The North American Free Trade Agreement has encouraged illegal migration, says Mexican peasant Lucas Benítez, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, in a conversation with Tierramérica.
Coffee growers in eastern Cuba have significantly increased production with the application of fertilizer made from the waste material produced in processing the coffee for consumption.
Thirty thousand Indians from the Ecuadorian Amazon were able to put the U.S.-based petroleum giant ChevronTexaco in court on charges of environmental destruction.
Experts warn that it will take months or years for condor, deer, bear and other species to recover from the destruction of their habitat that occurred in the forest fires of late October in the U.S. state of California.
In an effort to attend to the problems of hunger and malnutrition, among others, the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 31 declared 2004 the International Year of Rice. Sixty percent of the world's 1.3 billion poor live in Asia, and rice is their principal sustenance.
The sanitation alarm sounded by Uruguayan authorities last week in the southern Ciudad de la Costa, the country's fastest growing urban center, came two years after residents, experts and activists warned of the problem.
The Canadian mining company Manhattan, backed by Peru's Ministry of Energy and Mines, called off the Nov. 7 public hearing on its gold exploitation plan for the northern city of Tambogrande after the mayor announced a general strike to protest the project.
Populations of 23 species of frogs and toads in Costa Rica have decreased, and 11 could become extinct, according to the studies conducted by biologists Gerardo Chaves and Federico Bolaños, from Costa Rica's National University.
Guatemala's Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources this month delivered aquatic research equipment for monitoring the Mesoamerican Reef System, which extends along the Caribbean coast from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, to Guatemala, Belize and Honduras.
Residents and officials in the northern Honduran region of Choloma are promoting the creation of an ecological museum near Ticamaya Lagoon in order to protect marine species and promote tourism.
- The environmental watchdog Greenpeace alerted the governments of Argentina and Chile about a nuclear waste shipment that left Australia last week and could pass through Cape Horn, a threat to the territorial waters of both countries.
Despite their exclusion from society, indigenous communities in Latin America are gaining ground in the political arena. They have brought down two governments and wield increasing influence at the local and parliamentary levels.
Little is known about the huge Guaraní Aquifer, an underground reservoir of freshwater for the countries of Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay). Experts are preparing long-term plans to preserve it.
Chile's principal indigenous community -- some 700,000 people -- is seeking a system for self-determination, but without undermining the integrity of the state.
In an effort to attend to the problems of hunger and malnutrition, among others, the United Nations General Assembly on Oct. 31 declared 2004 the International Year of Rice. Sixty percent of the world's 1.3 billion poor live in Asia, and rice is their principal sustenance.
Politicians are demanding the recovery of control over the strategic Sumapaz Basin, which they say is used by the insurgent FARC to traffic people, arms and drugs.
Ecologist groups say the environmental proposals of the governor-elect of the U.S. state of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, are vague -- and they are going to demand concrete answers.
The consequences of failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on curbing climate change could be very serious, Mario Molina, Nobel laureate in chemistry, says in a dialogue with Tierramérica.
An internationally backed project for the western Cuban province of Pinar del Río aims to protect the area's wetlands and waterfowl.
Some 80 head of cattle, direct descendants of the livestock brought to the Americas by Christopher Columbus, have been removed from the glacier-covered mountains of southern Argentina. Experts aim to study their genetic makeup.
Several groups of Brazilian Indians are beginning to use the Internet, thanks to the Peoples of the Forest Network, a project of the non-governmental Committee for the Democratization of Information Technologies (CDI)