Representatives of a dozen environmental organisations, united in the Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador, speak out against Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s goal to reopen this industry, banned by law since 2017. Credit: Roundtable Against Metal Mining in El Salvador

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Dec 10 2024 (IPS)

Metal mining has a renewed momentum in Central America, encouraged by populist rulers who, in order to soften environmental damage, claim they can develop it in harmony with nature, which is hard to believe

Thus, they seek to win the approval of a majority that seems to follow them blindly, but not environmentalists or other social sectors, activists told IPS.

“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country,” Rodolfo Calles, an activist with the Association of Salvadoran Community Promoters, told IPS, referring to the interest shown by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in reactivating metal mining, which has been banned for seven years.“The mere popularity of President Bukele is not enough to say that the mine will not contaminate the country”: Rodolfo Calles.

Central America, an isthmus of six nations and 64 million inhabitants, is one of the most environmentally vulnerable regions, where activists and social defenders have been warning for decades about the negative impacts the metal mining industry has had on their ecosystems.

As a result of these struggles, a law banning all forms of metal mining was passed in El Salvador in March 2017, the first measure of its kind in the world and considered a historic milestone.

Costa Rica had done the same in 2010, but only for open-pit mining, and other countries have halted specific projects, such as in Guatemala and Honduras, and Panama last year.

Central America is a region rich in biodiversity and natural resources. It has abundant water and forests as well as mineral resources. With the exception of Belize, the only country without significant mineral deposits, significant quantities of metals such as gold, silver or zinc, as well as nickel, copper and other minerals can be found in all territories.

But several studies indicate that the mining industry’s economic contribution is minimal in the area, and in the case of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, it has not exceeded 1% of their gross domestic product (GDP). GDP per capita in the region is around US$6,000.

Guatemala is the Central American country with the greatest mineral wealth, metallic and non-metallic, while Panama and El Salvador have much lower concentrations of mineral elements of interest, according to a study.

Panama saw its largest protests in three decades, against the largest copper mine in Central America. As a result, in November 2023, a law established an indefinite moratorium on mining. Credit: Luis Mendoza / Mongabay

Going backwards

Now El Salvador and Costa Rica, ruled by leaders labelled as populist, are taking steps backwards.

“Bukele launches the issue because he relies on the credibility he claims to have as president and people’s misinformation,” Calles stressed.

Despite his authoritarian nature, the president continues to enjoy broad popular support, according to all opinion polls.

Meanwhile, Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves announced on 27 November that he had submitted a bill to the unicameral National Assembly to reverse the ban on open-pit mining, setting off alarm bells in a country renowned for its efforts to preserve the environment.

The intention is to finally give the green light to a gold mine that had already won a concession but was cancelled when the 2010 ban came into force, based on the constitutional premise that citizens have the right to live in a healthy environment.

The mine is located in the town of Crucitas, in the province of Alajuela, in the north of the country. It is owned by the Canadian consortium Infinito Gold.

But President Chaves wants to reverse the ban.

“Right now we are just seeing how we are going to counteract what is coming,” Erlinda Quesada, a Costa Rican environmentalist with the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, an organisation that, among other things, seeks to protect water sources from intensive monoculture production, told IPS.

In a telephone conversation from the town of Guácimo, in the province of Limón, in the northwest of the country, Quesada added: “It is no secret to anyone that we have a populist government that… is ingratiating itself with these humble sectors, the poorest in the country, and holding them in its hands” when it wants to approve the proposal.

Meanwhile, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega intensified his relationship with China by granting, also on 27 November, the fifth concession to Xinjiang Xinxin Mining Industry.

The new 1,500-hectare mining project is located between the municipalities of Santo Domingo and La Libertad, in central Nicaragua. In all, the consortium’s operations cover 43,000 hectares.

These concessions granted by Ortega’s dictatorial regime would appear to be, in addition to the economic benefit, a move to tighten links with China and annoy the United States, which is seeking to curb the Asian power on the world geopolitical stage.

In September 2022, the people of Asunción Mita in eastern Guatemala voted against the Cerro Blanco mining project owned by Elevar Resources, a subsidiary of Canada’s Bluestone Resources. The ‘no’ won. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Bukele’s economic hope

Out of the blue, Bukele posted a message on the social network X on 27 November showing his interest in the country’s return to the extractive industry, arousing concern among social sectors that, after a long struggle, had succeeded in getting the Legislative Assembly to ban mining in March 2017.

“We are the only country in the world with a total ban on metallic mining, something that no other country applies. Absurd!” the president wrote.

He added that this wealth can be harnessed responsibly to bring “unprecedented” economic and social development to the Salvadoran people.

That development is what he has promised to deliver in his second five-year presidential term, beginning in June 2024, after winning the elections in February amid sharp criticism that the constitution did not allow him to participate in a second, consecutive election.

Then, on 1 December, in a public act, the president tried to justify his extractivist project stating that the country’s mining potential is enough for an accumulated wealth of three trillion dollars, equivalent to 8,800 % of the current Salvadoran GDP.

There are around 50 million ounces of gold in the subsoil, equivalent to 132 billion dollars at current value. But it’s not just gold and silver, he said.

“According to our initial studies, we have found metals of the fourth industrial revolution, such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, which are used to make batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage,” he claimed.

Rare earth minerals, used for advanced electronics, wind turbines and electric vehicle motors, as well as platinum, palladium and iridium to produce hydrogen and catalytic converters, among others, have also been detected, he added.

Bukele said there will always be environmental impacts in any development project, but they can be minimised. As his New Ideas party controls the Legislative Assembly, it would be very easy for him to revive mining in El Salvador.

An anti-mining banner at a church in El Salvador. Social mobilisation against mining projects has been key in trying to stop the operations of these consortiums and prevent soil and water contamination in the communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

Cheerful accounts

“The president is making happy accounts of the supposed economic benefits that would be obtained, but he is not accounting for the real damage that would be done to the ecosystems,” said Calles, a Salvadoran who has been fighting against the mines for years.

He added that when the ban on mining in the country was being discussed, Bukele was already involved in politics, and knew there were studies showing that the industry was unfeasable in El Salvador because of its negative impacts on water, soil and people’s health.

“I don’t know where he gets the idea that the impacts will be less. What we know is that mining extraction techniques have not changed significantly, and cyanide, for example, is still being used,” he said. This is a chemical compound that, if misused or unintentionally leached into bodies of water, can be lethal.

Central America’s experience with the extractive industry is negative and long-standing, as in other regions of the world.

At a forum organised in 2009 in San José, Costa Rica, by the Latin American Water Tribunal, the regional experiences of open-pit mining in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Peru were analysed and testimonies were heard about the adverse effects in these countries.

These included testimonies from representatives of the Honduran Association of Non-Governmental Organisations and the Environmental Committee of the Siria Valley, where the San Martín mining project, run by Minerales Entre Mares de Honduras, was operating at the time. It was shut down in 2008.

In 2022, the international organisation Oxfam stated that the mine left behind “a trail of complaints about human health (…), as well as reports of contamination and destruction of flora, fauna and local ecosystems; economic, social and cultural damage to the communities”.

Meanwhile, in late 2023, Panama ordered the closure of the largest copper mine in Central America, operated by Minera Panama, a subsidiary of Canada’s First Quantum Minerals. This came after the courts ruled that the concession contract was unconstitutional.

The closure was the result of massive social protests, due to allegations of serious environmental contamination, and led the government to promote a law establishing moratorium on mining activity in the country for an indefinite period of time.

In Guatemala, social mobilization led to court rulings that stopped the country’s main mining projects.

“The most emblematic projects have been suspended by the Constitutional Court, whose members, although corrupt, accepted that the companies never complied with two fundamental requirements: providing information to the community and holding citizen consultations,” Julio González, of the Madreselva Collective, told IPS from Guatemala City.

González added that these include the nickel mine owned by the Solway Investment Group, located in the municipality of El Estor, and El Escobal, owned by the Canadian company Pan American Silver, near San Rafael Las Flores, both in the east of the country.

The Progreso VII Derivada mine, known as La Puya, owned by Exploraciones Mineras de Guatemala, in the central-south department of Guatemala, as well as Cerro Blanco, owned by Canadian Bluestone Resources, located in the vicinity of Asunción Mita, in the eastern department of Jutiapa, have also been added to the list.

González questioned the authenticity of the environmental impact studies carried out by the mining consortiums, as they are based on a specific, very restricted geographical area.

“The biggest lie are these environmental impact studies, carried out in the so-called areas of influence, which is the place where the mine is located and the three or four surrounding villages, but the water, which is going to be contaminated, goes far beyond this area of influence,” he said.

On El Salvador’s backtracking on the possible reactivation of mining, he added: “What I see is Bukele’s alignment with the hegemonic economy, which is not exercised by the US government but by US corporations”.

Medardo Pérez, 60, sprays paraquat, a potent herbicide, to kill the weeds growing in his corn crop in the San Isidro canton of the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador. Most small farmers in Central America use this and other agrochemicals on their crops, just as agribusiness does on monocultures such as bananas, pineapples, coffee and sugar cane. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SANTA MARÍA OSTUMA, El Salvador , Aug 21 2023 (IPS)

In his green cornfield, Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez set about filling the hand-held spray pump that hangs on his back, with the right mixture of water and paraquat, a potent herbicide, and began spraying the weeds.

Paraquat, the active ingredient in brands such as Gramaxone, from the German pharmaceutical manufacturer Bayer, is sold without any restrictions in El Salvador and in other nations in Central America and around the world, despite its toxicity and the fact that the label clearly states “controlled product”."We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don't even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores." -- Medardo Pérez

“We are risking our lives with these poisons, since we don’t even use a waterproof cape to protect ourselves, so the chemical wets our backs, it gets inside our bodies, through our pores,” the farmer from San Isidro, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, in the central Salvadoran department of La Paz, told IPS.

Pérez, 60, said he was aware of the risks to his health, but added that using the agrochemical made it easier and faster for him to get rid of the weeds growing in his cornfield on his two-hectare farm.

“Paraquat is restricted here in Guatemala, but it is commonly used in agriculture; any peasant farmer can buy it; it is sold freely,” David Paredes, an activist with the National Network for the Defense of Food Sovereignty in Guatemala, told IPS.

In 2016 the New York Times reported that scientific reports linked paraquat to Parkinson’s disease, and explained that the product could not be sold in Europe but could be marketed in the United States and the rest of the world.

Agrochemicals everywhere and no controls

Central America is a region where these and other agrochemicals are imported and marketed with virtually no controls, and where governments appear to have given in to the interests of the powerful transnational corporations that produce and sell them.

Some 51 million people live in the region and 20 percent of jobs are in the agricultural sector, which accounts for a total of seven percent of the GDP of the seven countries of Central America.

In addition to small farmers, agroindustry in the region uses agrochemicals intensively to produce monocultures for export, such as bananas, pineapples, African palm, coffee and sugarcane.

Sugarcane is the raw material for the sugar that the region exports to the United States, Europe and even China, through trade agreements.

The sugar agribusiness uses glyphosate, patented in 1974 by the U.S.-based Monsanto, to accelerate sugarcane ripening, but there are reports around the world about the damage caused to the environment and to health, including possible cancer risks, as warned by environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

And yet it continues to be widely used in the region and in other parts of the world. Glyphosate is known by commercial names such as Roundup, also owned now by Germany’s Bayer.

“There is indiscriminate use of agrochemicals by agribusiness,” Paredes said from his country’s capital, Guatemala City.

Paredes shared with IPS the preliminary results of a study, still underway, that has detected the presence of 49 chemicals in the water due to the use of pesticides, half of them banned in more than 120 countries, he said.

The research has been carried out along the southern coast of the country, where monocultures such as sugar cane, banana, African palm and pineapple are predominant, he said.

Juan Mejía, a small farmer, takes a break from his daily chores on his two-hectare plot in the El Carrizal canton, in the municipality of Santa María Ostuma, El Salvador. Mejía still continues to use herbicides such as paraquat, but has reduced their use by 90 percent, and is now shifting to agroecological production. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala

The fight against agrochemicals

“Glyphosate is applied through aerial spraying, it is very common in that area, and when the wind spreads it to the crops of poor communities, their harvests are destroyed,” he said.

The same is true in El Salvador, where environmental organizations have been carrying out the Bitter Sugar campaign for several years, against the indiscriminate use of glyphosate, in particular, and agrochemicals in general.

“In this campaign we have protested the fact that spraying by light aircraft continues, and that it is punishable, as an environmental crime,” Alejandro Labrador, of the Ecological Unit of El Salvador (UNES), told IPS.

In September 2013, El Salvador’s single-chamber legislature approved a ban on 50 agrochemicals, including paraquat and glyphosate. But the decree was rejected by then President Mauricio Funes and the bill has been bogged down ever since.

However, except for a list of 11 products – including paraquat and glyphosate – the agrochemicals that the legislature wanted to ban were already regulated by other national and international regulations, although in practice there is little or no state control over their use in the fields.

“The corporate lobby twisted their arm,” Labrador said, alluding to the failed attempt to ban them via legislative decree.

He also hinted at the influence exercised over presidents and government officials by transnational biotechnology corporations such as Bayer and Monsanto, whose interests are usually defended by the agricultural chambers of the Central American region.

He added that El Salvador is the Central American country that imports the most agrochemicals per year, “at a very high cost to ecosystems and people’s health.”

In this regard, in the last decade, the use of glyphosate during the sugar cane harvest has been linked to a high rate of kidney failure in El Salvador.

This nation has the highest rate of deaths from chronic kidney disease in Central America: 47 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per year, according to a UNES report published in 2021, which states that 80,000 tons of fertilizers, 3,000 tons of herbicides and 1,200 tons of fungicides are imported annually into El Salvador.

The bittersweet taste of pineapple

In Costa Rica, the use of pesticides is also intensive in monoculture export crops like bananas and, above all, pineapples, activist Erlinda Quesada, of the National Front of Sectors Affected by Pineapple Production, told IPS.

Quesada pointed out that the product known generically as bromacil has been linked to cases of cancer, while nemagon has been linked to cases of infertility in men and women.

“It happened to us with the nemagon in banana production, which sterilized a lot of men in Costa Rica,” said Quesada, from Guásimo, a municipality in the province of Limón, on the country’s Atlantic coast.

Complaints from environmental organizations led the government to ban bromacil in 2017, due to the impact on underground water sources.

“However, I doubt that they have stopped using it,” Quesada said.

A report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) revealed in May 2022 that Costa Rica uses up to eight times more pesticides per hectare than other Latin American countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

“The average apparent use of pesticides in agriculture between 2012 and 2020 was 34.45 kilos per hectare, a figure higher than previous estimates” in the Central American country, the report cited, more than in OECD members Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile and Colombia.

One of the one-liter cans of paraquat that Salvadoran farmer Medardo Pérez used during a day’s work to eliminate weeds in his cornfield. Paraquat is one of the most widely used agrochemicals in Central America and the world, despite health risks and environmental contamination. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

A blow to food sovereignty

The focus on intensively produced monocultures among national and international economic leaders has ended up damaging the capacity to produce food for the local population, Wendy Cruz, of the local affiliate of the international farmers’ rights movement Via Campesina, told IPS from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

“Now it is the consortiums and elites that occupy large tracts of land to produce for global markets, and agrotoxins increasingly weaken the capacity of the land to produce food for our people,” Cruz said.

“We need to push for a change of model, with governments adopting an agroecological vision that sustains life,” she said.

Seeds of passion fertilize Brazil’s semiarid Northeast

This vision of producing agricultural products without damaging the environment with agrochemicals is shared by another Salvadoran, Juan Mejía, a 67-year-old small farmer who grows some of his products using ecological fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides.

Paraquat is still used, he said, to “burn the weeds,” but on a smaller scale, and he is trying to use it less and less. He also uses – but “very little” – Monarca, another Bayer pesticide, whose active ingredient is thiacloprid.

“We have learned to work organically, maybe not 100 percent, but as much as possible,” said Mejía, during a break in the work on his two-hectare plot, located in the canton of El Carrizal, also in Santa María Ostuma, in central El Salvador.

Mejía produces organic fertilizer known as gallinacea and a pesticide based on chili, onion, garlic and a little soap, with which he combats whiteflies, a pest that damages growing vegetables.

“It’s effective, but it doesn’t work automatically, right away, it takes a little more time,” he said.

He added: “We farmers have always mistakenly wanted to see immediate results, like we get with chemicals. But organic agriculture is a process, it is slower, but more beneficial to our health and the environment.”

In addition to milpa, a traditional ancestral pre-Hispanic system of planting corn, beans, chili peppers and pipián, a type of zucchini, Mejía grows citrus fruits, plantains (cooking bananas) and cacao.

“We have diversified and included other crops, such as green leafy vegetables, so that we are not buying contaminated products and are harvesting our own, healthier food,” he said.

Cahuita National Park, on Costa Rica's eastern Caribbean coast, is suffering a process of coastal erosion which is shrinking its beaches, while the coral reefs underwater are also feeling the impact of climate change. Credit: Diego Arguedas/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
CAHUITA, Costa Rica, Apr 14 2017 (IPS)

A few dozen metres from the Caribbean beach of Puerto Vargas, where you can barely see the white foam of the waves breaking offshore, is the coral reef that is the central figure of the ocean front of the Cahuita National Park in Costa Rica.

Puerto Vargas is known for the shrinking of its once long beach, as a result of erosion. The coast has lost dozens of metres in a matter of a few years, which has had an effect on tourists and on the nesting of sea turtles that used to come to lay their eggs.

Just as the beaches have been affected, there have been effects under water, in this area of the eastern province of Limón, which runs along the the country’s Caribbean coast from north to south.“We can test which corals are more resistant to the future conditions and that way we can create stronger ecosystems based on survivors that will tolerate the conditions that lie ahead.” -- Dave Vaughan

“The impact of the rise in sea level and changes in temperatures also affect the coral ecosystems,” Patricia Madrigal, Costa Rica’s vice minister of environment, told IPS.

The waters of the Caribbean sea are particularly fertile for corals, but the warming of the waters and acidification due to climate change threaten to wipe out these ecosystems, which serve as environmental and economic drivers for coastal regions.

The most visible effect is the coral bleaching phenomenon, which is a clear symptom that corals are sick. This happens when corals experience stress and expel a photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live in their tissues, producing oxygen in a symbiotic relationship. The algae are responsible for the colors of coral reefs, so when they are expelled, the reefs turn white, and the coral is destined to die.
According to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2015, there is clear evidence that 80 per cent of coral reefs in the Caribbean have bleached, and 40 per cent died during a critical period in 2005.

This is a recurring phenomenon all over the world. The report projected that 75 per cent of coral reefs in the world would suffer severe bleaching by the middle of this century, if greenhouse gas emissions are not curbed.

The coral reefs in the Caribbean make up about seven per cent of the world’s total, but play a key role in the economies of many coastal communities in the region.

The conservation of coral reefs goes beyond defending biodiversity. Coral reefs provide a living to nearly one billion people, offer protection by buffering coastal communities against storms and heavy swells, and bring in billions of dollars a year from tourism and fishing.

Because of this, experts from Costa Rica and the rest of the Caribbean region are calling for a halt to activities that cause global warming, such as the use of fossil fuels, and for research into how to restore coral reefs.

However, Caribbean countries should also think about reducing pollution, said biologist Lenin Corrales, head of the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre´s (CATIE) Environmental Modeling Laboratory.

A reef in an underwater mountain area in Coiba National Park, Panama. Credit: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

“How do you maintain the resilience of coral reefs? By not dumping sediments or agrochemicals on them. A sick coral reef is more easily going to suffer other problems,” Corrales told IPS at CATIE´s headquarters.

This argument is well-known in badly managed coastal areas: marine ecosystems suffer because of human activities on land and poor health makes them more vulnerable to other ailments.

In fact, an academic study published in 2012 showed that coral degradation along Panama’s Caribbean coast began before global warming gained momentum in the last few decades. Researchers blame deforestation and overfishing.

In terms of preparing for climate change, this means a step back: it is not possible to protect against future global warming ecosystems that the countries of the region have been undermining for decades.

The sediments as a result of deforestation or poor agricultural practices prevent the growth of corals, while overfishing affects certain species key to controlling algae that infest the reefs.

“Many of the fish that are eaten in the Caribbean are herbivorous and are the ones that control the populations of macroalgae that damage the coral,” said Corrales.

“With the herbivorous fish gone, in addition to the higher temperatures, the algae have a heyday,” said the expert.

A report published in 2014 by several organisations, including the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), notes that the absence of crucial herbivorous fish such as the parrotfish jeopardises the region’s coral reefs.

How long will these undersea riches last? No one knows for sure. All scenarios project severe impacts in the following decades, after many reefs suffered critical damage from the 2015 El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) weather phenomenon.

That is why experts such as Corrales warn that far from expecting an increase of one to two degrees Celsius as some scenarios project, fast changes in temperature should be considered, such as those associated with El Niño.

“People think that biodiversity is not going to die until the climate changes; but really biodiversity, and in this case coral reefs, are already suffering from thermal stress,” said the biologist.

When a coral reef spends 12 weeks with temperatures one degree higher than usual, it can suffer irreversible processes, he pointed out.
As the average sea level rises, it is more likely for the threshold to be reached, but even before that point it is also dangerous for coral. Stopping global warming does not guarantee a future for coral reefs, but it does give them better opportunities.

A possible way forward is being developed by the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Summerland Key, in the U.S. state of Florida, where researchers are growing corals in controlled environments to later reintroduce them in the ocean, as is done with seedlings from a greenhouse in reforestation efforts.

“We can actually test to see which would have a given resistance to future conditions and in that way build a stronger ecosystem of survivors for what the next years might bring,” Dave Vaughan, the head of the lab, told IPS in an interview by phone.

The team headed by Vaughan reintroduced 20,000 small corals to degraded areas of the reefs, in a process that will accelerate the recovery of these ecosystems.

In 2015, the lab received an investment of 5.1 million dollars to make Vaughan´s ambition possible: reintroducing one million coral fragments in the next five to ten years.

However, Vaughan himself admits that this is a mitigation measure to buy time. The real task to fight against climate change is reducing the emissions that cause the greenhouse effect.

“Coral restoration can give us a 10, 50 or 100 years head start, but eventually if the oceans continue to raise in temperature, there’s not too much hope,” he said.

Reynaldo Charles and Ezequiel Hudson talk with Eliécer Quesada (left to right) about the state of the breakwater on which they are standing. This is the part where the waves reach closest to the houses, and at high tide the water crosses over the new bicycle lane and the street and reaches the homes, in the town of Cienaguita on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Credit: Diego Arguedas/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
CIENEGUITA, Costa Rica, Mar 28 2017 (IPS)

Two years have gone by since the new government initiative which subsidises community works changed the face with which the coastal town of Cienaguita, on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, looks out to the sea.

In place of a battered path between the beach and the first houses, the investment allowed the construction of a paved coastal street with a bicycle lane, playgrounds for children and a sports space where groups of young people exercise around mid-morning, since March 2015.

“The boulevard has brought about a 180-degree change in this part of the community,” 67-year-old community leader Ezequiel Hudson told IPS about the new recreational spaces available to the 5,400 inhabitants of this town next to the city of Puerto Limón, in the centre of the country’s Caribbean coast.

However, the 2.5 million-dollar investment is threatened by coastal erosion and the rise in the level of water in the sea, which occasionally floods the new street.

Local residents of Cienaguita are worried about the effects that climate change may have on their town.“We have documented a rise in the sea level and in wind and wave speeds.” -- Omar Lizano

The most conservative estimates put the sea level rise between 20 and 60 centimetres by 2100, but new studies point to a still higher increase, which would irremediably damage the life of the whole town, whose inhabitants make a living fishing or working on the docks of Puerto Limón.

“A few days ago the sea rose, and covered the whole street,” said Reynaldo Charles, head of the town’s Association for Integral Development, on a mid-March tour through the area with IPS.

Community leaders and local residents are afraid that the waves will erode the foundations of the road and bicycle lane and end up destroying the new streeet, which everyone is so proud of. Charles and Hudson report that most of the almond trees that adorned the avenue have already disappeared.

The impact is uneven. In some places, the beach is full of sticks that the tide has washed up, and in the most critical areas, the waves have completely devoured the sand and stop just a dozen metres from the first houses.

It was not always like this. Local residents say that until a few years ago, the beach was 50 metres wide and children used to play there and adults would fish, in this town located 160 kilometres east of the capital, which is reached by a long, steep road which winds its way across the Cordillera Central mountains.

But now, the waves reach the doors of the houses at high tide and residents have to protect their homes with sandbags.

“This has to be solved now or in a matter of a few years, because this is a question of prevention,” 68-year-old retiree Eliécer Quesada told IPS, while looking at the breakwater that stops the Caribbean sea just a few steps from his house.

In front of him there is practically no beach, just the constant breaking of waves against the rocks placed there a few years ago by the state power utility, ICE, to protect underground cables.

However, ICE has moved the internet cables inland to protect them and local residents worry that they will receive no more help from the power company in the future.

“Go see what it’s like in the Netherlands or Belgium, with huge breakwaters and dikes which even have roads running along them,” said Quesada, who worked as a sailor his whole life and visited ports around the world.

The rest of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coastline has similar problems with erosion, said oceanographer Omar Lizano, of the University of Costa Rica’s Centre for Research in Marine Sciences and Limnology (CIMAR).

“This phenomenon is happening all along our Caribbean coast and I suppose that the same thing will happen in Nicaragua, Panama and in the entire Caribbean region,” the expert in waves and ocean currents told IPS.

For several years, Lizano has been monitoring the beaches on the Caribbean and observing how the waves have gained metres and metres of sand.

This Central American country of 4.7 million people has coastline along the Pacific Ocean to the west and the Caribbean sea to the east.

“We have documented a rise in the sea level and in wind and wave speeds,” said the CIMAR expert.

In Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coastal region, for example, the Cahuita National Park has lost dozens of metres of turtle nesting beach, which poses a threat to the turtle populations that spawn in the area.

A study published in 2014 by the Climate Change and Basins Programme of the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education (CATIE) determined that the sea rises on average two millimetres per year along the coast of the eastern province of Limón, which covers the country’s entire Caribbean coast, and whose capital is Puerto Limón.

The report analysed the climate vulnerability of the coastal areas of Central America’s Caribbean region and concluded that the Costa Rican districts overlooking the sea have a high to very high adaptation capacity.

This is partly thanks to the level of community organisation, with groups such as the one headed by Charles, and the institutional support which translates into concrete actions, like the breakwater built by ICE and another one built nearby by the Council of Port Administration and Economic Development of the Atlantic Coast.

The people of Cienaguita are asking for more resources to design new protective structures, which could even be transformed into a seaside promenade for the community. Quesada advocates mitigating the erosion with tetrapods, a very stable tetrahedral concrete structure used as armour unit on breakwaters.

Lizano said the situation is not sustainable for much longer. Other countries can invest in infrastructure to protect their people, such as breakwaters or seawalls, or fill in the beaches to buy time, but this is not feasible for Costa Rica because of the high costs.

“If we can’t afford to do this, the only thing we can do is move to higher ground. This is our adaptation measure,” said the oceanographer.

Community leader Charles said he has asked for help from Puerto Limón municipal authorities and from national agencies, but they all claim that they do not have the necessary funds.

Costa Rica is in the initial stages of its National Adaptation Plan, a broad document that will define the path that the country will take to protect itself from the worst impacts of climate change, and urban settlements and coastal areas shall be priorities.

“I think we need to start to talk very seriously about the vulnerability of coastal communities like Cienaguita or Chacarita (on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast),” Pascal Girot, the head of climate change in the Ministry of Environment and Energy, told IPS.

This can lead to more concrete actions, he said. “They will be badly affected by the rise in the sea level,” said Girot, who will lead the national climate adaptation process.

Former Costa Rican president Oscar Arias

By Oscar Arias Sanchez
SAN JOSÉ, Sep 20 2016 (IPS)

I have put a great deal of thought into whether or not to return to politics. Groups from different political parties, and without party affiliation, have expressed their concern over the current situation in the country and have offered me their support. And the opinion polls indicate that I would have a chance at a third presidential term.

The support of so many people fills me with gratitude. There is no greater reward for me than feeling the confidence and trust of the Costa Rican people, because it is based on deeds and actions, on knowing me for over 45 years, and knowing that, with all my defects, I always say what I think and do what I say.

The approval of my first two administrations is a reflection of what we managed to do together. In the 1980s, we brought peace to a region crushed by war, and we thus put Costa Rica on the world map.

Ten years ago, we inserted our small country in the international economy, and we put it on the map again when the United Nations approved the Arms Trade Treaty, Costa Rica’s biggest contribution to humanity in its entire history.

For many months I have weighed the contribution that I can still make, serving Costa Rica once again, against the need to give a boost to the emergence of a new generation of Costa Rican leaders. And I’m not thinking about the next four years. I’m thinking about the next 40. I have enough strength and enough ideas to serve them again. But I also know I’m not indispensable. No one is indispensable in a democracy.

This is something I have said many times: one of the main obligations of a political leader is to foster new leadership. The future of a country depends on the continuous emergence of new cadres willing to take up the baton. Only tyrants cling to power.

Democrats, of whom I am one, understand the importance of stepping aside. I believe the next generations must be given space, and this is the main reason for not running again for president.

The second reason arises from the political ungovernability in Costa Rica. The opposition doesn’t bother me; on the contrary, I have always believed that in a democracy if there is no opposition, it has to be created. I believe a good government requires someone on the other side of the sidewalk, reminding it of its commitments and holding it accountable.

Unfortunately, there is a segment of the opposition in our country which, instead of demanding that the government in office make good on its promises, uses any tool to keep it from doing so. Rather than allowing it to implement the government plan that voters supported at the polls, they spend four years carrying out a continuous election campaign, standing in the way of progress in the direction that the people said they wanted.

On May 8, 2006, when my second government took office, I made the following appeal to Costa Ricans, which continues to apply today:

“I hope that we learn that no party or social segment has a monopoly on honesty, patriotism, good intentions and love for Costa Rica. I hope that we can understand that the responsible use of political power is much more than pointing things out, complaining, and hindering, and consists above all of engaging in dialogue, working together and building.

“I hope we will be able to tell the difference between adversaries and enemies; understand that willingness to compromise is not a sign of weakness, just as intransigence is not a sign of strength. I hope we can do away with the pettiness of our political debate, raise up our heads, look forward and think big.”

The third and last reason that pushes me to make this decision is that I think there are many ways to work for the people of Costa Rica. They say that someone who is only good at being president is not even good at that. That is, if you can only exert influence from the presidential seat, it will not be a strong influence.

I don’t plan to retire. I will continue to express my opinions about the way things are going in the country, and I will continue to support the causes I believe in: I always defended what I consider is best for our people, and above all, for the less fortunate.

I will continue to tirelessly advocate the need for Costa Rica to approve educational reforms that make it possible to boost the quality of education in our primary and secondary schools and our universities, such as dual education, evaluation of teachers and ensuring that our young people receive the skills needed to compete in today’s world.

I will continue to insist on the need for Costa Rica to modernise its economy, invest in infrastructure, insert itself even more in the global markets, significantly bolster its competitiveness and rev up its engines of productivity, the best instrument to reduce inequalities. And I will continue defending democracy, peace and disarmament, because the small size of our country should never be the measure of its moral authority.

I have decided not to run for a third presidential term because I believe that the main problem we are facing is medium- to long-term. If we don’t manage to elevate the quality of politics and increase interest in public service, if we fail to get the most capable, educated and honest people to participate in political life, the sustainability itself of our democratic system is at stake.

To preserve this way of life that we have enjoyed for years, we have to encourage young people to lay their hands on the helm of history.

This is a country of young people. It’s the new generations that have to fight for, and exercise, power. If they don’t like the direction the country is moving in, they should change it. You can do a lot of good outside of politics, but a country where everyone is outside politics is a country adrift.

Arnold Toynbee, the great British historian, said “The greatest punishment for those who are not interested in politics, is that they are governed by people who are.”

Young people must occupy their rightful place in decision-making. They should take the helm of this ship we call fatherland; it will go in the direction of their commitment, or their indifference. I hope the Costa Rica of the future will not be the fruit of their omission, but of the most determined transformative action!

My profound gratitude to everyone who has supported me. Thank you so much for your affection and your trust. Thanks so much for the people of Costa Rica, who continue to move me, to inspire me, and to give me reasons to believe that politics is an instrument for doing good, for achieving peace, for doing justice; that politics is the workshop of dreams where perhaps they can become more realistic, more precise, more concrete, but also the place where dreams can come true.

The views expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

Excerpt:

Tapantí National Park lies east from the capital San José covering more than 50.000 hectares of forest, which in turn provides valuable watershed protection. Picture: Diego Arguedas Ortiz / IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 26 2016 (IPS)

While Latin America keeps expanding its agricultural frontier by converting large areas of forest, one country, Costa Rica, has taken a different path and is now a role model for a peaceful coexistence between food production and sustainable forestry.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) flagship publication The State of the World’s Forests revealed that commercial agriculture was responsible for 70 percent of forest conversion in Latin America between 2000 and 2010.

“What FAO mentions about the rest of Latin America, clearing forests for agriculture or livestock, happened in Costa Rica during the 1970s and 1980s,” Jorge Mario Rodríguez, the director of Costa Rica’s National Fund for Forestry Finance (Fonafifo), told IPS.“Agricultural development doesn’t necessarily require the expansion of croplands; rather, it demands the coexistence with the forest and the intensification of production by improving national farmers’ productivity and competitiveness" -- Octavio Ramírez.

At its worst moment, during the 1980s, Costa Rica’s forest cover was limited to 21 to 25 percent of its land area. Now, forests account for 53 percent of the country’s 51,000 square kilometers, with almost five million inhabitants.

The country has managed to hold and even push back the advance of the agricultural frontier while strengthening its food security, according to FAO, which says that Costa Rica’s malnutrition rate is under 5 percent, something the organisation accounts as “zero hunger”.

“Here’s a learned lesson: there’s no need to chop down forests to produce more crops,” FAO Costa Rica director Octavio Ramírez told IPS.

Despite the increase in forest cover, FAO states the average value of food production per person increased by 26 percent in the period 1990–1992 to 2011–2013.

FAO attributes this change “to structural changes in the economy and the priority given to forest conservation and sustainable management” which were seized upon by Costa Rican authorities in a specific context.

“It has to do with the livestock crisis during the 1980s but also the priority given by Costa Rica to forest management,” said Ramírez, born in Nicaragua but Costa Rican by naturalisation.

In The State of the World’s Forests report, launched on July 18, FAO explains that Costa Rican forests were regarded as “land banks” that could be converted as necessary to meet agricultural needs.

“To keep the forest intact was looked upon as a synonym of laziness and unwillingness to work,” Ramírez explained.

But there were two key elements during the 1980s that led to better forest protection, the environmental economist Juan Robalino told IPS.

José Alberto Chacón weeds between bean plants on his small farm in Pacayas, on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica. The terraces help control water run-off that would otherwise cause soil erosion. Picture: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

Meat prices plummeted while eco-tourism became a leading economic activity in the country, explained the specialist from Universidad de Costa Rica and the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center.

“This paved the way for very interesting policy-making, like the creation of the Payments for Environmental Services (PES) program,” said Robalino, one of the top experts in Costa Rican forest cover.

FAO states that a big part of Costa Rica’s success comes from PES, a financial incentive that acknowledges those ecosystem services resulting from forest conservation and management, reforestation, natural regeneration and agroforestry systems.

The program, established in 1997 and ran by Fonafifo, has a simple logic at its core: the Costa Rican state pays landowners who protect forest cover as they provide an ecosystem service.

From its launch until 2015, a total of 318 million dollars were invested in forest-related PES projects.  64 percent of the funding came from fossil fuel tax, 22 percent from World Bank credits and the remainder from other sources.

After studying PES impacts for years, Robalino explains the challenge for 2016 is to look for landowners with less incentives to protect their forests and bring them on board with the financial argument.

“The goal is to always look for those who’ll change their behavior because of the program,” Robalino stated.

Because of budget limitations, the program must decide which properties to work with, as applications exceed its capacity fivefold, according to Fonafifo director Rodríguez.

Priorities for PES funding include ecosystem services like watershed protection, carbon capture, scenic beauty and biodiversity conservation.

“Costa Rica learned that forests are worth more for their environmental services than because of their timber,” Rodríguez pointed out.

Fonafifo is now looking for new partnerships with the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock to launch a new program focused on small landowners who require more technical support, a road also favoured by FAO.

“Agricultural development doesn’t necessarily require the expansion of croplands; rather, it demands the coexistence with the forest and the intensification of production by improving national farmers’ productivity and competitiveness,” said Ramírez, FAO’s local representative.

Both FAO and local experts interviewed by IPS agreed that PES seized upon a national and international crossroads to launch a program that despite its success, is not the only cause for Costa Rica’s recovery.

“Costa Rica’s success cannot be exclusively attributed to PES since other policies, like the creation of the National Protected Areas System and its education system, also played a major role,” Rodríguez explained.

Beyond this program, the country has a longstanding environmental tradition: close to a quarter of its territory is under some type of protection, the forestry law bans forest conversion, and sports hunting, open-air metallic mining and oil exploitation are all illegal.

The country’s Constitution declares citizens’ right to a healthy environment in its article 50.

“I remember my school teacher telling us students that we had to protect the forest,” Robalino recalled.

However, Costa Rica’s forest recovery didn’t reach all ecosystems in the country and left mangroves behind. Their area has diminished in the past decades.

According to the country’s 2014 report to the Convention on Biological Diversity, mangrove coverage fell from 64.452 hectares in 1979 to 37.420 hectares in 2013, a 42 percent loss.

This ecosystem is particularly vulnerable to large monoculture plantations on the Pacific coast, where the local Environmental Administrative Tribunal denounced the disappearance of 400 hectares between 2010 and 2014, due to human-induced fire, logging and invasion.

Xinia Solano and Luis Diego Murillo are one of the families working with the shade house programme in Los Reyes, in the southeastern Costa Rican municipality of Coto Brus. This model of agriculture is being promoted by the FAO, in conjunction with various government institutions. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
LOS REYES, Costa Rica, Mar 15 2016 (IPS)

Before they got involved in farming, Luis Diego Murillo and Xinia Solano paid their bills and put food on their table with Luis’s salary as a foreman on construction sites, an unstable job that kept him on the move.

Now the 33-year-old Costa Rican walks along the rows where he and his wife grow bright green coriander and lettuce, and where stalks indicate a handful of radishes under the soil. They share the land with another family, but they are their own boss.

Over Murillo’s head is an enormous roof of black shade cloth which is crucial to his new life because it protects his crops in the community of Los Reyes, in the rural municipality of Coto Brus, Puntarenas province, in the foothills of Costa Rica’s Talamanca mountain range.

“We’re together now, I’m no longer away from my family,” he told IPS, explaining why they decided to dedicate themselves to farming full-time. “You don’t want to be working away from home, far away from your children and wife. You want to be with your family, no?”

Murillo and his wife, the 34-year-old Solano, are among the 74 families who have benefited from the Shade House programme that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is carrying out in southeast Costa Rica. “One of the big advantages is that they can produce year round. Before, in the dry season (November to May), the crops would be burnt by the sun. Besides, the popular idea that only a few things can be grown here has been laid to rest, and a greater diversity of crops is now produced.” -- Guillermo Murillo

In the protected shaded areas, 700 square metres in size, the farmers can manage the quantity and quality of sunlight, the percentage of shade and the impact on the crops of rainfall, which can be heavy in this area.

The families are thus able to grow fresh vegetables year-round, have boosted the quality and productivity of their crops and have even managed to grow vegetables that were unthinkable before, given the normal conditions in this area, such as broccoli and cabbage.

With this system, which began to be implemented in late 2013 on just six farms, the families produce food for their own consumption and earn an income selling the surplus.

“We’re very happy because thanks to the shade houses we don’t have to go out and buy food anymore. If you want coriander or a head of lettuce, you just come out and pick it,” said Solano, whose house is in a village next to Los Reyes, which is a six-hour drive from San José, although it is only 280 km away.

Another of the advantages of the programme is that it improves and helps diversify the diet of rural families in the socioeconomic region of Brunca, the area with the highest poverty level in this Central American nation of 4.8 million people.

FAO expert Guillermo Murillo (wearing a hat) talks to family farmers in the settlement of Los Reyes in southeast Costa Rica about techniques for improving production in their shade houses. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

Poverty affects 34.6 percent of households in this region of 300,000 people, compared to a national average of 20.6 percent, and only 51 percent of the economically population is employed, according to statistics that FAO provided to IPS.

This region only produces 15 to 20 percent of the fresh fruit and vegetables consumed here, and the rest is brought in from other parts of the country.

The families with shade houses are now eating better.

“We eat salad every day. We used to buy stuff for salad if we had the money, but now we don’t have to buy it,” said Solano.

The shade houses are also looking at larger-scale production and marketing of their crops, to boost family incomes.

The families participating in the programme already grow more than 25 different kinds of fresh vegetables.

“Some of the farmers have cars and lend them to others so they can sell their produce in nearby towns,” said Solano. “But we’re doing the paperwork to create a cooperative, to get a truck.”

Each shade house costs around 3,200 dollars, and the funds are provided by the Costa Rican government institutions working with FAO on the project, such as the Mixed Institute for Social Aid (IMAS) or the Rural Development Institute (INDER).

The programme, which also has the support of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, is focused on the entire family, and considers women’s contribution as key.

“The women here are very brave, most of them even pick up the shovel and plant. It was my wife who planted all of those plants (that provide shade for the coffee bushes),” Florentino Amador, a 54-year-old farmer, told IPS with pride in his voice.

Ligia Ruiz, 53, one of the most enthusiastic farmers in the four shade houses in Los Reyes, coordinates sales with her neighbours.

The shade house system makes it possible to diversify the production of fresh vegetables in the southern Costa Rican region of Brunca. Some fresh produce, like lettuce, was already grown in the region, but others, like broccoli and cabbage, are only now being produced, thanks to this farming technique promoted by the FAO. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

“On Wednesdays and Saturdays we harvest what we’re going to sell, just here in the community for now. I get the orders and we deliver the produce,” she told IPS.

Although each shade house was originally designed for one family, in Los Reyes the four shaded areas are worked by 10 families, who farm together in a very horizontal process; for example, the income from the sales goes into a joint fund, where they hope to save up for the cooperative.

“If there’s a lot to clean on one lot, one family helps the other, and then they in turn receive support,” said Ruíz with regard to the revival of the rural tradition of communal work.

The FAO’s aim is for the beneficiaries to be organised groups of farmers with access to a collective storage and trading centre, although the families are selected by the Costa Rican institutions involved in the project.

In Brazil and Mexico there are small-scale initiatives similar to the shade house project, said Guillermo Murillo, a FAO consultant who has worked in those countries and suggested the shade house model for Costa Rica.

“One of the big advantages is that they can produce year round,” Murillo told IPS. “Before, in the dry season (November to May), the crops would be burnt by the sun. Besides, the popular idea that only a few things can be grown here has been laid to rest, and a greater diversity of crops is now produced.”

Besides the support for setting up shade houses, the team of representatives of the FAO and the public institutions involved in the initiative give advice on farming techniques, tools, and marketing.

“The seeds that used to come here were the ones used in colder parts of Costa Rica, even though there were ‘tropicalised’ ones in the market,” said Murillo. “We looked for them, and the families started to use them.”

The programme is now being expanded to the northwest province of Guanacaste, where the installation of the first shade houses outside of the Brunca region has been approved.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís (centre-right) received United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (centre-left) in the presidential palace in San José on Friday Feb. 12. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Feb 12 2016 (IPS)

A visit by United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan to Costa Rica paved the way for closer trade ties between the two countries, especially in the areas of tourism and sustainable energy.

During the first official visit ever to this Central American nation by a UAE foreign minister, Al Nahyan and his Costa Rican counterpart and host, Manuel González, signed two agreements.

One of them refers to air services, and will boost visits by Emirati tourists to Costa Rica.

They also agreed to immediately begin the process of negotiating and promoting investment in tourism.

“This agreement opens up opportunities to take better advantage of air services between the two countries,” Al Nahyan said in Costa Rica’s presidential palace, after an official meeting with this country’s president, Luis Guillermo Solis, at the start of his one-day visit to San José on Friday Feb. 12.

“I think you have a wonderful, beautiful country,” the minister said in a press conference at the end of his meeting with the president. “Of course, there is the problem of the distance between us, but I believe that after opening the air route between Dubai and Panama City, it will be easier to get back and forth between our countries.”

He was referring to the new Emirates airlines route that will begin to operate on Mar. 31 as the world’s longest flight – nearly 18 hours – according to the company.

Al Nahyan also announced that mechanisms would be sought to facilitate visas between the two countries, in order to expedite trade.

“We have a lot of work to do with my colleague, Costa Rica’s foreign minister, to talk to the airlines and make sure things work out,” he said.

A flight between Panama City and San José takes less than one hour, and more and more airlines are connecting the two cities.

United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan (left) and his host, Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González, in the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry after signing the agreements reached during the Emirati minister’s visit. Credit: Foreign Ministry of Costa Rica

“Emirates will fly from Dubai to Panama; this strengthens potential ties, not only between the UAE and Panama but with the entire Central American region, and particularly Costa Rica,” Foreign Minister González told IPS in an exclusive conversation about the visit.

The other agreement signed on Friday afternoon in Costa Rica’s Foreign Ministry provides a framework for cooperation, accompanied by a mechanism for formalising bilateral political consultations, which will facilitate diplomatic relations between the federation of seven emirates and this Central American nation.

Costa Rica was the fourth and last country on Al Nahyan’s official Latin America tour, which began Feb. 4 in Argentina before taking him to Colombia and Panama.

The Emirati minister said a key area of cooperation between the two countries would be energy, where both countries are pioneers in complementary niches.

“I know Costa Rica wants and plans to use more renewable energy, and I know they have done a great deal in terms of legislating to strengthen that sector,” he said.

This country does not depend on fossil fuels for electricity, because 97 percent of its electric power comes from renewable sources. But the use of fossil fuels in transportation means they still represent around 80 percent of the total energy mix.

The UAE has committed nearly 840 million dollars to help other countries of the developing South produce clean energy.

“That’s why we’re in Costa Rica: to see what has been done in this area, and to create a legal foundation with respect to how we can cooperate,” Al Nahyan said in the news briefing.

Solís, of the centre-left Citizen Action Party, said the UAE invited this country to take part in an annual energy conference held early in the year in the Gulf nation.

“Costa Rica will be represented there with the highest-level technical teams, precisely to seek opportunities for cooperation in energy,” the president said.

In an opinion piece published by the La Nación newspaper, Al Nahyan explained that his country is “an important investor in a series of international commercial clean energy projects. And we are proud to be the host country for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).”

The Emirati minister also stressed that “like Costa Rica, we recognise that turning to clean energies is the most promising solution. The United Arab Emirates has been a major investor in clean energy sources for many years, both within the country and abroad.

“Costa Rica has been one of the most ambitious and progressive-thinking countries in the issues of climate change and sustainable development at the international level,” the minister concluded in his article.

Minister González explained in his dialogue with IPS that there are three major areas where his country and the UAE find points in common: human rights, the fight against climate change, and the struggle against people trafficking and in favour of associated labour rights.

With respect to ties in the field of energy, he explained that the Emirates have “an economy very focused on oil and gas, and with the drop in prices of fossil fuels, they have seen the need to focus on other sectors of the economy.”

This new openness and their traditional leadership in renewable energy “opens up opportunities for Costa Rica, which does not depend on oil and gas,” González said.

The Costa Rican minister sees the UAE as a key actor in the Middle East, a region “with which we are seeking closer ties.”

González said his guest “has expressed interest in Latin America, as demonstrated by this tour,” and noted that he was one of the promoters of the Global Forum on the Relationships between the Arab World, Latin America and the Caribbean Region.

“I met with him in the context of the United Nations General Assembly, in September of last year, and suggested that he consider making a visit to the region, and specifically to Costa Rica,” González added.

Costa Rica has consulates in Lebanon and Jordan and an embassy in Qatar. But it does not yet have a consulate or embassy in the UAE.

“We hope to boost to their maximum expression our relations with the Arab world,” González said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A group of Cubans wait in a shelter opened by the authorities in the town of La Cruz in the northwestern Costa Rican border province of Guanacaste. Credit: National Risk Prevention and Emergency Response Commission of Costa Rica

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSÉ, Nov 23 2015 (IPS)

Thousands of Cubans heading for the United States have been stranded at the Costa Rican-Nicaraguan border since mid-November, waiting for the authorities in Managua to authorise their passage north.Just over 2,500 Cubans are waiting in northern Costa Rica, the majority in temporary shelters opened by the local authorities. After receiving temporary transit permits from the Costa Rican government, the Cubans ran into resistance when they reached Nicaragua, which closed the border and denied them passage.

“We’re desperate to get to the United States because we want a better future for our children and for ourselves,” said Arley Alonso Ferrarez, a Cuban migrant, in a video provided by the Costa Rican government’s National Risk Prevention and Emergency Response Commission.

Alonso and the other Cubans stuck at the Nicaraguan border are seeking refuge under the U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which guarantees residency to any Cuban who sets foot on U.S. soil.

The exodus was fuelled once again this year by the fear that the thaw between the Cuban and U.S. governments, which began in December 2014 and has led to the restoration of diplomatic ties, would result in the modification or elimination of the special treatment received by Cuban immigrants to the United States.

Cubans have been making their way to the United States through Central America for several years now, but the phenomenon had gone unnoticed until the Costa Rican government adopted measures in early November to fight the trafficking of persons through this country.

That cut short the flow of undocumented immigrants and revealed the scale of the movement of Cubans from Ecuador to the United States.

“The current crisis was triggered by the dismantling of the (trafficking) ring, which has brought to light the situation which we had already warned about, with regard to the increase in the number of Cuban migrants,” Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González told IPS.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy,” Cuban migrant Ignacio Valdés told the local newspaper La Nación, referring to the dangers faced along the lengthy journey. “We’ve been robbed, we were forced to jump into the sea between Colombia and Panama, some girls were even raped, and the police stole from us.”

After the Nov. 10 arrest of members of the trafficking ring which smuggled migrants through Costa Rican territory, Cubans began to be stranded in groups along the southern border of the country.

That forced the authorities to issue seven-day safe conducts, to regulate their passage to Nicaragua. But that country completely sealed its border on Nov. 15, and blocked the entrance of Cubans when it reopened the border the next day.“The current crisis was triggered by the dismantling of the (trafficking) ring, which has brought to light the situation which we had already warned about, with regard to the increase in the number of Cuban migrants.” - Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González

The migrants are awaiting the results of a meeting to be held Tuesday Nov. 24 in El Salvador, where the countries of Central America, as well as Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, will try to hammer out a joint regional response.

The meeting will explore options to create a “humanitarian corridor” to facilitate the passage of Cubans to the United States – which has not been invited to the meeting, while Cuba has failed to confirm its participation, the Costa Rican Foreign Ministry reported.

In recent years, more and more Cubans have been going through Ecuador, which grants them three-month tourist visas and to which they arrive by plane. The route – by land and sea – is much less frequently used and less well-known than the Florida Straits.

It is 5,000 km as the crow flies between Ecuador and the U.S. border, but the routes used by the trafficking gangs are much longer.

In April 2014, the Ecuadorean government eliminated the requisite that Cubans applying for visas present a letter of invitation, thus allowing them to remain in the country for up to three months without any additional requirements.

Once they make it to the South American continent, the migrants go by land across the border between Ecuador and Colombia, before taking a boat along Colombia’s Pacific coast to Panama, where they are smuggled, once more by land, to the Costa Rican border.

“These people are brought in by the mafias, the international people trafficking networks; without a doubt they are risking their lives,” said the foreign minister. “We have received reports of women who have been raped, who have crossed through jungles, and of children who are put in danger. The conditions are deplorable.”

According to Costa Rica’s immigration office, around 13,000 Cubans have travelled through this country since last year.

But they have mainly gone unnoticed, because most of them are smuggled by people traffickers, who charge between 7,000 and 13,000 dollars per person.

Carlos Sandoval, an expert on immigration issues, told IPS that the trafficking rings operate throughout Central America, and are also involved in smuggling migrants from the region who are trying to make it into the United States.

And, he added, while a solution for the stranded Cubans is urgently needed, Central America has long been in debt to its own citizens who try to reach the United States.

“An ironic aspect of this humanitarian corridor initiative is that it’s happening in a region that spits out migrants. Around 300,000 people a year set out from Central America in an attempt to make it to the United States,” said Sandoval, a researcher at the University of Costa Rica’s Social Research Institute.

The Central American migrants heading towards the United States face situations just as complex as what the Cubans are going through.

“The case of the Cubans is just one more instance of what is a day-to-day reality in Central America,” said the Costa Rican expert, who for years has studied Central American migration to the United States, carrying out fieldwork in this region, in Mexico, and in the U.S.

Sandoval said the situation requires a regionwide response – something Costa Rica should have had in mind when it issued the first safe-conduct passes. He argued that it is the region’s governments themselves that create the conditions that allow trafficking networks to operate.

“What makes their business possible? It is possible to the extent that the borders are closed: it is so difficult to get there that without the support of these people (traffickers), it is even more complicated and dangerous,” Sandoval said.

Costa Rica plans to open new shelters in the northern town of Upala, because the ones already set up are full, the minister of human development and social inclusion, Carlos Alvarado, told IPS.

“Many of these people (the Cubans) are professionals, others are skilled workers. They are between the ages of 20 and 45. There are more men than women, some 30 children, and around 10 women who are pregnant,” said Alvarado.

Cubans continue pouring into the country, said the minister. On Friday Nov. 20, for example, some 200 people arrived.

On Saturday Nov. 21, Costa Rica’s authorities reported that there are more than 2,500 Cubans in transit in this country.

“Most of them report that they came using their own funds – they sold all they had and left everything behind to go to the United States,” the minister said.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Punta Leona private reserve on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast, where the owners voluntarily protect biological diversity and use a small part of the property for ecotourism. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
PUNTA LEONA, Costa Rica , Nov 20 2015 (IPS)

Private voluntary nature reserves in Latin America should be seen as allies in policies on the environment, climate change mitigation and the preservation of biological diversity in rainforests, say experts.

“Private reserves in Latin America are not included in conservation policies; they should be integrated in our national strategies,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, vice-president of conservation policies in Conservation International (CI) in Costa Rica.

Rodríguez, a former Costa Rican minister of environment, energy and mines (2002–2006), was addressing 150 environmentalists, promoters of voluntary conservation agreements, and ecotourism business owners, during the 11th Latin American Congress of Networks of Private Reserves, held Nov. 9-13 in the Punta Leona private nature reserve and tourism destination.

In his view, the private sector should play a more central role and governments and the owners of private nature reserves should work together to achieve compliance with the Aichi Biodiversity Targets adopted in Nagoya, Japan in 2010.

During the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Nagoya, 193 United Nations members established 20 targets to fight the loss of biodiversity, with a 2020 deadline.

“We are losing our natural capital due to climate change and the big gap between private and public conservation,” said Rodríguez. “The owners of private reserves should become political actors, to help meet the Aichi Targets.”

The global cost of financing efforts towards the targets is estimated at 150 to 440 billion dollars a year, according to figures from the Convention itself. But currently, CI says, the world is only channeling 45 billion dollars towards that end.

Rodríguez says private conservation efforts could help mitigate the shortfall in funds.

With that aim, the Latin American Alliance of Private Reserves was formally created Nov. 6 – the first of its kind in the world. It groups 4,345 private reserves in 15 countries, with a combined total of 5,648,000 hectares of green areas.

The 11th Latin American Congress of Networks of Private Reserves held No. 9-13 in the Punta Leona nature reserve on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

“The idea is to form a conservation chain,” Martin Keller of Guatemala, the president of the new alliance, told IPS. “Private areas can form a chain with national parks and expand national conservation systems. They are also a mechanism to absorb drastic climate changes.”

He argues that there should be no borders for private reserves in the region. “We are joining together in something magnificent, and formalising associations with international institutions so that they include us in environmental projects,” he said.

During the congress in Costa Rica, a pilot programme to encourage the sale of carbon credits was announced, with the donation of 200 hectares of land by a member of the Alliance. The programme will have an estimated 3,600 tonnes of carbon.

Keller hopes Latin America will begin to sell carbon as a bloc, starting in 2017.

“We have dreams and a passion for conserving nature,” the president of the Costa Rican Network of Nature Reserves, Rafael Gallo, who is donating the 200 hectares for the pilot plan, told IPS. “We want the sale of carbon to be a mechanism for private conservation at a global level.”

Gallo has an 800-hectare property on the Banks of the Pacuare River along Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Of that total, 700 hectares are a forest reserve. It is located in Siquirres, 85 km east of San José, near the Barbilla National Park, which forms part of the La Amistad Biosphere Reserve.

“The market is still just getting off the ground, a ton of carbon is worth three dollars,” said Gallo, who believes the mechanism will become viable when the price of a ton reaches 10 dollars.

The countries in the Alliance are Argentina, Belize, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. Uruguay and Venezuela also have private reserves, but they have not yet set up local networks – a necessary step before they can join.

Keller said he hopes the initiative will expand to the entire hemisphere, including the Caribbean island nations, Canada and the United States.

Private reserves in the northern Costa Rican province of Heredia. A pilot project for carbon credits will be carried out on one such reserve, thanks to a donation of 200 hectares of land by its owner. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Private reserves would like to benefit from multilateral institution programmes, and with that in mind they have made contact with U.N. partners involved in one way or another with conservation issues, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

“We want to be a regional bloc, we want to be heard at an international level, and we want incentives for property owners to continue joining forces to support conservation – because we would have a massive impact as a bloc,” Claudia García de Bonilla, executive director of the Association of Private Natural Reserves of Guatemala, told IPS.

Voluntary conservation areas are set up by ecotourism businesses, academic institutions, research bodies, or organic agricultural producers, and their advocates see them as green shields against climate extremes and the loss of biodiversity.

“Forests are a sponge, absorbing storms and hurricanes. We have to keep expanding our ecological corridors,” Bonilla said.

The representative of private green areas in Chile, Mauricio Moreno, underscored benefits that nature reserves belonging to individuals or private bodies can offer a global vision of conservation.

“These areas are refuges protected with a great deal of goodwill and effort,” he told IPS. “They complement the public networks. There are reserves that border natural parks and thus create much bigger areas that make it possible to conserve species of animals. With a public and private effort, integral conservation is possible.”

According to Ariane Claussen, an engineer in renewable natural resources at the University of Chile, the budget assigned to public protected areas in the region is insufficient, which makes it difficult for countries to have the capacity to act on their own in the preservation of biodiversity.

“Rather than seeing private reserves as independent, they should be seen in an integrated manner,” she told IPS. “If these people didn’t decide to practice conservation, they would be using that land in different ways, for unsustainable monoculture or stockbreeding.”

She said “the property owners dedicate a small portion of this land to (economic) development like tourism, because they need an income.”

Claussen, along with another Chilean colleague, Tomás González, stressed the Latin American initiative Huella, aimed at voluntary cooperation in technical planning for conservation, environmental education and ecological activism in the region.

Private reserves cover gaps left by the state, she said. “The idea is that they take part in conservation as buffer zones and link up the ecosystems of public protected areas that are isolated and fragmented,” she explained.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A hearing in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to follow up on compliance with its ruling that Costa Rica’s ban on in vitro fertilisation violates a number of rights. Credit: Inter-American Court of Human Rights

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Sep 15 2015 (IPS)

After banning in vitro fertilisation for 15 years and failing to comply with an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling for nearly three years, Costa Rica will finally once again allow the procedure for couples and women on their own.

On Sept. 10, centre-left President Luis Guillermo Solís issued a decree ordering compliance with the Inter-American Court’s 2012 verdict against the ban fomented by conservative sectors. The president ordered that measures be taken to overcome judicial and legislative barriers erected against compliance with the Court judgment.

“This was discriminatory,” lawyer Hubert May, the representative of several of the 12 couples who brought the legal action against the ban before the Court, told IPS. “The ban only affected those who couldn’t afford to carry out the procedure abroad, or those who weren’t willing to mortgage their homes or take out loans to fulfill their longing (for a child of their own).”

In November 2012, the Court ruled that the ban on in vitro fertilisation (IVF) violated the rights to privacy, liberty, personal integrity and sexual health, the right to form a family, the right to be free from discrimination, and the right to have access to technological progress. It gave Costa Rica six months to legalise the procedure.

But opposition from conservative sectors blocked compliance and hurt Costa Rica’s image in terms of international law.

Solís’s decree regulates IVF and puts the public health system in charge of the procedure, thus ensuring access for lower-income couples.

May said the decree “solves the problem of discrimination” by paving the way for the social security institute, the CCSS, to provide IVF as part of its regular health services.

IVF is a reproductive technology in which an egg is removed from a woman and joined with a sperm cell from a man in a test tube (in vitro). The resulting embryo is implanted in the woman’s uterus.

In its 2012 ruling, the Court stated that Costa Rica was the only country in the world to expressly outlaw IVF, a measure that directly affected local women and couples. In Latin America the procedure was first used in 1984, in Argentina.

One of the women affected by the ban was Gretel Artavia Murillo, who with her then husband ran up debt in an attempt to have a baby in the late 1990s.

Her now ex-husband, Miguel Mejías, declared before the Court that he had mortgaged his home and spent all his savings for the couple to undergo in vitro fertilisation in Costa Rica, but before they were able to do so, the practice was declared illegal.

IVF was first regulated in Costa Rica in 1995, but was banned in March 2000 by the constitutional chamber of the Supreme Court.

Five of the seven magistrates on the constitutional chamber argued that the law violated the right to life, which began “at conception, when a person is already a person…a living being, with the right to be protected by the legal system.”

Artavia and Mejía, along with 11 other couples, brought the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2001, and a decade later it reached the Inter-American Court. The Commission and the Court are the Organisation of American States (OAS) autonomous human rights institutions.

On Sep. 10 Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solís signed a decree making IVF legal after it was banned for 15 years. Credit: Casa Presidencial

A year later, the Court, which is based in the Costa Rican capital, San José, and whose rulings cannot be appealed and are theoretically binding, handed down its verdict.

“The constitutional chamber’s view was not shared by the Court, which considered that protection of life began with the implantation of a fertilised egg in the uterus,” said May.

May and other experts on the case said the position taken by Costa Rica’s highest court responded to the extremely conservative views of the leadership of the Catholic Church, and of other Christian faiths with growing influence in the country.

This Central American nation of 4.7 million people considers itself a standard-bearer of human rights in international forums. But the question of IVF tarnished that image when the conservative sectors took up opposition to it as a cause.

The debate in the legislature on a law to regulate IVF stalled for over two years, due to resistance by evangelical and conservative lawmakers.

In a Sep. 3 public hearing by the Court on compliance with the 2012 ruling, the executive branch said it planned to regulate the procedure by means of a decree, which civil society organisations saw as a reasonable solution to the stalemate over the new law.

“We know that in the legislature there is no way to forge ahead on key issues, such as practically anything to do with sexual and reproductive rights,” Larissa Arroyo, a lawyer who specialises in these rights, told IPS.

Arroyo pointed out that with regard to an issue like IVF, time is of the essence, given that a woman’s childbearing years are limited. She noted that “almost all of the victims lost their chance” to have children using the technique.

In the week between the public hearing and the signing of the presidential decree, the government consulted Costa Rica’s College of Physicians and the CCSS. While both backed the decree, the CCSS clarified that it preferred a law and warned that it would need additional funding, because each fertility treatment costs around 40,000 dollars.

The decree limits the number of fertilised eggs to be implanted to two.

In the same week, the legislative debate became further bogged down. While one group of legislators tried to expedite approval of the law to regulate IVF, another group continued to oppose the procedure as an attack on human life at its origin, likening it to the Jewish holocaust.

“The extermination camps of Nazi Germany are in the Costa Rica of today, the Costa Rica of the Solís administration,” evangelical legislator Gonzalo Ramírez, of the conservative Costa Rican Renewal Party, even said at one point.

Given that outlook and the impasse in the legislature, organisations like the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) celebrated the decree which offers “universal access” to IVF and “respect for the principle of equality.”

However, CEJIL programme director for Central America and Mexico Marcia Aguiluz recommended waiting until IVF is actually being implemented.

“The decree lives up to the requirements, but it is just a first step,” said Aguiluz, who is from Costa Rica. “Until the practice starts being carried out, we can’t say there has been compliance.”

Lawyers for the presidency said the decree is equipped to withstand legal challenges.

The 2012 ruling is the second handed down against Costa Rica in the history of the Court. The previous one was in 2004, when the Court found that the conviction of journalist Mauricio Herrera by a Costa Rican court on charges of defamation of a diplomat violated free speech, and ordered that the country enact new legislation on freedom of expression.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), once a domain of the rich countries, is keen to extend its global membership and has set out a clear path for Costa Rica’s membership, within months of launching accession discussions with Colombia and Latvia.

As part of this strategy, the 34-nation OECD has in fact been strengthening cooperation with Brazil, India, Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China and South Africa through ‘Enhanced Engagement’ programmes.

According to OECD official sources, over time the organisation’s focus “has broadened to include extensive contacts with non-members and it now maintains cooperative relations with a large number of them.”

Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, paid a historic visit to the OECD on Jul 1, 2015, to sign cooperation agreements in a move that will bolster ongoing collaboration.

The visit to the OECD, the first by a Chinese state leader, coincided with the 20th anniversary of OECD-China relations, as well as China’s upcoming Presidency of the G20 in 2016.

Premier Li Keqiang delivered a keynote address in the context of the OECD Leaders Programme. He was accompanied by a number of ministers and high-ranking officials from the Chinese government.

OECD’s Global Relations Secretariat (GRS) develops and oversees the strategic orientations of OECD’s global relations with non-members. More than 15 Global Fora have been established to address trans-boundary issues where the relevance of OECD work is dependent on policy dialogue with non-members.

Regional initiatives cover Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia; Asia; Latin America; and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The Sahel and West Africa Club creates, promotes and facilitates links between OECD members and West Africa.

Helping improve public governance and management in European Union candidate countries, potential candidates and European Neighbourhood Policy partners is the mission of a joint OECD-EU initiative, the Support for Improvement in Governance and Management (SIGMA) programme.

The OECD’s current members are Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

On Jul. 8, 2015, OECD members adopted the Roadmap for the Accession of Costa Rica to the OECD Convention setting out the terms, conditions and process for its accession.

OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría said: “Launching the accession process of Costa Rica underlines the organisation’s commitment to broaden its global outreach. Our joint objective is to work together to bring Costa Rica’s policies and practices closer to OECD best policies and practices.”

Gurría, who hails from Mexico, added: “This process, through which standards and best practices are adopted, is as important as membership itself and will help improve the lives of all Costa Ricans. It will be mutually enriching, as it will also allow the OECD to learn from Costa Rica’s experience in various policy areas.”

The first step in the process will see Costa Rica submit an initial memorandum setting out its position on approximately 260 OECD legal instruments. This will in turn lead to a series of technical reviews by OECD experts, who will collect further information from Costa Rica through questionnaires and fact-finding missions.

As part of the accession process, the OECD will evaluate Costa Rica’s implementation of the organisation’s policies, practices and legal instruments. Its committees may make recommendations for adjustments to legislation, policy or practice to bring Costa Rica closer to OECD instruments or best practices, serving as a catalyst for reform.

There is no deadline for completion of the accession processes, said an OECD official. Final accession will depend on the candidate country’s capacity to adapt and adjust to meet the organisation’s standards. Once all the committees have given their opinion, a final decision will be taken by all OECD member countries in the Governing Council.

Created in 1961 as the successor to the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, which administered the Marshall Plan at the end of the Second World War, OECD serves as an economic, environmental and social policy forum for its 34 member countries, as well as partners worldwide, on the world’s most important global challenges.

Edited by Phil Harris   

In public hospitals in Costa Rica, like the Rafael Ángel Calderón hospital in San José, there is no protocol regulating legal therapeutic abortion, for doctors to follow. As a result, physicians restrict the practice to a minimum, leaving women without their right to terminate a pregnancy when their health is at risk. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jun 24 2015 (IPS)

The lack of clear regulations and guidelines on therapeutic abortion in Costa Rica means women depend on the interpretation of doctors with regard to the circumstances under which the procedure can be legally practiced.

Article 121 of Costa Rica’s penal code stipulates that abortion is only legal when the mother’s health or life is at risk. But in practice the public health authorities only recognise risk to the mother’s life as legal grounds for terminating a pregnancy.

“The problem is that there are many women who meet the conditions laid out in this article – they ask for a therapeutic abortion and it is denied them on the argument that their life is not at risk,” Larissa Arroyo, a lawyer who belongs to the Collective for the Right to Decide, an organisation that defends women’s sexual and reproductive rights, told IPS.

“The problem isn’t the law, but the interpretation of the law,” said Arroyo.

She and other activists are pressing for Costa Rica to accept the World Health Organisation’s definition of health, which refers to physical, mental and social well-being, in connection with this issue.

Many doctors in public hospitals, unclear as to what to do when a pregnant woman requests an abortion, refuse to carry out the procedure regardless of the circumstances.

Illegal abortion in Costa Rica is punishable by three years in prison, or more if aggravating factors are found.

“It’s complicated because in the interactions we have had with doctors, they tell us: ‘Look, I would do it, but I’m not allowed to’,” said Arroyo.

Others say they have a conscientious objection to abortion, in this heavily Catholic country.

In Costa Rica, abortion is illegal in all other situations normally considered “therapeutic”, such as rape, incest, or congenital malformation of the fetus.

Activists stress the toll on women’s emotional health if they are forced to bear a child under such circumstances.

“Many women don’t ask for an abortion because they think it’s illegal,” Arroyo said. “If both women and doctors believe that, there’s no one to stick up for their rights.”

This creates critical situations for women like Ana and Aurora, two Costa Rican women who were carrying fetuses that would not survive, but which doctors did not allow them to abort.

In late 2006, a medical exam when Ana was six weeks pregnant showed that the fetus suffered from encephalocele, a malformation of the brain and skull incompatible with life outside the womb.

Ana, 26 years old at the time, requested a therapeutic abortion, arguing that carrying to term a fetus that could not survive was causing her psychological problems like depression. But the medical authorities and the Supreme Court did not authorise an abortion. In the end, her daughter was born dead after seven hours of labour.

The Collective for the Right to Decide and the Washington-based Center for Reproductive Rights brought Ana’s case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as well as that of Aurora, who was also denied the right to a therapeutic abortion.

Her case is similar to Ana’s. In 2012, it was discovered that her fetus had an abdominal wall defect, a kind of birth defect that allows the stomach, intestines, or other organs to protrude through an opening that forms on the abdomen. Her son, whose legs had never developed, and who had severe scoliosis, died shortly after birth.

In 2011, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) expressed concern that “women do not have access to legal abortion because of the lack of clear medical guidelines outlining when and how a legal abortion can be conducted.”

It urged the Costa Rican state to draw up clear medical guidelines, to “widely disseminate them among health professionals and the public at large,” and to consider reviewing other circumstances under which abortion could be permitted, such as rape or incest.

The international pressure has grown. Costa Rican Judge Elizabeth Odio, recently named to the San José-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights, said in a Jun. 20 interview with the local newspaper La Nación that “it is obvious that therapeutic abortion, which already exists in our legislation, should be enforced.”

“There are doctors who believe therapeutic abortion is a crime, and they put women’s lives at risk,” said Odio.

In March, Health Minister Fernando Llorca acknowledged that “there is now a debate on the need for developing regulations on therapeutic abortion – a debate that was necessary.”

Activists are calling for a protocol to regulate legal abortion, established by the social security system, CCSS, which administers the public health system and health services, including hospitals. But progress towards a protocol has stalled since 2009.

“For several years we have been working on a protocol with the Collective and the CCSS,” said Ligia Picado, with the Costa Rican Demographic Association (ADC). “But once it was completed, the CCSS authorities referred it to another department, and the personal opinions of functionaries, more emotional than legal, were brought to bear.”

The activist, a member of one of the civil society organisations most heavily involved in defending sexual and reproductive rights, told IPS that “the problem is that there is no protocol or guidelines that health personnel can rely on to support the implementation of women’s rights.”

Picado said the need for the protocol is especially urgent for women whose physical or emotional health is affected by an unwanted pregnancy and who can’t afford to travel abroad for an abortion, or to have a safe, illegal abortion at a clandestine clinic in this country.

Statistics on abortions in this Central American country of 4.7 million people are virtually non-existent. According to 2007 estimates by ADC, 27,000 clandestine abortions are practiced annually. But there are no figures on abortions carried out legally in public or private health centres.

Groups of legislators have begun to press the CCSS to approve the protocol, and on Jun. 17 the legislature’s human rights commission sent a letter to the president of the CCSS.

“We hope the CCSS authorities will realise the need to issue the guidelines so that doctors are not allowed to claim objections of conscience and will be obligated to live up to Costa Rica’s laws and regulations,” opposition lawmaker Patricia Mora, one of the authors of the letter, told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

An employee of Costa Rica’s water and sanitation utility, AyA, fills the containers of local residents in Milano de Siquirres, who depend on water from tanker trucks because the local tap water has been polluted since August 2007. Credit: Courtesy Semanario Universidad

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, May 25 2015 (IPS)

Twelve years after finding the first traces of pesticides used by the pineapple industry, in the rural water supply, around 7,000 people from four communities in Costa Rica’s Caribbean region are still unable to consume their tap water.

The communities of Milano, El Cairo, La Francia and Luisiana are located in the municipality of Siquirres, 100 km northeast of the capital, San José, in an agricultural region where transnational corporations grow pineapples on a large scale.

For years the four towns have depended on tanker trucks that bring in clean drinking water.

“It’s hard,” the head of the Milano community water board, Xinia Briceño, told IPS. “And while the truck used to come every day, now it comes every other day. And when it breaks down, or there’s an emergency in some other place, or it’s a holiday, people go without drinking water for up to four days.”

Briceño, the president of the community association that runs the rural water system in Milano which serves some 1,000 families, is frustrated with the delay in resolving the situation. “As of next August we will have been dependent on the tanker truck for eight years.”

Since Aug. 22, 2007, these rural communities have only had access to water that is trucked in. They can’t use the water from the El Cairo aquifer because it was contaminated with the pesticide bromacil, used on pineapple plantations in Siquirres, a rural municipality of 60,000 people in the Caribbean coastal province of Limón.

“Chemicals continue to show up in the water,” Briceño said. “During dry periods the degree of contamination goes down. But when it rains again the chemicals are reactivated.”

The failure of the public institutions to guarantee a clean water supply to the residents of these four communities reflects the complications faced by Costa Rica’s state apparatus to enforce citizen rights in areas where transnational companies have been operating for decades.

The technical evidence points to pineapple plantations near the El Cairo aquifer as responsible for the pollution, especially the La Babilonia plantation owned by the Corporación de Desarrollo Agrícola del Monte SA, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Fresh Del Monte.

But it is public institutions that have had to cover the cost of access to clean water by the local communities.

As a temporary solution, the public water and sewage utility AyA decided in 2007 to provide the communities with water from tanker trucks. Today, the local residents bring containers three times a week to stock up on clean water.

In nearly eight years, AyA has spent over three million dollars distributing water to the four communities, according to official figures. Briceño said a system to bring in water from another nearby aquifer could have been built with those funds.

“The idea is to build a water system to bring in water from a new source, in San Bosco de Guácimo. But that means piping it in from 11.7 km away,” Briceño explained.

The first evidence of the pollution was discovered in 2003, when the National University’s Regional Institute for Studies on Toxic Substances found traces of pesticides in the local water supply. Studies carried out in 2007 and subsequent years found that the water was unfit for human consumption.

The Supreme Court’s constitutional chamber ruled that the Health Ministry, AyA and several other public institutions should resolve the problem.

But the state has not managed to obtain compensation from pineapple producers for the environmental damage, as it has failed to carry out an assessment of the harm caused, and lawsuits filed in the environmental administrative court since 2010 are still underway.

“That is one of the delays we have had, because part of the process of bringing a complaint before the environmental administrative court is an economic appraisal of the environmental damages,” Lidia Umaña, the vice president of the court, told IPS. “Not all of the different authorities have the capability to conduct appraisals.”

The judge said that without an appraisal it is impossible to determine whether the companies must pay damages or not, and that “in this case like in any other a group of experts must be appointed to appraise the damages.”

After years of waiting for a solution, the case has gone beyond the borders of this Central American country, reaching the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). On Mar. 20 Briceño and other representatives of the affected communities, and delegates of the Environmental Law and Natural Resources Centre (CEDARENA), asked the IACHR to intervene.

“The IACHR is currently preparing a report on the human right to water and they told us they would include this case,” said Soledad Castro, with CEDARENA’s integrated water management programme, which is supporting the communities in their complaint before the Washington-based regional human rights body.

In remarks to IPS, Castro complained about the state’s inertia in solving the problem. In her view, “only AyA has made an effort, bringing in water trucks at an extremely high cost. Although it hasn’t been sufficient, at least AyA did something. The rest have been conspicuously absent.”

The case has also drawn the attention of other international bodies and organisations, like the Water Integrity Network (WIN), which criticised the state’s failure to protect the rights of local residents and the slow, non-transparent reaction by the authorities to the pollution of the water.

“(The state) has lacked accountability and transparency in its laboratory tests, the information given to the community, and compliance with rules and regulations,” says the 2014 WIN report “Integrity and the Human Right to Water in Central America”.

According to the Chamber of Pineapple Producers and Exporters (CANAPEP), which represents the industry in Costa Rica, pineapples were grown on 42,000 hectares of land in Costa Rica in 2012 and exports of the fruit brought in 780 million dollars. The United States imported 48 percent of the total, and the rest went to the European market.

Worried about the growth of pineapple production and the possible impact on local communities, the municipalities of Guácimo and Pococí declared a moratorium on an expansion of the industry. But a 2013 court ruling overthrew the ban, after it was challenged by CANAPEP.

In 2014, the annual state of the nation report stated that pineapple production stood out because of the large number of conflicts, and noted that it had mentioned the same problem in earlier reports.

IPS received no response to its request for comment from Corporación Del Monte corporate relations director Luis Enrique Gómez with regard to the water problem.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, May 11 2015 (IPS)

After years of violence against two indigenous groups in Costa Rica, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) demanded that the government adopt measures by May 15 to protect the life and physical integrity of the members of the two communities.

The IACHR granted precautionary measures in favour of the Bribri community living in the 11,700-hectare Salitre indigenous territory, who have been fighting for years to reclaim land that has been illegally occupied by landowners.

“The law gives us the right to defend our claim to our territory, and one of the things it allows us to do is take back the land that is in the hands of non-indigenous people who are not living on it,” the leader of the community, Roxana Figueroa, told IPS.

Besides seeking to protect the community of Salitre, the resolution is aimed at safeguarding the Teribe or Bröran community in Térraba, also in the southeast. Around 85 percent of the Teribe community’s land is occupied by non-indigenous people, which violates their collective title to their ancestral territory.

Salitre, Térraba and the other 22 indigenous territories established in this Central American nation all share the same problem: the occupation of their land by non-indigenous landowners, in violation of international conventions and local legislation.

Costa Rica’s indigenous law, in effect since 1977, declared native territories inalienable, indivisible, non-transferable and exclusive to the indigenous communities living there.

Non-indigenous people “have come here to exploit nature and have occupied our lands or acquired them through fraudulent means from indigenous people,” said Figueroa, who spoke to IPS from a farm that the Bribri people managed to reclaim from a group of outsiders who had invaded it.

Figueroa, 36, says that while the level of violence has gone down in the community, “it’s still there, looming. They have identified those of us who took part in recovering this land, and they know who are participating in the struggle.”

There are very real reasons to be afraid. The violent incidents documented by the IACHR include a Jan. 5, 2013 machete attack on three unarmed indigenous men. One was also tortured with a hot iron rod; another was shot; and the third man nearly lost two fingers.

A Costa Rican indigenous family runs to take shelter in the community of Cedror in the indigenous territory of Salitre on Jul. 6, 2014, fearing an attack by landowners who occupied their land after setting fire to their homes and belongings the day before. Credit: David Bolaños/IPS

In one of the latest incidents, a group of non-indigenous men sowed terror in Salitre, where they burnt down a house before fleeing – a common modus operandi of the thugs.

The precautionary measures granted by the IACHR came in response to complaints filed since 2012 by two lawyers with the Forest Peoples Programme, an international organisation that works with forest peoples in South America, Africa, and Asia, to help them secure their rights.

It represents a crucial step in order for the case to eventually to make it to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in the Costa Rican capital, San José.

The Court and the Washington-based IACHR are the Organisation of American States (OAS) human rights system.

The IACHR resolution, issued Apr. 30, stressed that the situation is grave and urgent, and that the damage caused is irreparable. It gives the Costa Rican government 15 days to deliver a report on the implementation of the measures it called for.

Besides demanding guarantees for the lives and personal integrity of the members of the Bribri and Teribe communities, the IACHR ordered the government to reach agreement on the measures with the beneficiaries and their representatives, and to investigate the violent incidents.

“This is a preliminary stage that would precede an eventual trial; the IACHR issues precautionary measures while it decides whether the case has merits to be taken to the Inter-American Court,” Professor Rubén Chacón, a lawyer who is an expert on indigenous law at the University of Costa Rica, explained to IPS.

According to Chacón, either the resolution will have a real impact on domestic policies, or the status quo will remain unchanged, and “if the Court asks, the state will respond that the country has an efficient judicial system.”

In his view, the violence against indigenous people has waned, but the authorities are failing to take advantage of this period of relative calm to tackle the roots of the problem.

However Chacón, who represents Sergio Rojas, one of the leaders of the indigenous peoples’ effort to recover their ancestral territory, acknowledged that things have changed. “If it weren’t for the willingness that the government is currently showing to some extent, the threats would be worse now than they were two years ago,” said Chacón.

The IACHR precautionary measures have come on top of international calls for a solution to the violence plaguing the indigenous people in Salitre, Térraba and other communities in Costa Rica, where 2.6 percent of the population of 4.5 million are indigenous people.

During a July 2014 visit to the country, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon met with 36 leaders of different indigenous peoples, who described the hardships they suffer due to the authorities’ failure to enforce the laws that protect them and to take a hand in the matter.

In March 2012, then U.N. special rapporteur for the rights of indigenous peoples James Anaya visited the country, and Térraba in particular, drawing attention to the violence against Costa Rica’s indigenous communities.

According to Chacón, the visit played a crucial role because “in his report, Anaya outlined the extent of the confrontation between indigenous and non-indigenous people and the threats” in Térraba and Salitre.

The government of Luis Guillermo Solís has taken up the challenge of solving the conflict over land in Salitre and assigned the president’s deputy minister of political affairs, Ana Gabriel Zúñiga, as an intermediary in the conflict in Salitre.

Zúñiga told IPS that the government sees the IACHR’s precautionary measures as an endorsement of the work done since Solis took office in May 2014, which has included the launch of talks with the indigenous communities in the south of the country.

“They pointed out the positive things we have been working on,” said the deputy minister, who added that “the conflict has dragged on because the integral solution required is structural and has to counteract 30 years of institutional inertia.”

Although the IACHR specifically mentioned the violent incidents of the second half of 2014, Zuñiga argued that they were the result of a long-seated problem that cannot be solved in a few months.

“The conflict that broke out in July is due to a historical problem that has not been resolved. When we assess the situation, the most serious events occurred in 2012, like the branding with a hot iron rod,” she said.

The roughly 100,000 indigenous people in Costa Rica belong to the Bruca, Ngäbe, Brirbi, Cabécar, Maleku, Chorotega, Térraba and Teribe ethnic groups, according to the 2011 census, living in 24 indigenous territories scattered around the country, covering a total of nearly 350,000 hectares – around seven percent of the national territory.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Seven percent of Costa Rica’s electricity comes from wind power, thanks to wind farms such as the ones operating in the mountains of La Paz and Casamata, 50 km from San José. But the automotive industry remains a hurdle to the country’s dream of achieving a totally clean energy mix. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, May 5 2015 (IPS)

Costa Rica has almost reached its goal of an energy mix based solely on renewable sources, harnessing solar, wind and geothermal power, as well as the energy of the country’s rivers.

In April, the state electricity company, ICE, announced that in 2015, 97 percent of the country’s energy supply would come from clean sources.

“The country as such, along with its energy and environmental policies, has decided that it wants its energy development to be based on renewable sources,” Javier Orozco, the head of ICE’s System Expansion Process, told Tierramérica.

But this Central American country of 4.5 million people still depends partially on fossil fuels. The official said “we use thermal energy generation as a complement because renewables depend on the climate and you can’t guarantee that there will always be wind or water.”

The country’s energy supply is based almost totally on clean sources. In March ICE announced that in the first 75 days of the year, not a single litre of oil nor kilo of coal were burnt to generate electricity in the country.

“In our country, we build thermal plants to keep them turned off. Our aim is to have thermal plants that are turned off most of the time,” Orozco said.

That objective is not always met, principally because hydroelectric power varies with seasonal stream flows. The year 2014 was dry and the country’s fossil fuel use hit a record level, generating 10.3 percent of the total electricity supply.

Since the mid-20th century, Costa Rica’s energy mix has been largely based on hydroelectricity. But the country has gradually reduced its dependence on that energy source, and in 2014 hydropower accounted for only 63 percent of the total demand of 2,800 MW, while geothermal energy supplied 15 percent and wind power seven percent.

Last year’s large petroleum bill was caused by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation, a cyclical climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world, which hit Central America hard and triggered one of the worst droughts in over half a century.

Projections of the future impact of climate change play a double role: while the world has to seek cleaner sources of energy to curb global warming, Costa Rica must diversify its energy mix because of the changes in hydrological patterns.

The country is thus exploring the limits of renewable energies and the possibility of generating 100 percent clean energy is on the table, as part of a strategy based especially on geothermal power.

This source of energy is hidden under the volcanoes of northwest Costa Rica. Local scientists and engineers are perfecting the technique of using the earth’s heat to generate electricity.

“We are planning the construction of the new geothermal plant, Pailas II, and we are at the stage of feasibility studies for a new field. Geothermal power is important because it isn’t subject to climate change, but is constant,” Orozco explained.
The plant will have 50 MW of installed capacity and it will join the ones already in operation: Pailas (35 MW), and Miralles (165 MW). That means that only 23 percent of the country’s geothermal potential of 865 MW is being used, according to ICE figures.

But the problem with respect to developing this source of energy is that the rest of the potential lies in national parks, where exploiting it is banned by law.

That raises the question of what definition of green energy the country will accept.

Experts like former minister of environment and energy René Castro (2011-2014) see the development of geothermal energy as viable.

“It is possible,” Castro told Tierramérica. “Two changes are needed: ICE would need to expand geothermal energy production, and the extraction of this source of energy in national parks would need to be authorised, while paying royalties to the parks and replacing the land used, twice over: if 50 hectares are used (in a park), the equivalent of 100 percent of its ecological value would be replaced.”

The other measure proposed by Castro is “to authorise the private sector to generate electricity with biomass from pineapple or banana plant waste, or sawdust,” and later sell it to ICE, which administers the energy supply and is the biggest producer of electricity.

Private operators represent 14.5 percent of total energy generation and one-fourth of installed capacity. But they face legal restrictions when it comes to expanding their share.

The investment needed would be similar to what is projected by ICE, which is close to one percent of GDP, the former minister said. “What would change is that instead of one single investor, ICE, it would be the dominant one, accompanied by around 30 other companies and cooperatives,” he said.

The country is in urgent need of holding this debate.

In July 2014, the legislature approved a loan from the European Investment Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency to build the Pailas II geothermal project.

ICE is building plants that will expand its current installed capacity of 2,800 MW by an additional 800 MW.

At the same time, the government is holding a national dialogue on electrical energy, to discuss these issues, and a national dialogue on transportation and fuels, which will address the hurdle to Costa Rica’s dream of green energy: the fuel used in transportation.

Transport, the weakest link

“The transportation sector is the biggest energy consumer at a national level and is responsible for 67 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” said the current minister of environment and energy, Édgar Gutiérrez, at the start of the national dialogue talks.

That is why “addressing the challenges in this sector is a priority” for the government, he said.

No matter how clean Costa Rica’s energy mix becomes, the country will still produce emissions and will still have a “dirty” development model because of land transport.

One possible solution could come from Costa Rican-born scientist and former astronaut Franklin Chang, who is working on a hydrogen-based renewable energy system.

“The problem doesn’t lie in electricity but in transportation,” he told Tierramérica. “That’s where we have to distance ourselves from the use of petroleum, introduce our own fuel in our own country with hydrogen-based technologies.”

From his laboratory in Guancaste, in western Costa Rica on the Pacific Ocean, Chang has partnered with Costa Rica’s state oil refinery, RECOPE, to create a pilot plan with several hydrogen-fueled vehicles, and has reached the test stage. But a technicality has stalled the 2.3 million dollar project.

In October, his company, Ad Astra, announced that it was ready to launch the final phase.

“It was the final flourish – we were going to install and create a small ecosystem of hydrogen vehicles,” said Chang. But RECOPE was unable to overcome the legal obstacle to operate using that energy source. “In March I announced that I was totally fed up.”

The legislature is currently studying a solution to enable RECOPE to invest in clean energy sources, but until then the project will be stalled.

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

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Workers on strike at the Sixaola plantation in Costa Rica’s Caribbean region rest after sharing a pot of beans, while they wait for news from the leaders of their trade union about the conflict with the transnational corporation Fresh Del Monte. Credit: Fabián Hernández Mena/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Mar 18 2015 (IPS)

A strike that has brought activity to a halt since January on three major banana plantations on Costa Rica’s southern Caribbean coast, along the border with Panama, has highlighted the abuses in a sector in the hands of transnational corporations and has forced the governments of both countries to intervene.

More than 300 labourers, almost all of them indigenous Panamanians working on plantations for a branch of the U.S. corporation Fresh Del Monte, have been on strike since Jan. 16 to protest harassment of trade unionists, changes in schedules and working conditions, delayed payment of wages and dismissals considered illegal.

“The company laid us off on Dec. 31 and when it rehired us on Jan. 3 it said we were new workers and that any modification of the work applied to us. But according to legal precedent, to be considered a new worker at least a month has to go by,” Federico Abrego, one of the striking workers from Panama, told Tierramérica by phone from the area.

Abrego and most of the more than 300 workers on strike on the Sixaola plantations 1, 2 and 3 belong to the Ngöbe and Bugle indigenous groups, who live in a self-governed indigenous county in Panama across the border from Costa Rica, where many go to find work.

Between 70 and 90 percent of Panama’s 417,000 indigenous people live in poverty, according to a 2014 United Nations report.

Observers say the latest conflict between workers and Fresh Del Monte in the Caribbean municipality of Talamanca, 250 km southeast of San José, is the result of decades of accumulation of land on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, mainly by large foreign banana producers, but in recent years by pineapple growers as well.

Talamanca is in the second-to-last place among the country’s 81 municipalities in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Index. Most of Talamanca’s population is indigenous, and banana and plantain plantations cover 37 percent of the territory.

“The plantations that are on strike belong to Corbana (Corporación Bananera Nacional) and are leased to Fresh Del Monte,” lawmaker Gerardo Vargas, who represents the Caribbean coastal province of Limón, told Tierramérica. “Two years ago there was a big strike over the subhuman conditions, poor wages and immigration problems and a union was founded.”

“In December the contract with Corbana expired, and when they renewed it, the company did something that infringed the rules: they set up a new union, dismissed all of the workers, and only hired back those who were in the new union. The new conflict broke out as a result,” said Vargas, of the left-wing Broad Front coalition.

Corbana was created by the government and the owners of banana plantations to bolster production and trade. In the past it also produced bananas on land that it now leases to companies that basically use the property as their own.

“The concentration of land in Limón is getting dangerous,” warned the legislator from the banana-producing province. “Today hundreds and hundreds of families have to sell their land to become hired labour.”

Abrego is a classic example of these plantation workers. The 53-year-old Gnöbe Indian has been working on banana plantations in Costa Rica since 1993. He now lives with his wife and eight children, half of whom are still of school age, in a house that belongs to the Banana Development Corporation (Bandeco), a branch of Fresh Del Monte.

“My fellow strikers ask me about the food and tell me the same thing my family tells me at home: that they don’t have anything to eat while we’re waiting to be rehired,” said Abrego, the leader of the trade union at the Sixaola 3 plantation.

A burnt vehicle that workers on strike at a Sixaola banana plantation in Costa Rica’s Caribbean coastal region say was set on fire as part of the violent actions against them carried out in reprisal by banana-growing companies. Credit: Fabián Hernández Mena/IPS

“I’m trying to get by without an income, with what I can scrounge up. But there are guys with small children who are having a harder time,” he said with a heavy heart, before explaining that the striking workers prepared communal meals to survive.

An estimated 95 percent of the strikers are indigenous people from Panama. “We’re on this side (of the border) for work,” said Abrego, a legal resident in Costa Rica. “We didn’t come here to steal or to take the bread out of anyone’s mouth. It’s rare to see a Costa Rican working on a banana plantation.”

The strike escalated when banana workers from Panama blocked traffic for a number of hours on the bridge over the Sixaola river, which connects Costa Rica and Panama, on Feb. 20-21.

The roadblock and the fact that the strike is being held by Panamanians on a Costa Rican plantation forced both governments to establish a negotiating table after an agreement reached on Feb. 27, which is to deliver its recommendations in a month.

Taking part in the talks are representatives of Bandeco, the local branch of the Sitepp (Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Empresa Pública y Privada) trade union, Costa Rica’s Ministry of Labour and Social Security, and Panama’s Ministry of Labour.

Besides the creation of the binational commission and its report, the agreement included “the company’s promise to immediately rehire 64 workers and to not evict the dismissed workers from their homes,” Costa Rica’s Deputy Minister of Labour Harold Villegas told Tierramérica.

The plantations in Costa Rica’s Caribbean coastal region are the scenario of frequent conflicts between workers and the big banana companies, and the current strike on the Sixaola plantations is just one example. In 2013, Sitepp held a strike to protest poor working conditions and the complaints are piling up in the Ministry of Labour.

In May 2014, an inspection by the ministry revealed a number of violations of the country’s labour laws and ordered the companies to redress them.

For example, according to the report by the national inspection office, “on occasion, company officials use different forms of intimidation against the workers, either through verbal abuse or shouting or practices of labour harassment.”

“After these denunciations were made, they set up a union, tailored to the needs of the company,” the president of Sitepp, Luis Serrano, told Tierramérica. “Through that union they were trying to take over the negotiation of the collective bargaining agreement that expired in December. They launched a campaign against us and started to give benefits to the union in alliance with the company, which they created.”

The union leaders complain that despite the binational agreement, they have not yet received food support from the institutions, although the 64 workers covered by the accord were rehired.

A large proportion of the banana industry is in the hands of transnational corporations. Besides Fresh Del Monte, there are branches of other U.S. firms like Chiquita Brands, which controls 24 percent of the country’s banana exports, or the Dole Food Company.

The banana industry carries a heavy weight in the country, especially the Caribbean coastal region. According to statistics from Corbana, it employs 6.2 percent of Costa Rica’s workforce and 77 percent of all workers in the Caribbean region.

The industry represents seven percent of the country’s exports, and last year it brought in 900 million dollars.

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

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

As Juan Evo Morales Ayma, popularly known as ‘Evo’, celebrates his victory for a third term as Bolivia’s president on a platform of “anti-imperialism” and radical socio-economic policies, he can also claim credit for ushering in far-reaching social reforms such as the Bolivian “Law against Political Harassment and Violence against Women” enacted in 2012.

“In many countries women in the political arena, whether candidates to an election or elected to office, are confronted with acts of violence ranging from sexist portrayal in the media to threats and murder,” says the World Future Council (WFC), which monitors the gap between policy research and policy-making.

Speaking to IPS after the 2014 Future Policy Award for Ending Violence against Women and Girls ceremony, organised by WFC, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women on Oct. 14, WFC founder Jacob von Uexkull told IPS that the Bolivian law “is a visionary law, particularly for protecting women against political harassment and violence.”“Achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women ... violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole” – Martin Chungong, IPU Secretary-General

“For the first time we introduced the category of what are called visionary laws which aim to curb violence against women in politics and other professions,” he said, adding that the passing of such a law in Bolivia is “very significant”, suggesting that other should emulate the Bolivian example.

The law against political harassment and violence against women was enacted in Bolivia by the Morales government following the assassination of Councillor Juana Quispe after she had complained about the abuse she suffered from other councillors and the mayor of her town. The law defines political harassment and political violence as criminal offences which carry imprisonment ranging from two to eight years depending on the magnitude of the offence.

The WFC, which promotes the world’s best laws and solutions for implementation by policy-makers in countries all over the world, chose to offer the “honourable mention” for the Bolivian law in the visionary category.

Based in Hamburg, Germany, the WFC was set up in 2007 to pioneer the campaign for the spread of best laws in different areas. Beginning in 2009, the WFC has been offering the Future Policy Award (FPA) for the strongest laws in the field of sustainable development.

The WFC identified the Belo Horizonte Food Security Programme in 2009 as the best law for the FPA to address the right to food. In 2010, the FPA went to Costa Rica for the best law to strengthen biodiversity. In 2011, it was awarded to Rwanda for its laws to protect forests, and in 2012 it was awarded to the Republic of Palau in the Pacific Ocean for the best laws to protect coasts.

Last year, the FPA went to the treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean.

With 2014 having been designated by WFC as the year for ending violence against women and girls, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka says that governments must adopt a “comprehensive legal framework” that addresses violence against women, by “recognising unequal power relations between men and women” and advocating a “gender-sensitive perspective in tackling it.”

According to Martin Chungong, Secretary-General of IPU, the key message is that “achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women.” Moreover, “violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole.”

Michael Paymar (centre), member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, along with others behind the ‘Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence’ programme of Duluth, Minnesota, winner of this year’s gold Future Policy Award (FPA). Credit: Courtesy of World Future Council

This year’s WFC gold award went to the “Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence” programme of the City of Duluth in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Among others, said von Uexkull, the “Duluth model” has a shared philosophy about domestic violence and a system that shifts responsibility for victim safety from the victim to the system.

The “Duluth model” has helped countries formulate laws and policies based on the principles of coordinated community response and paved the way for the intervention of criminal justice in cases of intimate partner violence.

Each year, an estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner.

According to von Uexkull, such violence entails huge human, social, and economic costs which are estimated to be around 5.18 percent of world GDP.

HBO (Home Box Office), a U.S. pay television network, has recently produced a documentary entitled Private Violence, which looks at domestic violence against women. In an interview with The Guardian, Cynthia Hill, the documentary’s director, said: “The thing that I did not know that was so revealing to me was that anywhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of domestic violence homicides happen at the point of separation or after [the victim] has already left [her abuser].”.

One of the biggest issues facing women and girls today in the world, says Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary of the Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), is violence. “I see the violence against women as a manifestation of inequalities, disempowerment and exclusion,” Gumbonzvanda told IPS. “It is the accumulation of many realities that women find in their own lives, particularly that of social disempowerment.”

To highlight the importance of enforcing and implementing existing laws to eradicate violence against women, the WFC gave awards this year to Austria and Burkina Faso for their stringent implementation of laws to protect women against violence. “When the justice system and specialised service providers work hand in hand, real progress can be made,” said von Uexkull.

However, as countries are preparing to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, there is not a single country in the world where we have succeeded in eliminating violence against women, warns Gertrude Mongella, Secretary-General of the Beijing conference, former President of the Pan-African Parliament and WFC Honorary Councillor from Tanzania.

“Many countries now have laws that protect women from violence,” Mongella told participants at the FPA ceremony. “However, women who report violence often face a range of challenges, including resistance or disbelief from law enforcement officers, judges and lawyers.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Rosa Julia Leyva, to the left, with other participants in the Drugs and Social Inclusion panel at the Fifth Latin American Conference on Drug Policies, held in San José, Costa Rica. She spent 12 years in prison for smuggling a small stash of heroin in a bag that a friend gave her to carry. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Sep 5 2014 (IPS)

Poor young men, slumdwellers and single mothers are hurt the most by anti-drug policies in Latin America, according to representatives of governments, social organisations and multilateral bodies meeting at the Fifth Latin American Conference on Drug Policies.

During the Sept. 3-4 conference held in San José, Costa Rica, activists, experts and decision-makers from throughout the region demanded reforms of these policies, to ease the pressure on vulnerable groups and shift the focus of law enforcement measures to those who benefit the most from the drug trade.

Today things are backwards – the focus is on “the small fish” rather than “the big fish”, Paul Simons, the executive secretary of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD), told IPS.

The proposals set forth during the meeting recommended an overhaul of the legal systems in Latin America, to reduce incarceration and establish sentences proportionate to minor crimes. The participants argued that laws and the justice systems should focus on cracking down on the big interests involved in drug trafficking.

They also recommended that amounts for legal personal possession should be established, along with measures such as the decriminalisation of some drugs or the creation of markets controlled by the state, along the lines of what Uruguay is doing in the case of marijuana.

The current policies give rise to cases like that of Rosa Julia Leyva, an indigenous Mexican woman who now works in the Mexican interior ministry’s National Commission on Security.

Leyva was imprisoned in 1993 for carrying a woven bag with a small package of heroin, which was given to her by a friend who paid her plane ticket in exchange for help with her baggage. It was the first time she had ever left the Petatlán mountains in the southwest state of Guerrero. Until her arrest, she told IPS, she thought she was carrying money or clothes.

At the time, she was the prototype of the women who are constantly thrown into Latin American prisons for drug smuggling: an illiterate 29-year-old, the mother of a five-year-old daughter, sentenced to a quarter century in prison for possession of heroin.“I’m just a poor woman who went through something very difficult. I had nothing to do with drugs and I never could have imagined that they would give me 25 years for drug trafficking. They made out like I was a big drug smuggler and I didn’t even speak Spanish.” --Rosa Julia Leyva

The Organisation of American States (OAS) reports that 70 percent of the female prison population in the region was incarcerated for drug possession.

“I’m just a poor woman who went through something very difficult,” Leyva says. “I had nothing to do with drugs and I never could have imagined that they would give me 25 years for drug trafficking. They made out like I was a big drug smuggler and I didn’t even speak Spanish.”

“I think the law should be more specific in these things,” said Leyva, who also makes crafts. She managed to get her sentence reduced to 13 years, of which she served just over 12. Now she gives theatre classes in Mexican prisons.

In the world’s most unequal region, the prisons are packed full of poor people, while white collar criminals are much less likely to be brought to justice, said experts participating in the “Drugs and Social Inclusion” panel during the conference.

This imbalance and overcrowding of the prisons could change, they said, if the courts and prison systems made the effort.

“We want to see who is brought before the courts, and look into options for people who are not violent and who have committed minor crimes, as consumers, drug mules [who smuggle small quantities] or people who committed the crime to feed themselves and their families,” Simons told IPS.

“They are the small fish, like bus drivers or mules, who smuggle small quantities without any violence in a region full of contrasts,” said the head of CICAD, which forms part of the OAS. “We want to see if there is a way for these people not to be caught up in the prison cycle.”

In a region where 10 of the most unequal countries in the world are located, “drug policies must be reformulated,” said Yoriko Yasukawa, resident coordinator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Costa Rica.

The proportionality of sentences in cases like Leyva’s was a recurrent theme among the experts, who called for a “more just” legal system in line with the real damage caused by people convicted of drug-related crimes.

“Sometimes the punishment is comparable to the penalties for homicide or other serious crimes,” Argentine social worker Graciela Touzé told IPS.

“It is not similar to the damage caused, and the punishment can’t be similar either, although that does not mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable,” added the president of the Intercambios Asociación Civil, an organisation based in Buenos Aires.

Social cost

During the regional conference, speakers were adamant in their criticism of the social costs of repressive anti-drug policies.

Costa Rica’s minister of public security, Celso Gamboa, explained that the people arrested in his country in the first eight months of 2014 included fishermen, flight attendants and drivers who were drawn into drug smuggling by poverty.

“The blows to drug trafficking structures have focused on the most vulnerable parts, which leads us to conclude that much of the fight against drugs in Costa Rica and the rest of Latin America fuels the criminalisation of poverty,” he said.

“The question is: where are the investigations enabling us to reach the white collar structures and those who hold the real power?” said Gamboa, a former prosecutor from the Caribbean province of Limón, where he was involved in hundreds of drug trafficking cases.

Above and beyond the complicated situation in the prisons, civil society organisations insisted that anti-drug policies are marked by inequality. For that reason, activists said, drug consumers and young people are punished more harshly.

But the different proposals for redressing the imbalance sometimes clash.

Gamboa believes in tackling the drug problem with an economics-based approach that goes after the big fish who hold the real money, while Zara Snapp, of the Mexican Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, says the best way to reduce the number of civilian victims of the drug trade is by creating a market in Mexico regulated by the state.

“The inequality does not mean that there isn’t a lot that we can do, because we still have many resources, it’s just that we channel them into the militarisation of the struggle and into law enforcement, rather than towards creating opportunities for the vulnerable populations,” the Mexican activist, who also forms part of the non-governmental Mexican Commission for the Promotion of Human Right, told IPS.

“The only thing that approach does is to create fertile ground for recruitment by organised crime,” she said.

It is poor young men and women who pay the cost. According to the OAS, the prevalence of consumption of “pasta base” or cocaine paste is 1.8 percent overall, but 8.0 percent among young people in poverty.

The stigma surrounding the use of pasta base accentuates their marginalisation and further limits their opportunities, according to the Report on the Drug Problem in the Americas.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A Costa Rican indigenous family runs to take shelter in the community of Cedror in the indigenous territory of Salitre on Jul. 6, afraid of being attacked by landowners who occupied their land after setting fire to their homes and belongings the day before. Credit: David Bolaños/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

Indigenous people in Costa Rica, hemmed in by violent attacks from farmers and ranchers who invade their land and burn down their homes, have found a new ally: United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who met with 36 native leaders during a recent visit to this country.

The leaders, representing eight indigenous groups, described the violence faced by native people in Costa Rica, and the many struggles they face, even in simply getting identity cards.

But they underlined that their most pressing concern is the occupation of indigenous areas by “the white man”, which has led to an escalation of attacks from landowners, who invade their ancestral territory and try to drive them off the land, despite a law that guarantees their right to collective ownership of their territory.

The latest violent episode occurred in the community of Cedror, in the Salitre indigenous territory in the southeast of the country.

The Bribri people in Salitre had begun a process of recovering territory occupied by landowners or “finqueros”, who responded by burning down their modest homes and blocking access to their territory.

The violence, which continued from Jul. 5 to 8, prompted a visit to Cedror by the deputy minister of political affairs, Ana Gabriel Zúñiga, sent by President Luis Guillermo Solís, along with representatives of the Defensoría de los Habitantes – ombudsperson’s office – and the Ministry of Justice and Peace.“We don’t want to be beggars of the state. If they approve our law, we could develop ourselves according to our vision that we must protect the forests and water.” -- José Carlos Morales

A mob of around 80 thugs converged on the community on Jul. 5, armed with rocks and guns, chased the local indigenous people out of their homes, and then burned down the huts, with all of the families’ belongings inside.

Ligia Bejarano, one of the indigenous leaders who informed the U.N. secretary-general of the situation, told him that in 2010 native people were thrown out of the legislature when they went to lobby for approval of a new law on indigenous affairs.

According to Bejarano, Ban was very receptive and told them he was aware of the latest attack on native people in this Central American country, where members of indigenous groups represent 2.6 percent of the population of 4.5 million.

The secretary-general paid an official visit to Costa Rica on Jul. 30, and spent an additional four days in the country on vacation.

“I stress that dialogue is a very powerful tool and that we must continue to foment it, as long as there is grassroots community participation,” Magaly Lázaro, a member of the Brunca indigenous community who also participated in the meeting with Ban, told IPS.

“This is a group of marginalised populations who have long been discriminated against by societies,” Ban said shortly after the meeting, referring to indigenous people during a conference held in the San José-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

“I do take away the empty feeling that it was very short, for such an important meeting – five minutes weren’t enough for me to say what I feel; you can’t sum up so many things because the problem is bigger than what was discussed,” another of the three female participants, Justa Romero, told IPS.

The indigenous territory with the worst problems is Térraba, 150 km southeast of San José. Around 85 percent of the community’s land has been occupied by non-indigenous outsiders, according to the 2012 State of the Nation report drawn up by the National Provosts Council.

This is happening despite the fact that Costa Rica’s Indigenous Law, in force since 1977, declared native territories inalienable, indivisible, non-transferable and exclusive to the indigenous communities living there.

In other words, even if outsiders buy land in indigenous territories, the purchase and land title are invalid.

The native leaders told IPS that in the meeting with Ban they asked him to help them get the authorities to accelerate the adoption of measures to ensure respect for their rights and support for their autonomous development.

“Now we want to see how many non-indigenous people are in our territory,” Romero, a Bribri native who belongs to the Commission of Indigenous Women of Talamanca Association (ACOMUITA) in the country’s southern Caribbean region, told IPS. “But it’s not just a question of saying ‘we found this or that’ – I mean we should go and remove them and demonstrate that the land truly belongs to indigenous people.”

According to the 2011 national census, the roughly 100,000 members of the Brunca, Ngäbe, Bribri, Cabécar, Maleku, Chorotega, Térraba and Teribe communities live in 24 indigenous territories scattered around the country. Altogether, these areas cover 350,000 hectares of land – around seven percent of the national territory.

After visiting Salitre, Deputy Minister Zúñiga said the administration of Solis, who took office as president in May, recognises indigenous people’s right to their land and will support them in recovering their territory.

“We have started to carry out an analysis of all aspects related to the demarcation of Salitre and we are taking the first steps to see who [non-indigenous people] have farms in the territory and who has the right to be indemnified,” Geiner Blanco, a member of the Maleku indigenous community and a presidential adviser on native affairs, told IPS.

A bill aimed at overcoming the gaps and problems in the country’s institutions with respect to indigenous affairs has been stalled in the legislature for 19 years.

The proposed reforms include the governance of native territories by indigenous councils; the removal of all non-native people from the territories; and education for indigenous children designed in line with the native world vision and culture.

“We don’t want to be beggars of the state,” Brunca indigenous leader José Carlos Morales told IPS. “If they approve our law, we could develop ourselves according to our vision that we must protect the forests and water.

“But they don’t want to pass it. They want us to keep being beggars,” said Morales, who helped draft the 1977 Indigenous Law and worked for five years in the United Nations Human Rights Council’s indigenous rights body.

Lázaro, a 29-year-old member of the Brunca community, told IPS that she would be happy just to stop being plagued by the fear she started to feel in August last year, when she was visiting Salitre and preparing a meal with the women and children while the men went out to patrol the borders of the territory.

“We were about to eat when a bunch of people came up with sticks and clubs and surrounded us in a question of just a few seconds,” she said. “It was a mob of finqueros and white people; I had heard of that kind of violence, but I hadn’t experienced it, and the fear has stayed with me.”

Edited by: Estrella Gutiérrez / Translated by: Stephanie Wildes

The presidents of China, Xi Jinping, and Costa Rica, Luis Guillermo Solís, both at their microphones during a Jul. 17 meeting in Brasilia. Credit: Presidencia de Costa Rica

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jul 30 2014 (IPS)

China’s plan to become Costa Rica’s main energy ally through the joint reconstruction of an oil refinery has been revived after the presidents of the two countries agreed to review the conditions of the project during a meeting in the Brazilian capital.

The two countries initially signed a framework accord in 2008, including Chinese participation in oil projects, especially the upgrade and expansion of the Moín refinery on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast, with an investment of 1.5 billion dollars.

But criticism from public institutions, political leaders and social organisations brought the initiative to a halt.

The Costa Rican president’s office stated in a communiqué that Beijing had accepted its request to renegotiate the project, with the aim of “resolving inconsistencies in the contract,” in which each country has invested 50 million dollars so far.

Costa Rican Foreign Minister Manuel González said in a Jul. 22 press conference that “we have no deadline” for that review, which all of the involved institutions will take part in.

President Luis Guillermo Solís participated in the news briefing, although he did not specifically refer to the refinery.

Solís held a bilateral working meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on Jul 17 in Brasilia, during a summit of presidents of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) with Xi, after the sixth summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) grouping.

The upgrade of the Moín refinery, which belongs to the state oil refinery Refinadora Costarricense de Petróleo (Recope), would increase its processing capacity from 18,000 to 60,000 barrels a day of crude. The company controls Costa Rica’s oil imports, and since 2011 it has had to purchase only refined products, because the plant was shut down.

The joint refinery project, or “Chinese refinery” as it is referred to locally, was criticised by politicians and a large part of organised civil society from the start.

“We have always defended the construction of a refinery, whether it was with China, Russia or France,” said Patrick Johnson, a leader of the oil workers’ union, the Sindicato de Trabajadores Petroleros Químicos y Afines.”We want the confusion to be cleared up…and if the project is beneficial, then it should go ahead because the country needs a refinery,” he told IPS.

In June 2013, the office of the comptroller general brought the initiative to a halt arguing that there were serious problems with a key feasibility study. Since then, the project has been on hold.

The renegotiations should overcome the first real hurdle that China has run into in Costa Rica. In 2007, this country became the first in Central America to establish diplomatic relations with China, in a part of the world that continues to have ties with Taiwan – incompatible with relations with China.

“Having an embassy here makes it easier to deal with matters with Central America,” Patricia Rodríguez, an expert on China who was an official in Costa Rica’s embassy in Beijing from 2008 to 2010, told IPS.

China is now Costa Rica’s second-biggest trading partner after the United States. This country’s sales to the Asian giant climbed from 91 million dollars in 2000 to 1.5 billion in 2011, when a free trade treaty signed in 2010 went into effect.

In strategic terms, the joint refinery between Recope and the state-run China National Petroleum Corporation International (CNPCI) is China’s star project in the country, and the joint venture Sociedad Reconstructora Chino Costarricense (Soresco) was set up in 2009 to carry it out.

The investment is to amount to 1.5 billion dollars, of which Soresco would receive 900 million in loans from the China Development Bank. The rest will come from the partners. The construction and remodeling of the plant will absorb 1.2 billion dollars of that total.

The work was to begin early this year and was to last 42 months. The comptroller general’s office’s decision to put it on hold was due, among other things, to the fact that the feasibility study was carried out by a subsidiary of CNPCI, which it said subverted the evaluation.

The resolution had the effect of “completely paralysing the refinery upgrade process by leaving it without the technical studies necessary for it to continue,” explained Recope in a lawsuit brought against the comptroller general’s office in response to the measure.

Despite the ruling by the comptroller general’s office, the administration of conservative President Laura Chinchilla (2010-May 2014) continued to defend the refinery modernisation project. But the centre-left Solís promised during the election campaign to renegotiate the agreement, because he considered several aspects of the contract negative for the country.

The request to renegotiate the contract had the support of political sectors and in particular of lawmaker Ottón Solís, an economist and university professor who was one of the first to speak out against certain facets of the agreement.

“We have enormous bargaining power here because China is desperate to open up negotiations with Costa Rica and this country has prestige,” Deputy Solís, of the governing Citizen Action Party, told IPS.

“If we insinuate that it’s impossible to negotiate with China because they take advantage of you with unfair contracts, the whole world will be put on the alert and other countries won’t want to negotiate with them,” and that gives Costa Rica bargaining power, he said.

One of the promises made was that the upgrade of the refinery will bring down fuel costs for consumers, who currently pay 41 percent extra in taxes and profit margins for service stations and Recope’s operating costs.

Petrol currently costs 1.48 dollars a litre in Costa Rica, which makes it the most expensive gasoline in Central America. Official figures from 2012 indicate that oil consumption in the country stood at 53,000 barrels per day.

“Fuel is a fundamental element for price stability because there are public services that depend on its price, like public transportation and electricity, and the same is true in the case of the productive apparatus,” the president of Costa Rica’s consumers association, Erick Ulate, told IPS.

During the meeting with President Solís, Xi also agreed to expand the timeframe for carrying out studies for the project of widening the road connecting San José with the Caribbean port of Limón, where 90 percent of the country’s exports are shipped out. The expansion of the road will be financed with a 395 million dollar loan from Beijing.

Members of Costa Rica’s Environmental Administrative Tribunal (TAA) take a break during an inspection of damage to wetlands in Puntarenas by invading farmers. Back centre: TAA president, judge José Lino Chaves. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
PUNTARENAS, Costa Rica, Jul 2 2014 (IPS)

Biologist Juan Sánchez drives the leader of two off-road vehicles along a dirt road in southeastern Costa Rica. Officials and experts are on their way to inspect a homestead whose owner has destroyed part of a mangrove swamp.

Sánchez is a technical officer for the Environmental Administrative Tribunal (TAA), the environmental court that enforces environmental laws in Costa Rica.

During the inspection of the wetland, 280 kilometres southeast of San José, he told IPS that for the past seven years he has been “chasing the bad guys”: companies and individuals who are harming natural resources in this Central American country of 4.5 million people.

The TAA was created in 1995 and is one of the foremost mechanisms in Costa Rica to combat destruction of the ecosystem. It depends on the Environment and Energy Ministry (MINAE), not the judicial branch.

It only has 20 officials to fulfil its remit of enforcing green justice.

“We have been relatively successful in the area of environmental administrative justice,” the TAA president, judge José Lino Chaves, told IPS.

In his view, “the TAA’s change of language and actions since 2008 has managed to warn Costa Ricans that we were doing something really wrong,” and that “caring for the environment is a priority” for the country.

One-quarter of Costa Rican territory is under some form of environmental protection, 53 percent is forested and it contains nearly four percent of the world’s biodiversity. The country promotes its natural wealth as its chief attraction and an asset to combat climate change.

The TAA is complemented by the Public Prosecutor’s Agrarian Environmental Office, which is also very short-staffed.

“I remember that a study carried out in the early 1990s found that 98 percent of the environmental offences reported were dismissed,” the former Environment minister (2002-2006), Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, told IPS.

At the time, “the (formal justice) system was inefficient, and according to the study the accused were acquitted because their responsibility could not be proved,” said Rodríguez, who is an environmental lawyer and a current vice president of Conservation International, an NGO.

“I don’t doubt the good intentions of the members” of the TAA, congressman and environmental lawyer Edgardo Araya, who won the legal battle against the Crucitas mining project in the national Dispute Tribunal, told IPS. “But the TAA as it stands is not viable; it lacks resources and judges.”

Álvaro Sagot, another environmental lawyer who won a pollution case against dairy giant Dos Pinos before the TAA, agreed about the lack of resources, but highlighted to IPS the value of the environmental court’s accessibility, as any person, with or without knowledge of the law, can bring a complaint.

Plaintiffs can also resort to the ordinary justice system. But Rodríguez said the criminal justice route is no use, because of lack of awareness. “I remember talking to judges who freed poachers arrested in national parks, because they did not consider this an offence,” he said.

One of the most famous TAA rulings was in September 2009, when it compelled the Panama registered vessel Tiuna to pay a fine of 668,000 dollars for tuna fishing in protected areas.

The environmental court assessed the value of the 280 tonnes of fish taken from the Coco Island National Park, off the western Pacific coast, and levied a proportionate fine.

Costa Rica has sought to build an international reputation as a “green country.” For years its slogan was “No Artificial Ingredients,” and in 2007 the government launched its “Peace With Nature” initiative, reaffirming Costa Rica’s commitment to the environment.

But cases are piling up in the TAA’s offices and Chaves himself admits that creating environmental awareness is a complex process.

This month the environmental court had 3,600 open case files to deal with, more than three times the number a decade ago. There are only six lawyers and three environmental judges, two of whom are lawyers and one an engineer.

The three judges are tasked with visiting all the affected zones to see for themselves the environmental damage in the field, in order to make their rulings.

On these field trips, judges and biologists alike wear mountain boots, protective cotton sunhats and machetes at their belts.

As well as inspecting specific cases, the TAA carries out “environmental sweeps,” their term for inspection tours lasting several days, with the purpose of putting a stop to ecological damage in a given territory.

The TAA has already halted 200 real estate projects on the Pacific coast and 40 on the Atlantic coast since the sweeps started in 2008, its president said.

But the “bad guys” do not give up. Only days after Sánchez’s inspection trip, another group of lawyers, experts and judges visited mangrove swamps in Puntarenas, in the Central Pacific region, 80 kilometres east of the provincial capital, to investigate another complaint.

They found a scene of devastation: 25 hectares of mangrove had been reduced to ashes by invaders who were already planting maize and sugarcane.

“They go on and on, and if we let them they would devour the whole zone. They burn down the mangroves and use the land for farming,” forest biologist Alexis Madrigal, the coordinator of TAA’s technical department, told IPS at the scene.

While members of the technical team removed the plastic bags the invaders used to mark their new plots, Chaves and the two lawyers with him considered possible next steps.

The first thing is a precautionary measure to halt the land invasion, followed by a ban on agricultural use of the land or an order to pay an indemnity, or both.

The TAA inspired the creation of three environmental courts in Chile, and Chaves shared the Costa Rican experience with the courts’ Chilean promotors.

The two systems are similar in that they both have three judges, one of whom must be a scientist; they have wide independence and are responsible for punishing environmental harm. Peru is making headway with a comparable initiative.

The main challenge faced by the TAA is expanding the number of its technical field staff as well as the lawyers in its San José headquarters, so that members of the legal team are not burdened with the unmanageable load of 600 case files each, as they are now.

It also needs stability. From 2012 to 2014, Chaves was vice minister of Water and Oceans at MINAE. He was able to secure improved budgets for the ATT, but its activities, especially the sweeps, declined.

In July, after a year and a half of less ambitious inspections, the TAA will undertake a tour in which MINAE, institutions like the National Environmental Technical Secretariat, the Water and Sanitation Institute and the security forces will also participate.

They are bound for the north of the country, where expansion of agriculture is threatening biodiversity and water for human consumption. In his San José office, judge Chaves smiles and says: “The environmental sweeps are back.”

to commemorate the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. Participants included President Luis Guillermo Solís, second from the top, and activist Marco Castillo, bottom. Credit: Roberto Carlos Sánchez/Presidencia de Costa Rica

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, Jun 12 2014 (IPS)

Grey-haired gay activist Marco Castillo and his partner Rodrigo Campos are about to enjoy equal health care rights. For the first time in Costa Rica, and in Central America as a whole, homosexual couples will enjoy the same access to public health services as heterosexuals.

The decision by Costa Rica’s social security system to extend medical benefits to same-sex couples came just after centre-left President Luis Guillermo Solís, who took office May 8, sent out a strong signal against homophobia by having the rainbow flag raised at the presidential palace.

Castillo and Campos are just one illustration of the inequality that marks a region plagued by discrimination against sexual minorities. Although Castillo, 70, has been enrolled in the social security system for a large part of his life, he has never been able to provide his partner with health coverage because their relationship was not recognised by the state.

The good news for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community came on May 22, when the social security institute (CCSS), which runs the country’s public hospitals and social security system, approved a reform that grants same-sex couples the same medical benefits and hospital visitation rights enjoyed by heterosexual couples.

The reform is to go into effect in August. To qualify, same-sex couples will have to prove that they have been living together for at least three years.

The next step that is expected shortly is CCSS board approval of equal pension rights for same-sex couples.

“This is an important step in achieving our rights, a result of growing social awareness of our problems,” Castillo told IPS. “It doesn’t mean we have gained all our rights, but it does show that we have begun to move in that direction.”

Castillo, a lawyer who heads the Diversity Movement, which fights for the rights of LGBT persons, plans to sign up his currently unemployed partner for social security health insurance as soon as possible.

There have been other indications as well of a new openness in this mainly Catholic country of 4.5 million people. The government of Solís, from the centre-left Citizen Action Party (PAC), has shown signs that it plans to take up the cause of sexual diversity.

The situation in the rest of the countries of Central America is less encouraging, where discrimination, and even harassment, is common. In countries like Honduras and Nicaragua, IPS found that the most significant advance made was the creation of specialised legal units to address the problem of discrimination against the LGBT community.

Within Latin America, Central America is lagging farthest behind in terms of guaranteeing the rights of members of the LGBT community, concluded the sixth Regional Conference of the International Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex People for Latin America and the Caribbean (ILGALAC), held May 5-10 in Cuba.

“The outlook for the [Latin American and Caribbean] region is much more complex than what we thought,” Mexican activist Gloria Careaga, secretary general of the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), said during the conference. “We have seen strides forward, but also major setbacks in regions like Central America.”

Hate crimes are the most serious manifestation of just how far behind Central America is lagging with respect to the rest of Latin America.

According to the Centre for AIDS Education and Prevention (CEPRESI), a non-governmental organisation in Nicaragua, nearly 300 hate crimes have been committed against the LGBT population in Central America in the last five years.

In Nicaragua, the situation is very different for LGBT persons than in Costa Rica.

Marvin Mayorga, with the Sexual Diversity Initiative for Human Rights, told IPS that in his country the only progress made at an institutional level since the LGBT community formally organised in 1985 was the 2009 appointment of a prosecutor for the defence of sexual minorities within the office of the human rights prosecutor or ombudsperson.

But Mayorga said the office lacks the funds to monitor abuses and has focused its efforts almost exclusively on the fight against HIV/AIDS.

When asked for a comment, the office responded to IPS twice that it “did not have time.”

In Honduras, the struggle is led by the Civil Society Group (GSC), an alliance of social and humanitarian organisations that include LGBT groups.

The GSC’s leaders say it has been an uphill battle.

“We have to break down many taboos and gain visibility in society,” GSC activist Omar Rivera told IPS. “But we managed to get the office of the public prosecutor to create a special unit for investigating high-impact murders, including those against the LGBT community, a year ago.”

The unit investigates killings of journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, and members of the LGBT community in Honduras, which according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has the highest homicide rate in the world: 96.1 murders per 100,000 population, compared to a global average of 8.8, a Latin American average of 29, and a Central American average of 41.

In Costa Rica, the authorities would appear to be more receptive. The reform of the social security system came just a few days after President Solís had the rainbow flag hoisted over the presidential palace on May 16, the day before the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, in an unprecedented ceremony in this country.

One of the members of Solís’s cabinet is openly gay: Tourism Minister Wilhem von Breymann, who took part in the ceremony along with his partner of 19 years.

And Vice President Ana Helena Chacón was asked to be one of the two marshals in a Jun. 29 March for Diversity, in recognition of her defence of LGBT rights.

The main criticism voiced by the groups that defend the rights of sexual minorities targets the legislature. In the face of staunch opposition by lawmakers linked to the Catholic and evangelical churches, PAC is trying to push through any one of four draft laws that would legalise and regulate same-sex civil unions, which have been bogged down since the previous legislature.

“In the first week of June, the committee on legal affairs agreed to send the draft laws to subcommittee, which will study them for six months,” the head of the PAC legislative bloc, Emilia Molina, told IPS.

Meanwhile, as of August, Rodrigo Campos will have public health coverage thanks to his partner Marco Castillo, who will be able to visit him if he is ever in the hospital, with the same rights and privileges enjoyed by heterosexual couples.

Perhaps it is only one step forward – but for LGBT activists it is a huge stride. Although Castillo stressed that now that this battle has been won, they have their eyes set on many more victories.

With reporting by Ivet González (Havana), José Adán Silva (Managua) and Thelma Mejía (Tegucigalpa).

The Costa Rican legislature, which has to decide on the future of the country’s climate change legislation. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSE, May 21 2014 (IPS)

Eight months after it was introduced in the Costa Rican legislature, a bill to create a framework law on climate change is faltering after undergoing modifications that have run into criticism from environmentalists and experts – a situation made even more complex by the recent change of government.

The bill presented to this Central American country’s single-chamber parliament in August 2013 was aimed at establishing “an operational framework for the development of public policies on climate change mitigation and adaptation.”

But it stalled just ahead of the second and final vote.

Due to mounting opposition from the climate change officials of the previous administration, groups of climate change experts and a significant number of lawmakers, the bill was sent back and modified.

On Apr. 9, in the last month of the previous legislature, an amended version of the bill was presented in the Environment Commission, with a new name: “law on institutional adaptation for climate change”.

Negotiations of the bill are now resuming in the 57-seat Legislative Assembly sworn in on May 1, whose makeup changed significantly.

“The bill in its present shape and form is appalling, it doesn’t solve anything, it just makes things worse,” the director of climate change questions in the Ministry of the Environment and Energy, William Alpízar, who has been in his post since the administration of former President Laura Chinchilla (2010-2014), told IPS.

He said his office had told the Environment Commission that the bill should be eliminated.

Alpízar remains in his post even though centre-left President Luis Guillermo Solís took office on May 8, putting an end to the domination of the country by the two traditional parties: Chinchilla’s National Liberation Party (PLN) and the Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC).

Solís, who heads the Citizen Action Party (PAC), won 77 percent of the vote – the largest margin ever seen in a free election in Costa Rica.

Alpízar complained that the concerned sectors were not consulted for the bill, which he said creates unnecessary red tape, fails to take into account prior legislation, and is not even up-to-date.

“This is something that requires a dialogue with citizens in vulnerable areas, and with the public transport sector,” Olga Corrales, the coordinator of the Carbon Neutrality Strategy at the University of Costa Rica, told IPS. “Effective citizen participation is needed in the drafting of the law.”

But the bill’s sponsor, Alfonso Pérez, says the law is necessary because it creates an institutional framework for addressing the phenomenon of climate change.

Pérez, a leader of the PLN, which had a majority in the previous legislature, is no longer a lawmaker.

He said the Ministry of the Environment and Energy’s climate change office – the highest-level authority on the subject – is a technical body that lacks the necessary political clout.

The original draft of the framework law created two councils, one political and the other technical, to regulate Costa Rica’s climate change practices.

But the amended version would only create a National Commission on Climate Change (Conclima), conceived of as an effort to integrate several ministries – Environment and Energy, Agriculture and Livestock, Education, Health, and Public Works – along with other centralised institutions.

The main change in the new draft of the bill is the creation of Conclima, which would be given nearly two dozen different functions, ranging from promoting education on climate change in schools and universities to monitoring changes in zoning and a restructuring of transportation with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Pérez is the representative in Costa Rica of the Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE International), made up of parliamentarians from over 80 countries committed to developing and overseeing the implementation of laws in pursuit of sustainable development, in areas like forests, climate change and natural capital.

In its fourth report on climate legislation, GLOBE International highlighted Costa Rica’s bill and said it was slated to pass this year.

“The term ‘framework’ gave rise to certain expectations,” Pérez told IPS. “The second bill presented talks about ‘institutional adaptation’. But it does put the right emphasis on creating the necessary institutional framework in the country. The previous administration and minister did support it.”

But the new government has doubts about the bill, which the PAC had opposed in the prior legislature. Minister of the Environment and Energy Édgar Gutiérrez told IPS that the bill needs to be reviewed, although he preferred not to offer details.

In the new parliament, where bills need a boost from one or two legislators, no one has yet taken the initiative under his or her wing.

The bill’s critics include lawmakers considered “leaders” on the environment in the legislature.

“The bill doesn’t say anything, it is a statement of good intentions and creates more red tape, while it fails to establish clear mechanisms and policies,” said Edgardo Araya, a parliamentarian with the left-wing Broad Front, told IPS.

Araya, one of the country’s leading environmental lawyers, asked to form part of the Environment Commission, which has to approve the bill before it can continue wending its way through Congress.

Olga Corrales and Araya agreed that the bill fails to establish that climate change is a development issue, even though it does point in that direction by indicating that Conclima should promote multisectoral measures to tackle climate change.

Environmental organisations like Costa Rica Limpia or ARCA, as well as the country’s most prominent climate scientist, Lenín Corrales, are also opposed to the bill.

Pérez said the initial spirit of the draft law harked back to a 2011 report by the comptroller’s office which asserted that the climate change office is merely a technical body lacking in operational capacity.

What is clear is that Costa Rica does not have a comprehensive law on climate change.

During the election campaign, the current president’s environmental team promised to create a super ministry on climate change, overseeing several different ministries.

The future of another bill introduced by Pérez in parliament is also uncertain: the law on “valuation of natural capital and integration of green accounting in planning for development”, which would set a value on biodiversity, water and soil.

The value determined would be added to the technical criteria used in the process of granting construction or operating permits, and could also help to assess the weight of natural assets in the national economy.

Waves and high tides are eating away at the beaches in Costa Rica’s Cahuita National Park, where the vegetation is uprooted and washed into the sea. Credit: Diego Arguedas/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
CAHUITA NATIONAL PARK, Costa Rica , Apr 14 2014 (IPS)

The critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle has few sanctuaries left in the world, and this is one of them. But in 2012 only 53 nests were counted on the beaches of this national park in Costa Rica. And there is an enemy that conservation efforts can’t fight: the beaches themselves are shrinking.

For centuries, the over eight km of beaches in Cahuita have provided a nesting ground for four species of sea turtle: the leatherback sea turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), the loggerhead (Caretta caretta), and the hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata).

But the erosion of the sand and the rising sea level have reduced the size of their breeding grounds and the number of turtles who come to lay their eggs in this national park in the southeast Costa Rican province of Limón after migrating across the Caribbean sea.

“Many turtles now go to the beaches outside the park, in places we have no control over, which makes them more vulnerable,” the park administrator Mario Cerdas told IPS.

In the three years he has run the park, Cerdas has seen a drop in the numbers of turtles coming to nest.

The Cahuita National Park covers 1,100 hectares of land on a swampy peninsula and 23,000 hectares of ocean, including the country’s most important coral reef.

It was created in 1970 as a national monument, and in 1978 was declared a park to protect the fragile ecosystems.

The turtles’ change of destination, to beaches outside the park, is not the only concern. In sea turtles, gender is determined by the temperature of the sand on the nesting beaches, with cool beaches producing more males and warm beaches more females.

As a result of climate change, heat is increasing in Central America, which means that more females than males are born.

“This could be acceptable for the population up to a certain point, but if the gender ratio gap becomes too big, there could be problems,” said Borja Heredia, a scientist with the secretariat of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS).

And this is just one of hundreds of cases where climate change is affecting migratory species.

Drought in Africa is hindering the journey that millions of birds undertake every year across the Sahara desert; polar bears are finding it more and more difficult to find food; and global warming has modified the migratory routes of the monarch butterfly.

Scientists and government officials from around the world met Apr. 9-11 in Guácimo, Limón to study these effects and find solutions.

The workshop was organised by a CMS working group on climate change, made up of experts from more than 20 countries.

“What we are looking at is how to tackle climate change and the impact on migrant species, and that can be whales, it can be turtles, it can be birds, it can be invertebrates,” Colin Galbraith, head of the working group, and the CMS Conference of Parties appointed councillor for climate change, told IPS.

The team is to deliver a report in early May to the 120 states parties to the Convention. In June, the CMS’s scientific committee will evaluate it. After that, the next step would be to receive the approval of the Conference of the Parties in November in Quito, Ecuador.

Because climate change is expected to bring different changes to different regions, protecting species that migrate through the various regions presents an unprecedented challenge.

Manmade national borders do not mean anything to animals, which is why the CMS aims to create an international system of conservation areas to protect them on their migratory routes.

Galbraith told IPS that the report will focus on three main areas.

“Pulling information together and putting it into a plan to develop information and data sharing; how can we adapt to climate change but then also how can we help different countries build capacity; and how can we communicate this to the wider world,” said the head of the working group.

In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirmed the fragility of the world’s ecosystems to global warming, in the second volume of its 5th Assessment Report on Climate Change, which focuses on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability.

In coastal zones, the rising sea level is endangering habitats like coral reefs, wetlands and nesting beaches.

In Cahuita, for example, up to one-quarter of the beaches have been lost in 15 years, according to Cerdas. During the last high tide event, the water reached the park ranger’s wooden house, which is located 100 metres from the high tide line.

“Migratory animals face many of the same challenges that humans do: having to choose when to travel, what route to take, where to eat and rest, and how long to stay before returning home,” CMS Executive Secretary Bradnee Chambers wrote in a column published by IPS.

“Unfortunately, these choices that are seemingly so trivial for humans are life-or-death decisions for migratory animals,” he added.

The report by the working group that met last week in Costa Rica will also be taken into consideration by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity, in an effort to generate multidisciplinary knowledge.

“The different environment-related conventions have to start to look each other in the eye and work together more, cooperating with resources and research,” said Max Andrade, head of the public policy unit in the under-secretariat on climate change in Ecuador’s environment ministry.

Ecuador will seek to put a spotlight on global warming, as host to the next Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS COP11), Andrade said.

The decision to create the working group on climate change was reached at the last meeting, held in Norway three years ago.

Olga Vargas next to the greenhouse with which the Quebrada Grande de Pital Women’s Association began to revitalise its sustainable business, whose priority is reforestation. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
PITAL, Costa Rica , Apr 2 2014 (IPS)

Olga Vargas, a breast cancer survivor, is back in the countryside, working in a forestry programme in the north of Costa Rica aimed at empowering women while at the same time mitigating the effects of climate change.

Her recent illness and a community dispute over the land the project previously used – granted by the Agrarian Development Institute, where the women had planted 12,000 trees – stalled the reforestation and environmental education project since 2012 in Pital, San Carlos district, in the country’s northern plains.

But the group is getting a fresh start.

“After the cancer I feel that God gave me a second chance, to continue with the project and help my companions,” Vargas, a 57-year-old former accountant, told IPS in the Quebrada Grande forest reserve, which her group helps to maintain.

She is a mother of four and grandmother of six; her two grown daughters also participate in the group, and her husband has always supported her, she says proudly.

Since 2000, the Quebrada Grande de Pital Women’s Association, made up of 14 women and presided over by Vargas, has reforested the land granted to them, organised environmental protection courses, set up breeding tanks for the sustainable fishing of tilapia, and engaged in initiatives in rural tourism and organic agriculture.

But the top priority has been planting trees.

A group of local men who opposed the granting of the land to the women from the start demanded that the installations and business endeavours be taken over by the community.

The women were given another piece of land, smaller than one hectare in size, but which is in the name of the Association, and their previous installations were virtually abandoned.

“I learned about the importance of forest management in a meeting I attended in Guatemala. After that, several of us travelled to Panama, El Salvador and Argentina, to find out about similar initiatives and exchange experiences,” said Vargas, who used to work as an accountant in Pital, 135 km north of San José.

The most the Association has earned in a year was 14,000 dollars. “Maybe 50,000 colones [100 dollars] sounds like very little. But for us, rural women who used to depend on our husband’s income to buy household items or go to the doctor, it’s a lot,” Vargas said.

The Association, whose members range in age from 18 to 67, is not on its own. Over the last decade, groups of Costa Rican women coming up with solutions against deforestation have emerged in rural communities around the country.

These groups took up the challenge and started to plant trees and to set up greenhouses, in response to the local authorities’ failure to take action in the face of deforestation and land use changes.

“Climate change has had a huge effect on agricultural production,” Vargas said. “You should see how hot it’s been, and the rivers are just pitiful. Around three or four years ago the rivers flowed really strong, but now there’s only one-third or one-fourth as much water.”

In Quebrada Grande, the Agrarian Development Institute dedicated 119 hectares of land to forest conservation, which the Womens’ Association has been looking after for over a decade. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

In San Ramón de Turrialba, 65 km east of San José, six women manage a greenhouse where they produce seedlings to plant 20,000 trees a year.

Since 2007, the six women in the Group of Agribusiness Women of San Ramón have had a contract with Costa Rica’s electric company, ICE, to provide it with acacia, Mexican cedar, and eucalyptus seedlings.

The group’s coordinator, Nuria Céspedes, explained to IPS that the initiative emerged when she asked her husband for a piece of the family farm to set up a greenhouse.

“Seven years ago, I went to a few meetings on biological corridors and I was struck by the problem of deforestation, because they explain climate change has been aggravated by deforestation,” said Céspedes, who added that the group has the active support of her husband, and has managed to expand its list of customers.

Costa Rica, which is famous for its forests, is one of the few countries in the world that has managed to turn around a previously high rate of deforestation.

In 1987, the low point for this Central American country’s jungles, only 21 percent of the national territory was covered by forest, compared to 75 percent in 1940.

That marked the start of an aggressive reforestation programme, thanks to which forests covered 52 percent of the territory by 2012.

Costa Rica has set itself the goal of becoming the first country in the world to achieve carbon neutrality by 2021. And in the fight against climate change, it projects that carbon sequestration by its forests will contribute 75 percent of the emissions reduction needed to achieve that goal.

In this country of 4.4 million people, these groups of women have found a niche in forest conservation that also helps them combat sexist cultural norms and the heavy concentration of land in the hands of men.

“One of the strong points [of women’s participation] is having access to education – they have been given the possibility of taking part in workshops and trainings,” Arturo Ureña, the technical head of the Coordinating Association of Indigenous and Community Agroforestry in Central America (ACICAFOC) , told IPS.

That was true for the Pital Association. When they started their project, the women received courses from the Instituto Nacional de Aprendizaje (national training institute), which made it possible for two illiterate members of the group to take their final exams orally.

Added to these community initiatives are government strategies. More and more women are being included in state programmes that foment agroforestry production, such as the EcoMercado (ecomarket) of the National Forest Finance Fund (Fonafifo).

EcoMercado is part of the Environmental Services Programme of Fonafifo, one of the pillars of carbon sequestration in Costa Rica.

Since Fonafifo was created in the mid-1990s, 770,000 hectares, out of the country’s total of 5.1 million, have been included in the forestry strategy, with initiatives ranging from reforestation to agroforestry projects.

Lucrecia Guillén, who keeps Fonafifo’s statistics and is head of its environmental services management department, confirmed to IPS that the participation of women in reforestation projects is growing.

She stressed that in the case of the EcoMercado, women’s participation increased 185 percent between 2009 and 2013, which translated into a growth in the number of women farmers from 474 to 877. She clarified, however, that land ownership and the agroforestry industry were still dominated by men.

Statistics from Fonafifo indicate that in the EcoMercado project, only 16 percent of the farms are owned by women, while 37 are owned by individual men and 47 percent are in the hands of corporations, which are mainly headed by men.

But Guillén sees no reason to feel discouraged. “Women are better informed now, and that has boosted participation” and will continue to do so, she said.

José Alberto Chacón weeds between bean plants on his small farm in Pacayas, on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica. The terraces help control water run-off that would otherwise cause soil erosion. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
ALVARADO, Costa Rica, Mar 4 2014 (IPS)

José Alberto Chacón traverses the winding path across his small farm on the slopes of the Irazú volcano, in Costa Rica, which meanders because he has designed it to prevent rain from washing away nutrients from the soil.

His careful husbandry ensures his crops of beans, maize and carrots on his half-hectare parcel of land, which like that of many other farmers in the Pacayas area, is located on steep slopes that are prone to the loss of the land’s fertile layers.

Chacón told IPS that he is constantly applying techniques like designing a winding path, and building terraces or containment walls with harvest leftovers, and he feels like an acrobat leaping from one measure to another to keep his family farm alive.

“It hurts to see soil being washed into the river. I’m getting older and my piece of land will always be the same size, so I have to find ways of making it flat with terraces, so as to keep working it as long as God wills,” said the 51-year-old Chacón, who is married and has three children.

One of his children helps with the sale of excess produce. His 50-year-old wife, Irma Rosa Loaiza, shares the farm work. “We are a model of family agriculture. She comes out to the plot of land itself to help,” said her husband.

The community of Pacayas, one hour east of San José, is located on the eastern end of the fertile Costa Rican central valley, between the Irazú and Turrialba volcanos. The population density is higher than the national average and it receives 2,300 millimetres of rain a year, on slopes of up to 70 percent.

Now climate change is another factor, increasing rainfall and soil erosion. The Ministry of Environment and Energy estimates that erosion has reduced agricultural GDP by 7.7 percent between 1970 and 1989.

The 2014 agricultural census may show a worsening of the situation in this Central American country of 4.4 million people, where agriculture contributed 10.7 percent of GDP in 2000 but 8.67 percent in 2012, according to official figures.

Chacón, wearing black rubber boots and a white hat for protection against the sun, proceeds along the cultivated rows. His field has a 50 percent slope, and there is a height difference of up to 20 centimetres between one maize row and another, sufficient for rainwater not to pour straight down to the Pacayas river in the canyon below.

Farmers in Pacaya cultivate crops on a slant across the slope so that rains will not wash away their soil. In this micro-basin, 68 percent of the fields have a slope of more than 30 percent. Credit: Diego Argueda Ortiz/IPS

He is a subsistence farmer, like the rest of the farmers in the area, whose parcels are an average area of 2.5 hectares and who eke their living out of the mountainside. If their crops fail, they do not eat; if they overplant and the soil is washed away, they also fail to put food on the table.

“There has to be a balance between sustainability and food security. I can’t tell local people: this land is unfit for agriculture, you should plant forests, because it is all they have,” agricultural scientist Beatriz Solano, assigned to the area for the past 17 years by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, told IPS.

A study published in 2013 by the journal Environmental Science & Policy describes how “a combination of extreme precipitation, steep topography and questionable land use has led to heavy erosion and impairment of soil regulation services” in the area.

Even families with land on gentler slopes have had to apply new techniques. The certified organic farm Guisol is an example. Its owners, 68-year-old María Solano and 43-year-old Marta Guillén, work small parcels using live hedges to contain erosion, as they showed IPS.

Not all the area’s producers are aware of the importance of such actions. A survey carried out in 2010 by a researcher with the inter-American Tropical Agronomy Research and Training Centre (CATIE), based in this country, found that seven out of 10 farmers in Pacayas did not use soil protection techniques.

Moreover, the small size of the farms means that they do not benefit from payment for forest cover, the preferred system of erosion control in Costa Rica.

Experts say the latest soil conservation practices in family agriculture will be essential in Pacayas, because of the changes in rainfall patterns.

“There used to be steady rainfall from October to January or February, with thick mist. Now it’s more unstable, and without water potatoes do not grow, and it is farmers who lose out, because seeds and fertilisers are increasingly expensive,” 68-year-old farmer Guillermo Quirós, who had to rebuild the drainage channels on his farm two years ago, told IPS.

In 2011 researcher Carlos Hidalgo of the National Institute of Agricultural Innovation and Technology Transfer concluded a research study monitoring soil management in the area.

“It’s a process that has to include all the actors, including municipalities, producers and research centres,” Hidalgo told IPS in his office in San José.

The multi-disciplinary effort is making progress. Every two months, the soil management committee for the Birrís river basin, a group made up of different sectors, meets in Alvarado municipality to which Pacayas belongs. There they plan their work for the next period.

This month the modest town hall of Alvarado hosted the first meeting of 2014, presided over by local environment manager Gabriela Gómez, and seven out of the eight participants were women. In Pacayas, men carry out most of the agricultural work and women take on local planning and conservation.

“We’re gong to ask the TEC (Technological Institute of Costa Rica) to do a study of run-off, so we can improve the ditches, prevent flooding in the lowlands of the district and reduce erosion,” Gómez told IPS. She has led environmental initiatives that have achieved nationwide recognition.

Pacayas is located in the Birrís river basin, a hydrographical complex rising in the mountains above the town, which feeds the hydropower plants of the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE).

The Institute spends close to four million dollars a year removing sediment derived from soil erosion from its reservoirs.

Meanwhile, Chacón and other small farmers keep building terraces following the contours of their plots, to prevent the rains from stripping their topsoil.

The impact is clearly visible. On the other side of the river that borders his field, the earth is reddish and bare and there are only a few green patches lower down the slope. “That soil has already been eroded,” said agricultural scientist Solano.

Cloud forest in Costa Rica. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
SAN JOSÉ, Feb 5 2014 (IPS)

Meeting Costa Rica’s self-imposed goal of being the first country in the world to achieve carbon neutrality by 2021 will depend on the priority given this aim by the winner of the second round of the presidential elections in April.

To be carbon neutral means removing as much carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere as is emitted.

But experts are doubtful about the future of the carbon neutrality plan, which was notable by its absence from the election campaign that ended Sunday Feb. 2, when none of the candidates received the 40 percent of votes needed for a first-round win.“According to calculations we performed nine months ago, we will have an excess of 5.2 million tonnes to absorb." -- William Alpízar, head of Climate Change for MINAE

On Apr. 6, over three million voters will choose between Luis Guillermo Solís, of the opposition centre-left Citizen Action Party (PAC), who took 31 percent of the vote, and Johnny Araya of the governing centre-right National Liberation Party (PLN), who received 29 percent, according to provisional official figures.

“Studies show that the 2021 goal is not realistic. We have to take steps towards that target, but realistically we are probably talking about 2025,” Patricia Madrigal, the PAC’s environmental adviser, told IPS.

In her view, carbon neutrality should not be seen as an isolated issue, but as a guiding force for all public policies in future four-year government terms.

In 2007, Costa Rica decided to become the world pioneer in carbon neutrality, and set itself the goal of fixing as much CO2 as it emits by 2021, to commemorate the bicentennial of its independence that year.

Experts and officials consulted by IPS acknowledged that the government that takes office May 8 will face complex challenges in transport, energy, institutional organisation and agriculture in order to meet that deadline.

Besides, they say, links must be developed between the national economy and the struggle to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“As long as the goal of carbon neutrality remains unrelated to the transport sector, which generates most CO2 emissions, it is just a slogan to raise international funding,” complained Mónica Araya, the head of Clean Costa Rica, an NGO, who was a government negotiator on climate change until mid-2013.

René Castro, the environment and energy (MINAE) minister, told IPS that plans for carbon neutrality have gone forward “75 to 80 percent.” But he also recognised that the transport sector was “notorious” for producing 42 percent of national CO2 emissions.

One priority in the move towards carbon neutrality is reduction of dependence on fossil fuels and modernising the obsolete public transport system, made up of hundreds of bus lines and a recently restored railway, linking the four major cities.

The parties of the two presidential candidates still in the race are proposing an electric railway for the capital city as well as renewing the bus and taxi fleets.

This Central American country with an area of 51,100 sq km and 4.4 million people has its strong points, too, such as a remarkable increase in forest cover, from 21 percent of its territory in 1983 to 52 percent in 2012.

This achievement was due mainly to the state programme of payment for environmental services, a local precursor to the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD).

However, according to “State of the Nation 2013: Challenges for 2014-2018”, a study commissioned by the National Council of Rectors of public universities, the country’s ecological footprint grew by 43 percent between 2002 and 2012, when CO2 emissions reached 16 million tonnes.

The ecological footprint represents the biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to absorb its waste products, including CO2.

Both parties with a chance of governing from May onward plan to reform the institutions in charge of environmental management. Currently the environmental authority is the Directorate of Climate Change, part of MINAE.

The PAC wants a supraministerial body to direct climate change action, while the PLN is proposing a national environmental strategy.

Some people within the state apparatus are also urging for renewal of institutional structures, which they say have been eroded by the imbalance between the task they are charged with and their real powers to carry it out.

“The climate change agenda must become a development agenda; it cannot be the exclusive responsibility of MINAE, which is weak and has limited resources,” William Alpízar, head of Climate Change for the ministry, told IPS.

To become carbon neutral, Costa Rica must reduce its CO2 emissions as much as possible and compensate for the remaining emissions by the CO2 absorption capacity of the new forests.

The private sector is participating in the drive through carbon neutrality certification. The Climate Change directorate has already certified eight companies and another four are being processed.

During the Warsaw Climate Change Conference or COP19 in November, Costa Rica presented a proposal for the first CO2 bank, designed to trade carbon credits between CO2-emitting companies and owners of forested lands that act as carbon sinks.

According to official estimates, Costa Rica will emit close to 21 million tonnes of carbon in 2021, and it hopes to compensate for 75 percent of this total by carbon capture in its forests, an amount practically equivalent to its current emissions.

“According to calculations we performed nine months ago, we will have an excess of 5.2 million tonnes to absorb. That is our target for reduction, and it is divided between transport, agriculture and waste,” Alpízar said.

This model has been criticised because the burden of lowering emissions is assigned to local forest cover, without proposing a real change of policy for a form of development that is fully adapted to climate change.

“In the name of carbon neutrality we have set aside everything else we need to do about climate change,” Jorge Polimeni, an environmental auditor with the Ecological Flag Foundation, which advocates a more comprehensive adaptation to the hazards of climate change, told IPS.

The study “Economic Impact of Hydrometeorological Phenomena in Costa Rica”, coordinated by researcher Roberto Flores, reported last year that between 2005 and 2011, climate change effects cost the country 710 million dollars.

A family travelling by boat along the San Juan River, a biodiversity-rich area on the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua. Credit: Germán Miranda/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Sep 10 2013 (IPS)

A team of scientists who analysed the richness of plant species around the world concluded that the ecosystems in need of immediate protection in order to meet the 2020 conservation goals set by the Convention on Biological Diversity are largely concentrated in Latin America.

Humanity’s life support system, which provides our air, water and food, is powered by 8.7 million different kinds of plants, animals and other living species. But those species are going extinct at an accelerating rate, representing a major threat to future human survival.

Recognising this threat, nearly every country in the world has agreed under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to protect 17 percent of the planet’s land areas and conserve 60 percent of the world’s plant species by the year 2020.

These twin goals, included in the 20 Aichi Targets, can only be achieved if far more land in the Caribbean, Central America and northern South America is properly protected, according to a new study published Sep. 6 in the journal Science.

The study, “Achieving the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Goals for Plant Conservation”, analysed the distribution of 110,000 different plant species to discover that about 67 percent the world’s plants live in 17 percent of the planet’s land area – mainly in tropical and subtropical regions.

“Our paper sets out the priority areas for protection, based on their species richness,” said report co-author Stuart Pimm from Duke University, in the eastern U.S. state of North Carolina.

Those priority areas include Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, northern Peru and the Caribbean islands, Pimm told Tierramérica*.

Costa Rica is home to nearly 800 endemic species, found nowhere else in the world. Canada, which is nearly 200 times larger in area than the small Central American nation, has only about 70 unique or endemic species scattered across its nine million square kilometres of land area.

The reasons for this disparity are Canada’s cold climate and the last Ice Age, which buried the entire country in ice several kilometres deep 10,000 years ago.

Less than one sixth of these priority regions are protected, the report found. While Costa Rica has protected at least 20 percent of its land area, far more than nearly any other country, there is not enough data to know if that is enough, Pimm said.

“When it comes to plants, we don’t have the data to determine how much should be protected in any one country or where these protected areas should be inside a country,” he noted.

There is far more information on birds and animals, which has been used to identify so-called “biodiversity hot spots”.

This new study confirms most of these spots, but takes the analysis further with better methodology. There is a correlation between the diversity of plants and that of other species, but there are also plenty of exceptions. A tropical forest might have many amphibians, while a tropical island with similar numbers of plants may have none, Pimm explained.

Most existing national parks and protected areas are often in remote areas or in barren and inhospitable areas. With this new data, species-rich areas can be targeted for protection.

“The hard reality is that most of the priority areas in need of protection are in generally poor countries, like Madagascar or Ecuador,” said study co-author Clinton Jenkins, a tropical ecologist and conservation expert from North Carolina State University, who also works with a Brazilian conservation NGO.

“Costa Rica has to protect more of its area than Canada if we want to stem the rising tide of extinctions,” said Jenkins in an interview with Tierramérica.

Mobilising international support to protect biodiversity in other countries has been very difficult. Under the CBD Strategic Plan for reaching the 2020 goals, developed countries agreed to double biodiversity aid by 2014, and to maintain those levels until the final year of the plan.

“This is key to achieving any target,” CBD spokesperson David Ainsworth told Tierramérica.

Ecuador proposed to protect 10,000 square kilometres of its Amazon region as a national park, instead of allowing oil drilling, through the Yasuní-ITT initiative. It asked the international community to contribute 350 million dollars a year to offset the foregone oil revenues, Jenkins noted.

But after five years, the fund to leave the oil in Yasuní Park untapped had collected only 13.3 million dollars, and now Ecuador is preparing to allow drilling to proceed.

“A new road has already been blasted through the region,” Jenkins said.

Roads inevitably lead to deforestation, with negative impacts on local indigenous communities, he added. The Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous peoples live in voluntary isolation in the region.

Oil drilling using extended reach technology could minimise the damage, by eliminating the need for roads. It is not necessarily more costly, but not all companies have the expertise to do it, he said.

“If the oil is going to be drilled, then it’s up to the Ecuadorian government to make sure companies make the minimum impact,” said Jenkins.

There are parts of the world that are simply more important than others when it comes to biodiversity. Yasuní is one. “Either species are protected from extinction, or they are gone forever and no one will ever experience them again,” he stressed. “I personally think it is immoral to allow species to go extinct.”

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

Excerpt:

On September 12 the government of Costa Rica commemorated the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Esquipulas II Accord, which restored peace to Central America after a period of conflict that lasted 30 years. The agreement was signed by all countries of Central America.

Oscar Arias Sanchez

The fact that humans enjoy the prodigious faculty of memory is far more than a poetic caprice of history. It is a sign of evolution and perhaps the most important feature of the species that left the darkness of the cave to set about building the marvel of civilisation. We do not remember merely to swell the shelves of archives or populate the stories of grandparents, but rather to make possible a better life. In other words, the meaning of memory lies in its relation to the present and gives us an advantage with respect to earlier times.

The anniversary of the accord may pass unnoticed by millions of Central American youth, but more than an oversight, this is a privilege. It is a privilege to not know the shaking of the earth caused by passing tanks, or the smell of blood in the air, or the taste of gunpowder, the colour of death, the cries heard through neighbours’ walls. Thus the significance of this date may be best understood in terms of what is absent: soldiers who no longer have to die, families who no longer have to flee their homes.

For those who know only the Central America of today, it would be difficult to believe the stories told by millions of refugees who flooded across the borders in the 1980s. Or towns annihilated by the hands of brothers with arms from either the United States or the Soviet Union. Or secret training camps where boys who barely understood the reasons for war graduated, stoked with hatred and violence. The conflict grew into a battle for military pre-eminence between two superpowers whose ambitions exhausted efforts to bring about peace by the Contadora Group (Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela) and the Support Group (Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay). The failure of these initiatives opened the way for Costa Rica’s proposal of what was called the Peace Plan.

It was in this whirlwind of angst that Costa Rica went to the polls in February 1986. The war in Central America was the central issue of the electoral campaign as it was increasingly clear that our country could not remain on the sidelines of the conflict for very long. The choice was stark: Costa Rica would either have to take up arms or dedicate itself entirely to bringing about peace.

Again and again I argued that peace in the region was essential to the country’s development. No initiative inside Costa Rica could counterbalance the chaos in which we found ourselves submerged. Foreign policy is not a decoration a country can choose to festoon itself with; rather, diplomacy is essential to a nation’s efforts to build a better future for its people. Costa Ricans understood this fact, which generated the mandate I received in winning the election.

My intention was to propose a peace plan that would restart dialogue and advance a solution to the conflict in the region. The document contained 10 priority actions, including the following: at the start of negotiations all belligerent parties would have to suspend all military operations. The prevailing approach to conflict resolution then and still today holds that negotiations are complete once a ceasefire is achieved. The Peace Plan, in sharp contrast, made a ceasefire one of the necessary conditions for holding talks of pressure in an environment that was truly amenable to the creation of lasting peace.

While the ceasefire thus served as the opening for peace, its underlying focus was the democratisation of the region. This was the distinctive feature of the accord and ultimately its decisive component. The U.S. government looked favourably on the formation of a democratic regime as the essential condition of peace but insisted that the only end to the conflict would come from an armed confrontation between the Nicaraguan Contras and the Sandinista government.

The Soviet government and the Cuban regime, in contrast, rejected from the beginning the Costa Rican proposal of including the establishment of democracy in the agreement. Thus there was no common ground: neither then U.S. president Ronald Reagan nor Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev trusted the diplomatic approach. For them, peace could emerge only from a prolonged battle.

How could we approve a plan that the most powerful nations in the world objected to? All five Central American presidents shared a profound sense of historic responsibility and the ability to recognise that the process they advanced was not a power grab but an act of the most elemental humanity. The destiny of millions of people depended on our willingness to engage in dialogue, our will to act, and our belief in a future of peace for Central America.

The agreement we reached in Esquipulas, Guatemala, on August 7, 1987, was but one step forward in a fight to have the will of Central Americans respected. The implementation of the Peace Plan was threatened relentlessly by hawks who wanted the process to fail. But we had already laid the cornerstone, and won the backing of the international community. Brick by brick, we were building a peace that still needs both architects and masons.

In these days, Central America is both celebrating a memory and fanning the embers of a dream that we are still building as a species. This goal, formulated by the Greeks, was recalled by Robert Kennedy the day of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let’s dedicate ourselves to what the ancient Greeks wrote so many years ago, to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. ”
(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

* Oscar Arias Sanchez, ex-president of Costa Rica (1986-1990/2006-2010), won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987.