from its banks to keep cattle out. Although not everyone has joined in this campaign, it is still impressive to see how the vegetation has naturally recovered in the areas that have been protected, without the need for planting new trees, commented Matos.

The little river has become a model for successful revitalization, earning press and television coverage in recent years.

The river’s deterioration was caused by deforestation of nearby hills and the replacement of native forests with eucalyptus plantations for charcoal production, stimulated by government policies since the 1970s. The river’s gradual death also dealt a heavy blow to local agricultural production.

“Many of its sources dried up, some of them blocked by sediment,” said Borges.

Minas Gerais is the Brazilian state with the greatest mining activity, which is in turn linked to railway transportation and the iron and steel industry, both major consumers of charcoal.

But extensive cattle grazing has also contributed to the river’s deterioration, due to the damage caused to the forest and soil along its banks, until the protective fence was installed. In addition, cattle ranching required the replacement of the natural vegetation with large stretches of pasture land, which is more prone to erosion and thus results in more sediment being washed into the river.

Matos, 57, and his five brothers share 200 hectares of land where they raise crops and cattle. Of his three sons, one has already moved to the nearby city, Januária, and “another of them wants to go, too,” he lamented.

“Living here is good, but surviving is difficult,” because rainfall is very irregular, and “after two months without rain, everything is lost,” he said.

Another difficulty facing local communities is the fact that the highways are unpaved and do not receive adequate maintenance, said Borges. This lack of attention from the municipal authorities not only affects transportation, but also the “barraginhas” constructed to save the river.

The most recent rains broke the poorly constructed dikes along a stretch of highway where they were installed roughly 50 meters apart to hold back the sudden rush of water. This led to a domino effect in which the barraginhas further downstream could not withstand the overflow of water that was not properly contained upstream, Borges explained.

The local watershed association plans to call on the municipal authorities to reform a 6.5- kilometer stretch of highway in order to test a model that could serve later for its entire length, he added.

The recovery of this small river through the efforts of the local communities themselves could serve as an example for the revitalization of the São Francisco, a promise made by the federal government to compensate for the diversion of this major river – a major undertaking aimed at improving the water supply in four states in the northeast that will benefit 12 million people, according to the official plans.

But very little is being done, except for basic – and incomplete – clean-up efforts in a few cities, and nothing to reforest the banks of the river and its tributaries, according to Roberto Malvezzi of the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission.

Numerous studies estimate that the São Francisco has lost a third of its flow since the mid-20th century. Many of its tributaries and sub- tributaries dried up in Minas Gerais, where most of its branches originate.

Cattle ranching and monoculture plantations – of soybeans, coffee, rice and other grains, in addition to eucalyptus trees – provoke deforestation and are the main causes of this water disaster, by “breaking the hydrologic cycle,” said Apolon Heringuer-Lisboa, founder and director of the Manuelzão Project, which is aimed at recuperating the Das Velhas River.

The main problem with the Das Velhas is that it runs through the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, and is therefore polluted with the city’s urban and industrial wastewater before flowing into the São Francisco.

Some 45 municipalities in the so-called dry corridor of Honduras have begun work on a project to promote reforestation, food security and climate change resilience in order to improve living conditions for their communities. The project, supported by the governmental Forest Conservation Institute and the World Food Programme, will be carried out over the course of five years and is expected to benefit some 12,800 families.

Neptalí Amador, a local government councilor in Marcovia, in the southern department of Choluteca, told Tierramérica that female heads of household there will be in charge of a nursery that will produce 1.5 seedlings a year to be used in reforestation. This will contribute to the recovery of water sources, the protection of vulnerable communities exposed to climate risks, and the diversification of subsistence farming.

Marcovia is the pilot area for the project. The other departments included are La Paz and El Paraíso, also in the south.

Residents of the southern province of Chubut, in the Patagonia region of Argentina, are fighting a proposed legal reform that would allow large-scale open-pit mining, involving the use of toxic substances, in this area. In 2003, the residents of Esquel promoted a non- binding referendum in which 82 percent of voters stated their opposition to large-scale mining. That same year, a provincial law was adopted which endorsed this opposition.

But now the government of Chubut is proposing a regulatory framework which, without revoking the law, would permit mega mining with cyanide and sulfuric acid in the center of the province, where there are copper, silver, gold and uranium reserves.

Javier Rodríguez Pardo of the Union of Citizens Assemblies of Chubut told Tierramérica that the reform “fully opens the doors” to mega mining without providing any guarantees against contamination of the water and soil.

The French Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) has granted a special recognition award to the “Energy, Innovation and Performance in Urban Lighting” project being implemented by the leftist government of Mexico City. “The product of an exemplary public-private partnership, this project provides for the complete and sustainable management of public lighting on the main thoroughfares and in the historic center of Mexico City,” ADEME president François Loos told Tierramérica.

Since 2010, the city government has been replacing 250-watt streetlights with energy-saving lighting systems to provide nighttime illumination throughout almost the entire city of eight million inhabitants.

The government of Marcelo Ebrard, who will be replaced on Dec. 6 by Miguel Mancera, has executed the project in conjunction with the French company Citelum.

According to a survey conducted by the Brazilian Water Program, 64 percent of Brazilians still do not have access to selective waste collection as a means of recycling. Among those excluded from selective waste collection services, 85 percent said they would be willing to separate recyclable waste if they had the opportunity, the study revealed. The Brazilian Water Program was created though a partnership between the state bank Banco do Brasil, the Brazilian chapter of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), and the National Water Agency.

“The deadline set by the National Solid Waste Policy for municipalities to offer selective waste collection and eliminate dumpsters is less than two years away. At this rate of progress, the targets will not be met,” Fábio Cidrin of WWF- Brazil told Tierramérica.

The Aukin Wallmapu indigenous community in Alto Bíobío, 500 kilometers south of Santiago, has denounced the presence of cracks and leaks in the Ralco hydroelectric dam. Both the company and the government have denied any potential hazards, and claimed that the situation at the hydro plant is “absolutely and totally normal.”

But the denunciations have been backed by environmental activist Patricio Segura, who filmed the cracks and published the footage.

Segura told Tierramérica, “It is deplorable that the community itself has to practically conduct espionage work to get the authorities to react, and that a major company like this does not continuously supply information.” The cracks appeared after the earthquake of Feb. 27, 2010.

Researchers at Venezuela’s University of the Andes are urging the government to adopt a management plan for the 7,000 hectares of the Caparo Experimental Station, the remnant of what was a forest covering millions of hectares in the country’s western lowlands less than a century ago. “We are calling for this remnant to be declared a National Park, and for a management plan to be established for the forest reserve in which it is located – decreed in 1961 with 175,000 hectares, but decimated by logging companies until the year 2000,” the researcher in charge of the station, Wilfredo Franco, told Tierramérica.

The forest’s deterioration is also due to “the roughly 10,000 people who have occupied it to carry out agricultural and livestock raising activities,” he added.

There are still 16 forest communities remaining in the station, with 191 tree species, 61 species of mammals, 248 of birds, 30 of amphibians, seven of snakes, numerous species of fish and insects, and a still undetermined diversity of microbes. This is what remains of what was once seven million hectares of forests in southwestern Venezuela and a roughly equal area in eastern Colombia.

The University of São Paulo will construct a photovoltaic power plant, in association with a local electric company, which will be the third solar power plant and the second to supply electricity to the public grid in Brazil. The plant will be powered by 2,500 solar panels to be installed in the city and will have a generating capacity of 500 kilowatts. The total cost of the project is estimated at 6.4 million dollars, and it will be overseen by the Ministry of Energy of the state of São Paulo.

This is one of 18 projects approved in 2011 by the National Electric Power Agency to lower the cost of solar power generation to one third of the current cost of almost 145 dollars per megawatt/hour.

“When the power generation source is connected to the distribution grid, data will be gathered that will help to evaluate its performance,” Rafael Herrero Alonso, an engineer at the Integrated Systems Laboratory and one of the project directors, told Tierramérica.

Women farmers in seven departments of Honduras are working towards higher-quality, environmentally friendly agricultural production to gain better access to markets and fairer prices. They are participating in an initiative promoted by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Inter- American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), aimed at strengthening food security and environmental protection in the department of Olancho, in northeast Honduras, El Paraíso, in the south, Comayagua, in the center of the country, Yoro, in the north, and Lempira, Intibucá and Ocotepeque, in the west.

The main beneficiaries are women heads of household who are now producing better quality grains that they are able to sell at fair prices on the national market, Miguel Barreto, WFP representative in Honduras, told Tierramérica. The goal is to break into the regional market and to replicate the model in other IICA initiatives, he added.

Agricultural researchers in Cuba are using radiation in an attempt to develop banana, rice, avocado and tomato strains that are more resistant to drought and salinity, as part of a Latin American cooperation project. “Many areas of the country have saline soils as a result of seawater penetration, drought and the widespread use of chemical fertilizers, among other causes. There is a growing demand for crops that will grow in difficult conditions like these,” researcher Orlando Coto of the governmental Institute for Tropical Fruit Production Research told Tierramérica.

The initiative, which will be expanded in 2013, will maintain the current studies, which use induced mutation techniques, and incorporate work on citrus fruit crops, he explained. “We are currently irradiating avocado tree seeds and leaf buds, but more time is needed in the case of fruit trees,” he added.

The Cuban research is part of a wider project being carried out under the Regional Cooperation Agreement for the Promotion of Nuclear Science and Technology in Latin America and the Caribbean, with the participation of 10 countries.

Young volunteers from the Vida Foundation of Honduras have launched a six-month campaign to raise awareness among street market vendors in Tegucigalpa of the importance of proper waste management and recycling. The campaign targets three street markets in the capital and includes talks on waste management, efficient water usage and the development of minimum standards of cleanliness, Vida Foundation representative Carlos Calderón told Tierramérica.

The volunteers are students of environmental engineering, medicine and tourism. Their goal is to make the city’s street market areas more environmentally friendly, and to prevent the flooding and damages caused by piles of garbage that clog sewers, especially during the rainy season.

This is one of the main causes of disasters in these areas, according to the authorities.

The Argentine government is blocking final approval of a bill on electronic waste that was passed four years ago by the country’s senate, according to the Argentine branch of Greenpeace. “The (ruling party) deputies decided not to sign the bill until it is endorsed by Minister of Industry Débora Giorgi, which means it could expire by the end of the month, and the process would have to start all over again,” Greenpeace activist Consuelo Bilbao told Tierramérica.

Argentina produces around 120,000 tons of e-waste annually, according to Greenpeace figures. There is no legal framework for the disposal of waste electronic equipment, which contains substances that pollute the water, air and soil.

The current bill establishes “extended producer responsibility” for recycling and final disposal. Bilbao maintained that by blocking the passage of the bill, Giorgi is serving the interests of the business sector, which is opposed to the legislation.

The energy and waste sectors were responsible for the emission of 16.43 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalents in São Paulo last year, according to a study commissioned by the city’s department of the environment. The two sectors together account for 95 percent of emissions in the city, Brazil’s largest and most populous.

Last year’s total emissions of CO2 equivalents (a combination of emissions of carbon, methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases) surpassed the 16.087 billion tons produced in 2010 and the 15.11 billion tons in 2003, when emissions were first measured.

“The increase in emissions was small compared to 2010. This is mainly the result of the replacement of gasoline with ethanol. Motor vehicles are the primary source of emissions. This change contributes to lower figures,” Vinicius Ambrogi, the technical manager of Geoklock, one of the firms that conducted the study, told Tierramérica.

Brazil has become the latest country to join the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), dedicated to promoting free and open access to data on biological diversity. Currently 58 countries and 46 organizations contribute data on animal, plant and microorganism species, gathered from museum specimens, field observations of plants and animals in nature, and results from experiments.

Some 388 million records stored in over 10,000 databanks are freely available to researchers around the world thanks to the GBIF.

Brazil is estimated to contain 15 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. It could contribute some 30 million records to the platform, although only five million will be digitized and available immediately.

“Integrating data provides fundamental knowledge for sustainable development,” Carlos Nobre, the secretary of Research and Development Policies and Programs at the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, told Tierramérica.

The Microfinance Network of Honduras (Redmicroh) is promoting small-scale clean energy projects through its 27 member organizations willing to finance family farmers interested in entering this field. The initiative, called "Mipymes Verde" (My Green SME), will support families with limited resources who want to set up microenterprises involving the generation of renewable energy, Redmicroh director Martha Salgado told Tierramérica.

“We are talking about options for the rural sector, for learning to use solar energy and thereby contributing to reducing the energy consumption of their communities and families, as well as getting established as micro- entrepreneurs,” she said.

A Chilean court has ruled in favor of an appeal for legal protection filed by the community of Hualpén against Empresa Nacional del Petróleo, spurred by the foul odor produced by the oil company’s Biobío refinery in Concepción, 500 km south of Santiago. The ruling of the Concepción Court of Appeals is considered historic by the inhabitants of Hualpén, who are calling on the state for the relocation of their homes.

“We live less than 70 meters from the refinery and the smell and sound pollution are unbearable,” María Mendoza, a local resident and member of the environmental committee of the Villa el Triángulo community council, told Tierramérica.

The community is analyzing whether the court’s ruling could serve as grounds for a lawsuit seeking compensation. “It would be fully justified, because we have endured the pollution for years and no one has listened to us,” said Mendoza.

Argentine government certification to promote better social and environmental conditions in the textile industry has been granted for the first time to a clothing company. Clothing manufacturer Ombú has received the first Shared Social Commitment certification, awarded by the National Institute of Industrial Technology (INTI). But “there are others currently being processed,” INTI representative Javier Armesto told Tierramérica.

“We received thousands of applications, but only seven fulfilled the basic requirements,” he said. “The biggest challenge in this sector is proving that workers throughout the production chain are duly registered,” he noted.

To earn certification, companies must prove that they do not use child or forced labor, that workers in the entire supply and production chain are legally registered, that working conditions are hygienic and safe, and that the company’s operations respect the environment.

According to INTI figures, unregistered workers are employed at some point in the supply and production chain in 70 percent of companies in the textile sector, which makes it difficult to earn certification.