Women working in government-owned nurseries in Haripur, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. Pakistan has launched one of the largest reforestation initiatives in the world — the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Jun 4 2021 (IPS)

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has been making sure that all foreign dignitaries visiting the country get their hands dirty. With a shovel and a watering can, they are invited to plant a tree for one of the largest reforestation initiatives in the world — the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Programme or TBTTP.

The TBTTP is part of a series of “nature-based solutions” to fight the climate change crisis. Other initiatives include increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix to 60 percent by 2030 and to helping preserve the environment of national parks. In addition, Pakistan has provided over 85,000 green jobs (to be increased to 100,000 by the end of the year) through a Green Stimulus Package following COVID-19.

These strategies fit perfectly with this year’s World Environment Day (WED) theme of ecosystem restoration (ER) as Pakistan readies to host, in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the event tomorrow, Jun. 5.

“This WED is of global significance as it kicks off the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration 2021–2030 with focus on reversing the loss to natural ecosystems to fight the climate crises,” Malik Amin Aslam, Minister for Climate Change and special assistant to the Prime Minister on climate change, told IPS.

“We hope to lead the world towards climate mitigation as well as restoration of ecosystems, ” Aslam said via What’s App.

“Pakistan’s agenda on environment has been validated and our role in ecosystem restoration has been accepted,” a pleased Muhammad Irfan Tariq, Director General of environment and climate change at Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change (MoCC), told IPS by phone from Islamabad. He was referring to the TBTTP, which aims to target one million hectares of forest restoration by 2023.  

“We are not doing this for show,” said Prime Minister Khan, referring to the TBTTP. “We are doing this so that we can leave behind a better country for our future generations. The biggest impact of climate change is that it will affect our future generation,” he said while addressing a TBTTP programme last week.

Incidentally, Pakistan contributes less than one percent to global emissions, yet it is among the top 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change.

Pakistan has world’s seventh-largest mangrove forest in Sindh, located along the Arabian Sea coastline in the Indus deltaic swamps, and comprising some 667,000 hectares. These mangroves are in Kakapir village, located around 15 kilometres to the west of Karachi, along the Indus delta. Credit: Zofeen T. Ebrahim/IPS

Building a relationship with nature

Environmentalist Vaqar Zakaria, however, remained wary of the methods employed by the government saying “greenwashing done in the name of restoration” cannot bring the “bees and the birds” back.

But there must be something right about the TBTTP as Saudi Arabia recently announced its intention of planting 10 billion trees in the coming decades to reduce carbon emissions and combat pollution and land degradation. 

Still, Zakaria favours protecting over restoration.

“It is better to protect because nature will heal itself back,” he said, explaining that restoration required sophisticated techniques and should be carried out with caution. “The right trees must be grown at the right place,” Zakaria, who spends hours in nature re-establishing his “connection to nature”, told IPS via phone from Islamabad. He believes that only after spending time outdoors, will “our hearts be in it and will be able to guide our future decisions”.   

Perhaps that is why the government is carrying out the Protected Areas Initiative (PAI), for “rebalancing” mankind’s relationship with nature as Aslam pointed out with plans to increase Pakistan’s terrestrial and marine protected area to 15 percent and 10 percent by 2023 respectively.

“Already our national parks have increased from 30 to 45 in number,” said the minister.

Recharging aquifers

Recharge Pakistan is a project where the government, in collaboration with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Pakistan, is building water storage that aims to benefit 10 million people.

“The focus is on building Pakistan’s resilience to climate change in water-stressed areas,” explained Hammad Naqi Khan, Director General, WWF-Pakistan. Along with increasing the water storage capacity, the project aims to restore the wetland ecosystem.

“But most importantly, it will benefit more than 10 million people (or five percent) of Pakistan’s population directly and 20 million people across 50 vulnerable districts of Pakistan indirectly,” Khan told IPS.

Minister Aslam emphasised these were not mere plans but are actually being implemented with “solid performance to show on the ground”.

Simi Kamal, chair and CEO of Karachi-based think tank Hisaar Foundation that looks at water, food and livelihood security, said: it was “still too early to see results” in the project but that it would have to “be a huge programme to make visible impact”.

Fortunately, the one-year project preparation phase has been approved by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and Pakistan will be able to conduct site feasibility studies and prepare a detailed proposal.

“Going beyond the currently underfunded GCF, there is an urgent need for developed countries to establish a truly ambitious climate reparations financing mechanism to provide assistance for adaptation projects and building resilience in many developing regions faced with potentially serious impacts of climate change,” A. Karim Ahmed, a board member of the Washington D.C- based Global Council for Science and the Environment, told IPS via email.

Blue Carbon

Another feather in Pakistan’s cap is a comprehensive assessment on blue carbon (carbon stored in coastal and marine ecosystems) that was recently completed.

“Conservation, rehabilitation, and management of blue carbon ecosystems can provide one-third of the economic mitigation needed until 2030,” climate change expert Hadika Jamshaid told IPS via What’s App.

Among the coastal wetlands, mangroves provide a huge potential to sequestering carbon. “Pakistan has done tremendously well in expanding its mangrove plantation,” said Tariq, Director General of environment and climate change at MoCC.

Pakistan has world’s seventh-largest mangrove forest in Sindh, located along the Arabian Sea coastline in the Indus deltaic swamps, and comprising some 667,000 hectares.

But in the absence of data, this blue carbon remains precluded from both the reported mitigation potential and fiscal benefits for Pakistan.

“Protection of these forests can help Pakistan achieve the country’s NDCs [nationally determined contributions],” said Jamshaid, expressing his support of the MoCC in the revision and implementation process of its NDC document. 

Meanwhile, under the TBTTP the central government will plant mangroves over 40,000 hectares, of which 15,000 hectares have already been planted, Riaz Wagan, chief conservator of forests in Sindh province, told IPS.

In addition, the Sindh government, under a public-private partnership model, is doing its own bit to restore ecosystems. It has signed an agreement with Indus Delta Capital Private Limited under the Delta Blue Carbon to plant and protect mangroves over 350,000 hectares, said Wagan, who is also leading the this Indus Delta Mangroves REDD+ Project.

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Excerpt:

Installing a solar panel on Lefties’ snack shack in Bridgetown. Credit: Stephen Leahy/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
BRIDGETOWN, Jun 6 2014 (IPS)

Facing potential extinction under rising sea levels, many small island nations are embracing renewable energy and trying to green their economies. Although the least responsible for carbon emissions, small countries like Barbados are on the front lines of climate impacts.

“Small island nations’ voices have to be heard by the rest of the world,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

“Many will undergo fundamental changes. Some will lose 60 to 70 percent of their beaches and much of their tourism infrastructure. Climate change will destroy some countries and the livelihoods of millions of people,” Steiner told IPS in Bridgetown.

Up to 100 percent of coral reefs in some areas of the Caribbean sea have been affected by bleaching due to too-hot seawater linked to global warming. Without global action to reduce emissions there may not be any healthy reefs left in the entire Caribbean region by 2050, according to UNEP’s Small Island Developing States Foresight Report.

Released in Bridgetown on World Environment Day Jun. 5, the report calculates that island nations in the Caribbean face187 billion dollars in shoreline damage from sea level rise well before the end of this century.

A 50-cm sea level rise will mean the country of Grenada will lose 60 percent of its beaches. Sea levels are destined to rise far higher than that, say recent science reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland along with hundreds of glaciers.

Islands are especially vulnerable to the impacts of global warming which will adversely affect multiple sectors including tourism, agriculture, fisheries, energy, freshwater, health and infrastructure, the report concludes.

“When our planet speaks we must listen,” said Barbados Prime Minister Freundel Stuart.

“Nature knows how to hit back,” Stuart told IPS.

For Barbados, World Environment Day with its theme “Raise Your Voice Not the Sea Level” was not just a ceremonial action but part of a commitment to become “the most advanced green economy in the Latin American and Caribbean region,” he said.

This country of 275,000 people is in the eastern Caribbean, 800 km from the shores of Venezuela. Facing recurring droughts in the past two decades, Barbados has been forced to use energy-intensive desalination to provide enough drinking water.

Imported fossil fuel means energy costs are many times higher than in rich countries like the U.S. Barbados has set a goal of 30 percent renewable energy by 2029 but expects to achieve this by 2019, said William Hines, Barbados’ Chief Energy Conservation Officer.

Solar energy is 30 to 40 percent cheaper but requires significant upfront investment since nearly everything must be imported. However, the payback period in a sun-rich country like Barbados is five to seven years, Hines said.

Aside from finding the money to build large-scale solar, integrating into the nation’s electrical grid has also been challenging. But because this is a small nation, the scope and scale of such challenges are smaller, and they can be resolved relatively quickly.

The three-coral atoll nation of Tokelau in the South Pacific became the first country in the world to become 100 percent powered by renewable energy in October 2012. Other South Pacific nations, including the Cook Islands and Kiribati, plan to be 100 percent renewable by 2020.

As a group, the 52 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have committed to cut their fossil fuel dependence by 50 percent by 2035. This is as much about setting an example for the world as it is a solution to the crippling fossil fuel costs that devour half of some countries’ budgets.

Barbados is going beyond renewable energy and has put policies into place intended to ‘green’ its entire economy. It has already completed a three-year study called the Green Economy Scoping Study to determine what needs to be done. That research concluded that green policies are not enough, and that Barbados also needs more public and private investment, along with education and changes in consumer behaviour.

“Barbados is one of the world leaders in greening their economies,” Steiner told IPS in an interview.

Small islands need support including financing and technology transfer from the developed world to be able to make this transition and to cope with current and future climate impacts. They can and want to move quickly to diversify their economies, create green jobs, increase resource efficiency and shift to green energy, he said.

“Small islands can serve as beacons for the rest of the world,” Steiner stressed.

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 Bradnee Chambers
BONN, Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

It’s beginning to sink in that our climate is changing more rapidly than at any time in recorded history and it will have profound and irreversible effects on the planet. On World Environment Day on Jun. 5, let’s stop for a moment to consider in particular the devastating impact that climate change is having on small island states and their wildlife. 

Forty years ago Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring”, helped launch the environmental movement. The image of a Silent Spring shocked readers because it evoked the idea that if we did not care for the environment then one spring very soon the birds would stop singing because they would have vanished.

Today in order to gain support for critical environmental issues such as climate change, many complex integrated models and economic analyses have to be prepared to convince people that our climate really is changing. Let’s hope that it will not require small islands states to have submerged beneath the waves before the skeptics are convinced.

Thinking back to a simpler age not so long ago – to the time when Carson wrote her seminal work – appreciation of the sheer wonder of nature was sufficient to move us to act. With what do we associate small islands?

Groynes installed at Folkestone Beach in Barbados to prevent beach erosion. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Blue lagoons, palm-lined golden beaches, coral reefs and majestic atolls. These tropical idylls are the epitome of beauty and part of their attraction as holiday destinations is their rich wildlife, much of which is migratory. But the islands are vulnerable to sea level rises and other effects of climate change. And so too are the features contributing to their appeal and that includes the species that live on and around them.

Migratory animals, which can be among the most vulnerable of all species because of their dependence on particular habitats at specific stages of their life cycles as they undertaken their epic journeys spanning continents and oceans, are subject to unprecedented changes.

We are observing threats to migratory species caused by increased temperatures that will lead to the loss of vital habitat while at the same time oceanic food webs linked to changing zooplankton abundance are starting to collapse.

Sharks are moving into warmer waters outside their normal boundaries of their migrations, increasing the frequency of attacks on people. Warmer beaches are affecting hatching patterns of marine turtles: cool beaches produce predominantly male hatchlings while warm beaches produce mostly females.

Hawksbill turtle, Komodo, Indo-Pacific. Credit: Courtesy of Image Broker/Robert Harding

So scientists are seeing the feminisation of marine turtle populations which will have an impact on the ability of turtles to reproduce. Large baleen whales such as the Blue Whale, the largest creature on earth, must make longer journeys between their feeding grounds in warmer waters to their breeding grounds in cooler parts of the sea. The whales’ main food source of krill is declining because of changes in temperature and acidification of the oceans due to climate change.

Islands are critical stopover, nesting and breeding sites for migratory birds. Albatrosses that wander the oceans for much of the time seek out tiny dots of land to build their nests and raise their young.

Islands provide much needed opportunities for rest and refuelling with food for birds flying between Eurasia and Africa – especially when the birds have completed their crossing of the Sahara.

The evidence is heaping up telling us that climate change is happening and the reality is that the temperatures will rise. What we must avoid is rapid changes or temperature increases so severe that we cross a point of no return.

This is a vitally important factor for species’ survival. Like humans, some animals can adapt and migratory animals are more likely to be able to adapt because they are mobile in nature and therefore potentially able to disperse other areas to mitigate environmental changes.

This is why getting a deal in Paris for the post Kyoto Protocol is so critical. A global deal now would mean we can keep the planetary temperature rise within a manageable limit and then concentrate international efforts on assisting people and their ecosystems, including migratory species and other threatened species by climate change, to adapt if possible.

If there is no deal, we will go beyond the manageable limits and we can foresee devastating impacts on humans and wildlife. On World Environment Day, let’s not forget the beauty that nature holds and just how very vulnerable it is, and know that the fight against climate change has many dimensions, including conserving the magnificent beautiful small island states and their wildlife.

Excerpt:

The phosphate processing plant of Gabes, seen here with phosphogypsum debris in the foreground. Credit: Justin Hyatt/IPS

By Justin Hyatt
GABÈS. Tunisia, Jun 7 2013 (IPS)

The story of Gabès and the local phosphate industry follows a plot that is all too familiar: an underdeveloped town located in an industrial region boasts one major lucrative industry with high output and export values, but the local population and surroundings experience alarming levels of illness and environmental blight.

But locals are no longer remaining as silent as they once were, holding a festival to mark World Environment Day on Jun. 5 and taking other actions such as protesting and using anti-pollution graffiti to increase awareness about the situation in Gabès.

The sixth largest city and a major industrial hub in southern Tunisia, Gabès is home to the state phosphate processing plant. The factory, operated by Group Chimique Tunisien (GCT), processes phosphate from Gafsa and the interior of the country into phosphorus, then exports the product worldwide.

Gabès’s industrial sector dates as far back as the middle of the twentieth century. By 2007, with an annual output of phosphate reaching 8 million tonnes, Tunisia became fifth in the world for phosphate production.

“It is an enormous industry” amounting to 30 percent of Tunisia’s gross national product (GNP), says Haythem Nasfi, director of the Gabès branch of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

GCT employs 3,000 workers, and on days when the production cycle runs at full speed, daily profits can reach 11 million TND, roughly 6.8 million U.S. dollars. But with a vast industrial zone less than one kilometre from the edge of town, the factories’ activities inevitably have severe repercussions for both human health and animal life.

Gabès has the highest rate of cancer in Tunisia, and in the neighbourhood closest to the factory, Chott Salam, lung cancer can be found in one out of 10 households. Kidney cancer rates are slightly higher, with 12 percent of families affected. Likewise, bone fragility, allergies and stillbirth all feature higher than average rates."You always want to sleep. You never have enough energy [in Gabès]."
--Haythem Nasfi

“Everyone is tired. You always want to sleep. You never have enough energy,” Nasfi said, citing a common complaint among Gabèsiens. Simply taking a short trip to the nearby touristic town of Matmata leads to a dramatic improvement in mental facilities, he added.

Affecting wildlife

Meanwhie, the Oasis of Chott Salam, which is located directly beside the industrial area and once teemed with bird and animal life, has become more of an industrial wasteland, unsuitable for wildlife or recreation.

Local fish populations suffer too. Since 1965 over 200 species have been lost, reducing biodiversity in the gulf to as few as 15 fish species.

The natural ecosystems inherent not just to this now damaged oasis but also to the entire Gulf of Gabès  are unique, their warm waters providing a special reproduction zone for species of the Mediterranean Sea. Noteworthy here are the waders and waterfowl, as well as marine vegetation such as seagrass and posidonia.

According to ecologist and designer Safouane Azouzi, a native of Gabès, Chott Salam is considered the only maritime oasis in the world. Yet currently over 400 sources of fresh water feeding into the oasis have dried up because of chemical pollutants, and the loss of adequate habitat and sources of uncontaminated water has forced many species to either find other habitats or simply dwindle in number.

Authorities have so far kept silent on the pollution issue and have yet to openly admit that the problem exists. Most Gabès residents believe that the government simply doesn’t want to cough up the money for its modernisation.

The most critical reform would involve ending the large-scale discharge of phosphogypsum, a by-product of the production cycle. The organisation SOS Environnement Gabès asserts that the daily amount of phosphogypsum that is leaked into the sea reaches a whopping 28, 720 tonnes.

Phosphogypsum, a radioactive reaction of phosphate ore with sulfuric acid, are strewn across the ground leading from the factory to the sea, and waves pounding the empty beach consist of ink-black water. In the United States, large quantities of phosphogypsum are required to be stored in sequestered large stacks.

Taking on pollution

But while no palpable steps toward factory reform have been observed by the citizens of Gabès, environmental activism has been taken to new heights.

The city now boasts 23 civil associations working to bring the pollution issue to the forefront of public discourse. The results are paying off. “Stop the Pollution” graffiti adorns the facades of numerous buildings, and non-violent protests such as roadblocks frequently figure into the routine used by campaigners.

The Association to Protect the Oasis of Chott Salam has spearheaded recent awareness-raising efforts, including a festival staged on the Jun. 5, World Environment Day. Over 1,000 participants marched through the streets to the scene of the festival, chanting, “We want to live.” Even more locals visited information stands or listened to anti-pollution rap and hip-hop.

Organiser Neder Chkiwa remarked that the previous year witnessed only a fraction of the current level of interest. The organisers have packed the month of June with numerous events, such as distributing flyers in shopping centers or holding anti-pollution graffiti contests.

The possibility for citizens to actively engage with this issue is in fact one of the benefits of living in Tunisia after the revolution. “During the time of Ben Ali, people might have complained behind closed doors,” Nasfi told IPS. Yet today this taboo has been broken, and not only citizens can discuss the problem openly, but they have also become de facto environmentalists.

Before the revolution, any open act of protest would have been unthinkable. “You would have gone straight to jail” Chkiwa noted.

SOS Environnement Gabès has been operating under the radar for a number of years, and they are particularly pleased with the new possibilities to protest. “We pin a lot of our hopes on the new generation, which has the most at stake and deserves to have healthy living conditions, without having to flee the city,” a member of the organisation, who requested anonymity, told IPS.

Dinah Abdelwahad, who hails from Gabès but currently lives in Tunis as an interior designer, maintains the same hopes. “While the activists are slowly but surely making progress to change things, there is still an imbalance of power. Those running the factories and in government have more money and political influence.”

“But I remain optimistic that things will soon pick up, and we will experience real change,” Abdelwahad concluded.

By IPS Correspondents
DUBAI, Jun 5 2006 (IPS)

Despite producing nearly 2.5 million barrels of crude oil a day in a region that contributes about 30 per cent of the world’s oil output and controls nearly 40 per cent of proven gas resources, the United Arab Emirates is determined to take giant strides on the path towards sustainable development.

Earlier this year UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan announced the creation of a new Ministry for Environment and Water. This follows the country’s signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 2005 and the setting of targets for progressively cutting carbon emissions, as well as investigating new ways to cut down on and dispose of all greenhouse gases.

The new ministry, announced in February, follows a recent United Nations Environment Programme report, ‘Global Environment Outlook 2006’, warning that climate change could hike temperatures and lead to more extreme climatic events in the Middle East.

The report says “careful planning” is needed to prevent the region’s rapid development from harming the environment, adding that the area’s per capita emissions of carbon dioxide – the main gas responsible for global warming – rose by 22 per cent between 1990 and 2002.

“Leaders of the Gulf states need to improve public transport and switch to renewable sources of energy. This region is especially suited to focus on solar energy as a way of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, Ebrahim Abdul Jalil of the Arabian Gulf University told journalists when the report was released.

Some positive steps have already been taken, says Frederic Muller, manager of a solar technology company here. “Realising the potential of solar energy in the UAE, which receives more than 300 days of sunshine a year, the government and private sector have already adopted several solar technologies in parking meters – a cheaper option than underground connections à remote telecommunications installations and solar water heating systems in some hotels.”

Even among fossil fuels, the country is now turning towards gas for power generation and other sectors as it is a cleaner more environment-friendly option than oil. Gas consumption in the Arab world was set to overtake oil demand in 2005.

According to another report published by the Organisation of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, the bulk of demand growth will be recorded in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other countries with relatively high energy consumption and steady industrial growth.

The report forecasts that the share of gas in the Arab energy market will rise from 48.9 percent in 2005 to 53.3 percent in 2015, overtaking the share of oil, which will decline from 47.4 percent to 42.8 percent.

In one of the first moves from oil to gas, eco-friendly cars will soon ply the roads of Sharjah and Abu Dhabi, two of the seven emirates that make up the country. After conversion, the cars will run on natural gas, which will benefit consumers as well as the environment since drivers will pay only four dirhams (about one U.S. dollar) for a gallon. Petrol now costs around seven dirhams per gallon.

“Natural gas vehicles do not give off carbon emissions and are at least 30 per cent more economical than petrol vehicles,” said a Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA) official, adding that most SEWA vehicles will be converted to use this eco-friendly fuel.

SEWA already supplies natural gas to 80 per cent of all residential, industrial and commercial areas in Sharjah.

According to Rajan Pillai, a car mechanic in Sharjah, “We get many enquiries about the required conversion, which takes about three hours. However, owners do realise that vehicles run on natural gas cannot give the same bursts of speed as petrol-driven engines.”

State-run Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) has plans to initially set up four natural gas filling stations in Sharjah and six in the capital Abu Dhabi. “Some taxis in Abu Dhabi are already running on natural gas and more will follow,” said an Adnoc official.

The technical committee formed by the government to ensure that clean compressed natural gas (CNG) is used as an alternative fuel in the emirate has announced that 20 per cent of vehicles in Abu Dhabi will have to switch to CNG by 2012.

Globally, the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries – Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – contribute about 2.4 per cent of world carbon dioxide emissions while their population is just 0.5 per cent of the Earth’s, according to a 2005 World Bank study.

The UAE’s sulphur dioxide levels were below World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines in recent monitoring but levels of nitrogen oxide were in violation. In Dubai particularly, nitrogen oxide, ozone and particle matter were found to be above the guidelines at many monitoring stations.

The sharp rise in energy and fossil fuel use in the Gulf states is put down to rapid economic growth, extreme climatic conditions that necessitate widespread use of air-conditioning and the need for desalination plants to produce fresh water.

The government has launched another major green project: the Al Masdar Initiative, which aims to create world-class renewable energy and resource industries in the capital Abu Dhabi.

The initiative will be based on four elements: an innovation centre to support the demonstration, commercialisation and adoption of sustainable energy technologies; a university offering specialist graduate programs in renewable energy and sustainability; a development company focused on commercialising emissions reduction solutions, and a special economic zone tailored to hosting institutions that will invest in development and production of renewable energy technologies and products, said a spokesman.

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By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Oct 27 2004 (IPS)

Carlos Gardel album covers, newspaper clippings and yellowed photographs once covered every inch of the walls in the narrow entryway on Havana’s Neptuno Street where someone had turned their home into a tango museum.

One day, in the early 1990s, with the economic crisis well underway, the memorabilia disappeared, and the soft strains of tango drifting from an old record player were replaced by the smell of pizza wafting from a privately-run fast food business.

The tango had moved a few doors down, and even though its new home was a bigger, more modern museum, the original venue lives on in the memories of nostalgic Havana residents.

There is no musical genre as much like the Argentine tango as the Cuban bolero, declared film critic Joel del Río at a recent seminar held in Havana, entitled Distant Signals: Argentine Contributions to Cuban Culture.

Some claim that the first country where the tango was danced was actually Cuba. Whether or not this is true, the quintessentially Argentine dance never really took root on the island, so rich in its own unique dance styles.

But the films, the music and even the cynical sense of humour of the South American nation have earned many loyal Cuban fans, and over successive generations.

Cubans now reaching middle age grew up watching films produced in Buenos Aires in the first half of the 20th century. For many, old movies from Mexico, the United States and Argentina were the only cinema they knew in their childhood.

“We all grew up believing that Libertad Lamarque was ‘America’s Sweetheart’, because that’s what our grandparents and parents told us,” recalled del Río.

Argentine-born Lamarque was one of the best-known tango singers of all time, as well as one of Latin America’s best-loved movie stars, appearing in more than 60 films.

Del Río believes that the classic Argentine movies broadcast almost daily on Cuban state television prepared the public for the emergence in the 1980s of Brazilian soap operas and the new school of Argentine cinema.

Eliseo Subiela, the director of films like Man Facing Southeast and Dark Side of the Heart, “probably has more fans in Cuba than in any other country,” and his work has influenced some of the island’s most celebrated filmmakers, like Fernando Pérez (Havana Suite), according to del Río.

As for music, tango arrived before and then along with the earliest Argentine cinema, and its melancholy strains seeped into the blood of a great many Cubans, making it the most popular non-Cuban musical genre on the island in the first decades of the 20th century.

Half a century later, the Argentine rock of singers like Charly García, Juan Carlos Baglietti and Fito Paéz made a similar impact on a new generation of Cubans.

In the early 1980s, once Argentina had emerged from the years of military dictatorship (1976-1983), the first groups of tourists from the South American nation began to arrive on the island.

“They were young leftists, who came to Cuba to learn about the country and the people, and by the end, they would practically give you the shirts off their backs. They went back to Buenos Aires empty handed, and among the things they left behind were the tapes they listened to in their Walkmans,” Cuban singer/songwriter Frank Delgado told IPS.

“Baglietto was the one who caught on most in Cuba,” he added.

This was how clandestine pirated copies of Argentine rock recordings began to circulate among young people in Cuba. It was a musical movement “that said things they didn’t say in tangos,” and it had an unquestionable impact on young Cuban musicians of the same and subsequent generations, including Santiago Feliú, Donato Poveda, Carlos Varela and Polito Ibañez, as well as Delgado himself.

The 1980s also brought the sophisticated humour of the Argentine comedy troupe Les Luthiers to the island, while dog-eared copies of Mafalda comic books, created by Argentina’s Joaquín “Quino” Lavado, passed from hand to hand, mostly among university students and intellectual circles.

Pirated cassette recordings of two 1984 performances by Les Luthiers became a veritable treasure at that time, and continue to be cherished by many Cubans, although they can now be downloaded from the Internet, noted Cuban humorist and scriptwriter Eduardo del Llano.

Argentina continues to be a major cultural presence in Cuba today. TV programmes from the South American country – ranging from dramatic series to sketch comedies to children’s shows – are among the most popular with Cuban viewers, while Argentine movies are consistently among the audience and jury favourites at the annual Havana International Film Festival.

Through culture, subsequent generations of Cubans have come to know an Argentina that is different from the one that their parents and grandparents knew, but the attraction still holds. As del Río noted, the geographic, andperhaps political, distance between the two countries has never been enough to keep their peoples apart, “because we have shared movies and tears.”

Excerpt:

By Moyiga Nduru
POLOKWANE, South Africa, Jun 9 2004 (IPS)

Tourism has long been viewed as one of the holy grails of job creation in South Africa, which is burdened by an unemployment rate of more than 30 percent. Certain parts of the country – Cape Town, and its surrounds for example – have become firm favourites with local and international visitors. Now the lesser known province of Limpopo is also hoping to take its place at the table.

Officials say tourism could become an engine for growth in the region if its under-explored mountain ranges, caves and wildlife preserves can be used to attract visitors – creating employment for the 5.3 million people who live in Limpopo.

"We would like to ensure communities surrounding the areas be empowered to manage (them) in a sustainable manner, while looking into generating funds through tourism and other initiatives," South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Environment and Tourism, Rejoice Mabudafhasi, told IPS recently (June 5).

At present, Limpopo accounts for just seven percent of South Africa’s marketed tourism resources, according to a 2003 study prepared for government by the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

"Of all the tourist products offered by South Africa, nature-based attractions and adventure collectively account for the largest supply at a 42 percent share – followed by historical and museum attractions, wine/drink and food attractions at 11 percent each, and water-based products at eight percent," the study added.

Latest figures from the Department of Environment and Tourism show that in 2002, South Africa drew more than 6.4 million tourists, which represented an increase of 11.1 percent over figures for 2001. The average annual growth rate in international tourist arrivals from 1994 to 2002 was 8.8 percent.

Government attributes the increased growth of tourism over the past three years to the Sep. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States, which made South Africa appear a safe destination for global travelers.

In Limpopo, local authorities are trying to raise awareness of the value and importance of scenic areas and monument sites – particularly that marking the position of the Tropic of Capricorn.

This latitude forms the southern boundary of the tropics, and is the most southerly spot at which the sun can be seen directly overhead at noon once each year. The sun reaches a vertical position over the Tropic of Capricorn on about Dec. 22, during the southern hemisphere’s summer solstice.

"Unfortunately, there has been damage caused to the Tropic of Capricorn monument by tourists, and other passers-by as well as the local community," observed Mabudafhasi.

The three small hills of Motumo, Matseke and Mphakane near the Capricorn marker have been defaced by paint.

The monument itself has also been defaced by trigger happy visitors who use it for target practice. IPS counted about 50 bullet holes on a sign board at the marker which details the history of the Tropic of Capricorn monument. Rust has also taken a toll on the sign board, ensuring that the story it tells can hardly be read.

"We are not going to tolerate this. We will deploy a unit to apprehend those who deface our monuments," Mabudafhasi told a crowd of over 5,000 which gathered to celebrate World Environment Day near the provincial capital of Polokwane on Saturday (June 5).

"Clearly there is the potential for tourism (at the monument) because of the scenic beauty of the koppies (small hills) and the history," she added. Limpopo is also considered an important pilgrimage destination for the followers of traditional African religions.

Thaba Mafumadi, an official in charge of Limpopo’s financial and economic affairs, told IPS, "To us tourism and environment are (different sides) of the (same) coin. We are encouraging both local and international tourists to come to our province."

The youthful King Kennedy Tshivbase of the Venda people – an ethnic group in Limpopo – also called on the followers kneeling before him to refrain from cutting down trees and burning vegetation. "We are going to take tough action against offenders," he warned.

"That’s right your majesty. An axe is already hanging over the heads of those offenders," answered a praise singer, who provided humorous additions to the king’s statements, to general acclaim from the audience.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SAN JUAN, Jun 5 2003 (IPS)

The government of this Caribbean island is widely perceived to be doing nothing to protect the environment, especially its forests and other green areas.

But people throughout Puerto Rico are taking matters into their own hands to create community forests of their own. Two of the most successful examples of these grassroots initiatives are the People’s Forest and the Corretjer Forest.

The People’s Forest, in the mountain town of Adjuntas, is run by Casa Pueblo, a grassroots organisation born of the successful struggle against strip mining that lasted from the 1960s to the early 1990s.

After a citizens’ pressure campaign, more than 700 acres of the area slated for the mining was declared a state forest in 1996. Now called the People’s Forest, it is run by Casa Pueblo in a one-of-kind arrangement with the Puerto Rico Natural Resources Department.

The facilities include hiking paths, recreational areas designed by Adjuntas schoolchildren and a natural auditorium carved out of the side of a mountain. The forest also boasts an agro-forestry project where children and adults plant trees, including rare, endangered and forgotten species, as well as fruit trees.

In 2002, Casa Pueblo Director Alexis Massol-González received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. When he was notified by telephone he did not believe it at first. ”I had never heard of the Goldman Prize, so I thought it was a joke,” he recalls with a laugh.

”I told them that I don’t work for money or awards, and they told me, ‘That’s why you earned it’.”

The Goldman Prize is awarded annually to six people from around the world and includes 125,000 U.S. dollars.

The award greatly increased Casa Pueblo’s local and international prestige and profile and it has since formed conservation partnerships with the University of Puerto Rico and the U.S.-based Smithsonian Institution.

Scientists from the Smithsonian have held workshops at the People’s Forest to teach Casa Pueblo volunteers, local environmentalists and graduate biology students how to monitor wildlife, carry out biodiversity surveys and to use new technologies like global positioning systems (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS) in their conservation work.

Activists complain that the government has failed to live up to its commitments to help manage the Forest, but that does not discourage Massol-Gonzalez. ”There is no room for pessimism or cynicism in Casa Pueblo,” he told IPS. ”We are people of hope, because through our activism we have learned that Puerto Rico’s problems can be solved.”

Northeast of Adjuntas is the rural town of Ciales, home to a community forest named after one of Puerto Rico’s most renowned poets: Juan Antonio Corretjer, who died in 1985.

The Forest is located at one of the most picturesque areas of the Encantado River, one of Corretjer’s favourite sources of solace and inspiration.

Towards the end of his life the poet voiced concern about the destruction of Ciales’ forests and their replacement by pesticide-intensive monoculture plantations.

In the 1980s, coffee grower Tato Rodríguez, a friend of Corretjer, began having second thoughts about using pesticides.

”Bird populations dwindled because of deforestation and chemical use,” said Rodríguez in an interview. ”Later the butterflies disappeared, and I even saw lizards die because of insecticides.”

Guided by Corretjer’s poetry as well as by concepts of ecological agriculture and environmental protection, Rodríguez and volunteers of the Casa Corretjer Cultural Center founded the 160-acre Corretjer Forest.

The area is an abandoned, weed-infested coffee farm that is being slowly cleared and repopulated with trees mentioned in Corretjer’s poems, as well as numerous endemic species. ”We plant trees that provide lumber and also trees that give fruit,” says Rodríguez.

The custodians of the Forest want to steer clear of the tree plantation model, and aim instead to create a complex, healthy and productive ecosystem that will provide jobs and food, and serve as a resource for eco-tourism.

Since starting the reforestation project and ending pesticide use in the Corretjer, long-gone birds and insect pollinators have started to return. ”Even the bees are back!” said Rodriguez.

”The sanpedritos, which are like miniature parrots and only live in caves, had left for the mountains. But since we stopped using agrochemicals, they’re back. And we’re also beginning to hear owls at night again.”

The Corretjer Forest has a strong educational component. Since last year, hundreds of school students from across Puerto Rico have visited, to learn both about ecology and Corretjer’s poetry. And all of its trees are planted by children.

”We prepared educational modules inspired by Corretjer and the landscape that motivated him to write poems,” said Casa Corretjer volunteer Marta Nuñez.

She emphasises the cultural importance of this ecological project. ”We are retaking the folklore that we are losing and is not taught in schools. It is beautiful to see first grade boys and girls, the tenderness with which they plant trees and touch their roots.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
MEXICO CITY, Jun 5 2003 (IPS)

Lacandon Indians in Mexico are threatening to use force to stop other indigenous groups from clearing out land and creating settlements in the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve.

Meanwhile, the government has promised for the umpteenth time to come up with a solution to the conflict that appears to be on the verge of erupting.

Since President Vicente Fox took office in December 2000, 10 new settlements have been carved out of the forest in the 331,000 hectare reserve, which forms part of the Lacandona jungle located in the southernmost state of Chiapas on the border with Guatemala.

There are now a total of 45 settlements with a combined population of 35,000 people.

An investigation carried out by environment authorities points to an imminent risk of violence between the Lacandon Indians, who number around 1,000, and the settlers, who are mainly indigenous people from other ethnic communities who use the slash-and-burn technique to clear agricultural land in the Lacandona jungle and the Montes Azules reserve.

For over a decade, Mexican governments have been promising to relocate the settlers and prevent the creation of new villages, but that has not yet happened.

”There is a time bomb in the Lacandona jungle, and not only there but in all rural areas of Chiapas, where poverty and violence persist,” Guillermo Trejo, a researcher of social movements at the Centre for Economic Research and Teaching, told IPS.

Slash-and-burn agriculture and logging activities that destroy the native forest, the clearing of jungle for livestock to graze, and fishing of endangered species are problems created by the new human settlements, which are growing in number despite the creation of a number of negotiating commissions, military patrols, and innumerable government promises.

Although it covers just a small part of Mexico’s territory, what is left of the Lacandona jungle, especially the Montes Azules reserve, is of great importance in terms of biodiversity.

The isolated jungle region, the main tropical wetlands preserve in North America, is home to 37 percent of Mexico’s mammal species, 48 percent of all bird species, and 33 percent of reptile species.

But the emergence of human settlements and the consequent destruction is driving the Lacandona jungle to its death, warn studies by the Autonomous National University of Mexico.

Two centuries ago, the tropical Lacandona jungle covered around two million hectares. Today it has shrunk to less than 500,000 hectares. Much of what was once jungle is now an arid, semi- populated landscape.

In the biosphere reserve, more than 20,000 hectares of forest have already been cleared, and another 20,000 are in the process of being destroyed, according to government estimates.

”Irregular settlements” created by indigenous people from surrounding areas, who are mainly sympathisers of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), anger the Lacandon Indians, who were made the legal owners and guardians of most of the jungle by means of a 1972 presidential decree.

The Lacandon Indians threatened last month to drive out the new settlers, who they accuse of destroying the jungle. The group also complained that the Fox administration has done nothing to resolve the situation.

Trejo said that negotiating a peace agreement with the EZLN is basic to coming up with a solution to the problem of irregular settlements in the jungles of Chiapas.

Peace talks between the government of Ernesto Zedillo (1994- 2000) and the Zapatistas, a mainly indigenous rebel group that rose up in arms in January 1994 demanding true democracy and respect for the rights of Indians, broke down in 1996.

But the EZLN refuses to return to the negotiating table, despite the fact that Fox met many of the group’s sdemands, such as closing army garrisons in Chiapas, which had been heavily militarised by the Zedillo government, and securing the release of imprisoned guerrillas and Zapatista sympathisers.

The EZLN says it will only agree to peace talks again when a law on indigenous rights is enacted in its original form, rather than the amended version that was passed by Congress in 2001. In the meantime, the poorly-armed insurgent group remains in the remote mountains of Chiapas, without attacking or being attacked, thanks to an amnesty in effect since 1994.

Indigenous people clearing out land for crops and pastures in the Lacandona jungle and the Montes Azules reserve say they are fleeing poverty, violence and a lack of land.

But the creation of human settlements in the jungle is just one aspect of a complex social situation in Chiapas, which requires special efforts that the Fox administration does not appear to be making, said Trejo.

Since 2001, authorities have been offering to solve the problem in Montes Azules through dialogue with the settlers and the Lacandon Indians. But nothing has yet come of that.

In December, 27 families of Chole Indians were peacefully evicted by authorities on the promise that they would be given land elsewhere. But after spending five months in government shelters, the families, tired of waiting to be resettled, began to seek land on their own in late May.

The Chiapas state government estimates that around 100 million dollars are needed to relocate the settlers – funds that it does not have.

The Rural Association of Collective Interest, which represents 12 of the irregular settlements that have cropped up in the Montes Azules reserve in the past few years, warned that it would not accept any relocation programme, and that on the contrary it would seek legal status for the villages.

The group’s spokesman, Mario Hernández, warned that the residents of the new villages were prepared to resist eventual police attempts to evict them.

Nevertheless, Secretary of the Interior Santiago Creel insists that there is no imminent risk of violence in Montes Azules – even though members of the Lacandon indigenous community and settlers have both threatened to use force if necessary.

As other officials have done in the past, Creel once more repeated that the conflict would be resolved through dialogue and cooperation among the parties involved.

But until an effective channel for dialogue is created, the Lacandona jungle and Montes Azules reserve continue to be destroyed, and violence may break out at any moment.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
ASUNCION, Jun 4 2003 (IPS)

Native forests have virtually disappeared in eastern Paraguay due to the advance of the agricultural frontier and indiscriminate logging by large landowners and landless peasants.

The phenomenon is now threatening jungles in the west as well.

Over the last 30 years or so, deforestation has become a growing problem in this land-locked Southern Cone nation, aggravated by erroneous development policies, the failure to address social demands, corruption, and weak enforcement and oversight by authorities, agricultural engineer Carlos Tallone told IPS.

The problem began in eastern Paraguay in the 1970s, ”when immigrants from southern Brazil moved across the border to Paraguay, where they mainly dedicated themselves to agriculture,” he explained.

With financing from the Paraguayan government, the new settlers bought up large tracts of land at low prices in the southeastern department of Alto Paraná, along the Brazilian border, and began to clear the forest to grow crops, mainly soybeans, selling the timber at ridiculously low prices, said Tallone.

After the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) collapsed, forests began to be chopped down in the east as well, where groups of landless peasants starting occupying property owned by large landholders.

The landless farmers moved into forested areas, where they felled the trees and sold the timber, which was smuggled over the border into Brazil.

But ”to prevent invasions of their property, the landowners decided to cut down the forests themselves,” he said.

When deforestation began in the eastern part of this country of six million, there was no official registry of forested areas. But private sector sources estimate that more than 65 percent of the eastern region’s 16 million hectares were covered by virgin forest.

The most abundant native species of trees were palo santo (Bulnesia sarmientoi) and quebracho (Schinopsis quebracho).

The area covered by virgin forest has drastically shrunk, to just 619,000 hectares – four percent of the estimated total of 30 years ago, when the logging began, according to data provided by the Forestry Service, which answers to the Ministry of Agriculture.

”But a third front of deforestation is opening up now,” Tallone noted.

Ranchers, who also took part in clearing the forests in the eastern region, to create pastureland, are now moving to western Paraguay, fleeing a growing wave of cattle rustling that has caused them serious losses, he said.

Ranchers ”are clearing the forests in the western region at a rate of around 100,000 hectares a year,” said the agronomist.

Of the 24 million-hectare western region, 15 million hectares are covered by woodland, including more than nine million that are timber-productive forests, which means they are fit for logging, the official statistics indicate.

A mining engineer from the United States, Tod Spargo, who has lived in Paraguay since 1975, is seeking financing for a sustainable forestry project in the western part of the country.

Spargo first came to this South American country to direct a search for uranium, and marvelled at the immense stretches of nearly untouched forest as he flew over the jungle as part of his work.

Since then, he has carried out research on various native species of trees and their rates of growth, and has designed a project for which financing is now being sought.

”The idea behind the plan is to demonstrate that the native forests can be preserved, in equal or better conditions than those existing” before they began to be exploited, Spargo said in a conversation with IPS.

The first stage of the project will be implemented on 17,000 hectares located in the northwestern department of Boquerón, which will be divided into five production units. Trees would be cut on each subdivision in a rotating pattern, for periods of one year, and would be left untouched for four years.

”The most important part of the plan is that it has been scientifically determined that only those trees with a diametre larger than 36 cms can be cut,” said Spargo.

”Cutting one tree per hectare a year would allow daily production of four cubic metres of top-quality boards,” he pointed out.

The main species involved in the project are the palo santo (Bulnesia sarmientoi), white quebracho (Aspidorsperma quebracho-blanco), coronillo (Scutia buxifolia), palo blanco (Calycophyllum multiflorum), red quebracho (Schinopsis quebracho-colorado), guayacan (Caesalpinia paraguariensis) and algarrobo negro (Prosopis nigra).

”For each tree felled, six seeds of the same species will be planted,” said Spargo. ”That way we will ensure that the logging operation is economically profitable as well as ecologically sustainable.”

Agronomist Damiana Mann, a technical adviser to the Forestry Service, said the biggest danger to Paraguay’s native forests is the change in the use of land – cutting down trees to clear land for agricultural purposes.

”The owners of land with forest cover see woodland as unproductive, which means they need incentives from the government to preserve and manage their forests,” Mann remarked to IPS.

Paraguay’s legislation authorises the clearing of woodland except in protected wilderness areas, or along rivers to prevent erosion and the clogging of riverbeds.

There are 18 protected areas in Paraguay, including 10 national parks, with a total combined surface area of nearly 1.5 million hectares. Fifteen of the reserves are in the east, covering a total of 358,000 hectares. The other three are in the west, and are comprised of approximately 1.1 million hectares.

Mann said the Forestry Service was drafting two bills, aimed at curbing the clearing of woodland for agricultural purposes, and promoting reforestation with native or exotic species.

Paraguay’s current reforestation law provides for an incentive equivalent to 75 percent of the costs of planting and the first three years of maintenance. But the Forestry Service is behind in its payments of the bonus due to a lack of funds.

”We are also working on creating a Forestry Fund that would draw money from various areas and cover the costs of reforestation,” she added.

Mann underscored the excellent quality of Paraguayan soil for reforestation activities, and pointed out that those who are involved in planting forests use mainly native species.

The Environment Secretariat’s director of strategic planning, Jorge Coronel, said deforestation has a direct impact on the quality of water resources, ”because there is greater build-up of sediment in rivers and streams.”

”When it rains, the soil does not absorb the water” if the trees have been cut down, and ”the soil is thus impoverished as sediment is washed away,” he explained.

In addition, since rainwater runs off the land more quickly without vegetation to deter it, the water is not absorbed, and the groundwater reserves are also reduced, said Coronel.

Excerpt:

By Stephen Leahy
BROOKLIN, Canada, Jun 4 2003 (IPS)

Fishing subsidies in the world’s rich countries and development that pushes poor farmers off their land are two reasons why the world’s oceans have been over-harvested, leading to a drastic drop in fish stocks, say experts.

Global fisheries subsidies vary between 14 billion U.S. dollars and 20 billion dollars annually, with Europe and Japan leading the way, according to the World Bank. By some estimates, government payments account for one dollar in four in the fishery sector.

The World Wide Fund for Nature, among other groups, has argued for years that these subsidies play a significant role in declining fish stocks.

At the same time, from western Africa, to the west coast of South America, to southeast Asia, farmers are being pushed off their land and into fishing because it is a means of survival that does not require a lot of assets, says Daniel Pauly, a leading fisheries expert based in Canada.

”We’re over-fishing by a factor of two or three,” he says in an interview. ”Some marine species are on the brink of extinction and if we don’t make major changes there will be little left in the ocean but plankton,” added Pauly, who worked for many years at the International Centre for Living Aquatic Resource Management (ICLARM) in Manila, Philippines.

The situation is now so dire that fishing should be banned in up to one-half of the world’s oceans for the next 10 to 20 years, he suggests.

A report that made headlines around the world last month said that commercial fishing has reduced populations of every species of large fish on the globe by more than 90 per cent, putting a vital source of food protein in peril – especially for populations in developing countries – threatening the livelihood of millions of small fishers and unbalancing marine ecosystems.

”From giant blue marlin to mighty blue-fin tuna, and from tropical groupers to Antarctic cod, industrial fishing has scoured the global ocean,” said Ransom Myers, a world leading fisheries biologist based at Dalhousie University in Canada and one of the report’s authors.

”We’ve known about collapse of certain fish species and some fisheries, but this study is the first good global overview,” says Meryl Williams, director general of the World Fish Center in Penang, Malaysia. The Center, formerly known as ICLARM, is an international fisheries research body and a member of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Since 1950, with the onset of industrialised fishing, stocks have been so efficiently harvested that it takes just 10 to 15 years to deplete any fish community by 90 percent, the Canadian study found. And the oceans have been so exploited that only 10 percent of all large fish, both open ocean species – including tuna, swordfish, marlin – and the large ground fish – such as cod, halibut, skates and flounder – are left.

Myers and colleagues spent 10 years collecting, verifying and assembling information from all major fisheries in the world. Their work advances a 1994 U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimate that almost 70 percent of fish stocks were over-fished.

One billion people rely on fish as a source of animal protein and 150 million people depend on fisheries for employment, most of them in the South, Williams told IPS.

”Reducing the amounts of fish caught in countries like Bangladesh, the Philippines and Malaysia will be very difficult.”

But drastic reductions in the world’s fish haul are urgently needed.

Financing by the North in the 1960s and ’70s helped the South build up its industrial fleets, which accelerated the fish stock declines, according to Pauly. As a result, the South accounts for more than one-half of the global fish catch, most of which is exported. By comparison, 95 percent of rice is consumed in the country where it is grown.

Exports and increasing scarcity have made fish very expensive in relative terms, too costly to remain a staple food in many southern countries.

”We in the North don’t see the lack of fish in the south,” Pauly says.

Tensions are high in many fisheries. ”There is already tremendous conflict at every level; it can get quite violent,” says Williams. Control of fisheries and fishing rights are major issues at global and local levels and will be difficult to solve, she adds.

One global issue Williams would like tackled immediately is fishing subsidies, including assistant to shipbuilders at a time when most experts agree the world’s fleet is far too large. ”The last thing the fisheries need is more fishing boats,” says Williams.

Fewer boats and fewer fishers is what are needed, agrees Pauly, along with alternative employment. ”Fishing should not be encouraged as a way of living, and we need to drag kids out of fishing,” he says.

Unfortunately, fishing is what Pauly calls an occupation of last resort. Throughout the tropics, landless and jobless people turn to fishing in hopes of making a living. Not being from traditional fishing communities and lacking skills, these ex-farmers are likely to use illegal gear, including dynamite, to fill their nets, he says.

According to Pauly the only way to prevent a complete collapse of the world’s fisheries is to create protected regions, including breeding areas, which would be off-limits to all fishing.

But how big and how long?

”One-third to one-half of the world’s oceans,” he says. ”These areas would be closed for the next one or two decades. Then we could safely catch as much fish as we are today without endangering the stocks.”

Currently, only a very small fraction of the seas are protected. ”We need to change the notion that anyone can fish anywhere, anytime, for anything,” Pauly says, pointing out that hunting animals is restricted virtually everywhere on the planet.

While Williams is hopeful that environmentally sustainable aquaculture will meet some of the enormous fish protein shortfall, she agrees that large reserves and international action are needed.

”Humans have had an enormous impact on the biodiversity of every continent,” she adds. ”The same thing is happening to the world’s oceans.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
PINJORE, India, Jun 4 2003 (IPS)

At Asia’s first Vulture Care Centre in this northern Indian city, scientists are battling to save the scavenging bird, which faces extinction due to a mysterious viral infection that is upsetting the ecological balance and is a serious public health menace.

”India’s vulture population has declined by over 98 percent over the past decade from tens of thousands of birds to just a few hundred, leading to a serious ecological imbalance,” said R D Jakati, who is in charge of the vulture centre in the Himalayan foothills in Punjab state, some 300 kilometres north of Delhi.

The carrion-consuming birds are now on the critically endangered list of BirdLife International, the global network of conservation groups based in Britain.

Declining vulture numbers have triggered serious public health problems. Rotting carrion lies around for days in towns and villages across India, and are believed to be spreading communicable infections like tuberculosis, anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease.

There has definitely been an ”exponential” rise in the number of stray dogs that feed on rotting flesh and and spread rabies, experts add. Their concern is high because more than 20,000 Indians die of rabies each year, the highest such number worldwide.

”This (carrion-eating dogs) can become a major human problem,” Jakati said in an interview. In Bikaner in western Rajasthan state, for instance, over 1,000 vicious dogs inhabited a large carrion dumping ground. This poses a serious threat to the local population, many of whom they regularly attack.

”The project aims to identify the reasons behind the decline in India’s vulture population and to develop corrective measures, ” Britain’s environment minister Elliot Morley said at the centre’s inauguration earlier this year.

Established with a 140,000 U.S. dollar grant from Britain, the research facility, nestling in a forested area, includes a diagnostic laboratory and voluminous cages that at present hold 13 ailing vultures. They are suffering from the fatal virus, which causes their necks to droop and induces laziness before killing them off.

Indian scientists working with their counterparts from the Darwin Initiative for Survival of Species and the National Birds of Prey Centre at Gloucestershire, Britain also hope to breed around 40 healthy vultures in captivity.

Centre scientist Vibhu Prakash said several Eurasian Griffon and Himalayan Griffon vultures have been radio-collared in order to map their migration patterns as they travel back and forth from Central Asia and Africa, carrying the unidentified disease with them.

One such tagged vulture has been tracked nearly 5,000 kilometres away in Mongolia. Prakash said it was ”vitally urgent” to identify what exactly ailed the vultures, especially since infections like AIDS and mad cow disease had first surfaced in animals before jumping across species to humans. The same is believed to be the case with the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Ailing and dead vultures have also been found in neighbouring Nepal and Pakistan, and there is concern that the avian disease could spread to other continents where these scavenging birds play a major role in the ecological system.

In African countries, for instance, communities depend on vultures to dispose of animal carcasses, as no carrion removal system exists.

A few vultures can efficiently dispose of a cow carcass within minutes, a fact that is important to followers of the Zoroastrian religion.

India’s small Parsee community in the western port city of Mumbai have been adversely affected by the declining vulture population because, until a decade ago, the birds would scavenge their dead in the secluded ‘Towers of Silence’ in the heart of the city, in keeping with ancient Zoroastrian tradition.

The Parsees cannot cremate, bury or submerge their dead in water because they consider a corpse impure, and their Zoroastrian faith does not permit them to defile the elements with it.

British expertise in breeding vultures in captivity for the Parsees has been called off, following differences within the orthodox community that had erected solar reflectors to hasten the decomposition of human bodies given the ‘lack’ of vultures.

Officials at the Vulture Centre were sceptical about the future of their own institution, because funding for it runs out next year and the federal government has so far shown little interest in keeping the project going.

When vulture populations were reported to be dying out a few years ago in the Keoladeo National Park in western Rajasthan state, scientists attributed this to the indiscriminate use of the pesticide DDT, both as an agricultural pesticide and in malaria control.

Large amounts of DDT had been dumped on Rajasthan to quell an outbreak of malaria. This, they believed, facilitated the entry of the chemical into the food chain.

Tests carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in Delhi showed that lactating mothers were passing on unacceptable amounts of DDT to infants in breast milk. Other tests showed unacceptably high amounts of DDT in the flesh of cows, which is left largely to vultures to feed on because of Hindu religious taboos concerning the animal.

Scientific experiments have shown that DDT can interfere with bird reproduction by affecting the embryonic development of bird species or by reducing the thickness of eggshells.

But in spite of warnings about the rapid decline in the vultures’ numbers by leading environmental groups such as Greenpeace International and the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), the government and the environment ministry refused to act.

At one point, the ministry even refused researchers’ permission to either trap the dying vultures or to send their infected tissue samples for detailed examination abroad, for fear of losing genetic material to foreign pharmaceutical companies and those interested in patenting the genomes of various organisms.

But last year, with the vultures close to extinction, the Indian government permitted tissue samples from a few deceased birds to be sent to Melbourne, Australia, for analysis, signalling some hope for the winged scavengers.

Excerpt:

By Emad Mekay
WASHINGTON, Jun 3 2003 (IPS)

The recent appointment of fast food giant McDonald’s to the advisory board of an environmental group has drawn accusations of ”green washing” from environmentalists and led one board member to resign in protest. But both the company and the group strongly deny the accusations.

Paul Hawken, a well-known activist and environmentalist respected for his strong opposition to corporate globalisation, resigned two weeks ago from the Green Business Network (GBN), a Washington-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) that says it is working to make businesses adopt better environmental practices.

"McDonald’s doesn’t have the expertise, the credibility or the values to be on the steering committee of a green business," Hawken, a board member since the NGO started its operation in 2000, told IPS in an interview.

Hawken and many other activists criticise the Illinois-based company for offering children unhealthy food that contains too much fat and sugar. They refer to scientific research that links fast food to childhood obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The critics charge that McDonald’s gets involved with green NGOs to win them over to its side so that its business model will not be changed or challenged.

”We can welcome any supply chain improvements McDonald’s engenders, without anointing them with a green label,” Hawken, author of ‘The Ecology of Commerce’ and ‘Natural Capitalism’, said in his resignation letter.

GBN is part of the National Environmental Education & Training Foundation and operates its main activity, the greenbiz.com website, from Oakland in the state of California.

The site offers companies advice on how to become environmentally and socially friendly. On the GBN advisory board sit firms including Coca Cola, International Paper, AT&T, and Kleenex maker Kimberly-Clark. But Hawken says that McDonald’s stands out.

"My objection is that the appointment absolutely undermines the credibility of the organisation and the green movement as a whole," he said. ”It’s like putting a child molester on the board of an orphanage.”

”How can you ‘bring information resources to help align environmental responsibility with success’ (the GBN mission) when the company in question is knowingly destroying two of the most important environments there are: our children and farmlands,” wrote Hawken in his letter.

Many nutritionists, green groups and environmentalists are angry at McDonald’s, which has 30,000 restaurants in 121 countries, for, among many reasons, targeting children and adults alike with massive advertisement campaigns for unhealthy food.

The company, which serves some 46 million people daily around the world, spends about two billion U.S. dollars a year creating advertising designed to get children hooked on fatty and sugary meals, they say.

Hawken’s resignation quickly became news among anti-globalisation activists, who say they are worried that some groups and companies are trying to exploit the space created by years of hard lobbying from environmentalists and public health activists.

"They (McDonald’s) think they can become a sustainable corporation by joining groups like that," said Anuradha Mittal of the California-based Food First. "It makes a joke of the whole debate about sustainability because it’s now without any concept of human rights."

But both McDonald’s and GBN strongly deny the ”green washing” accusations.

Joel Makower, GBN founder and strategy director, attributed the difference with Hawken and other activists, to ”language”.

”When you come right down to it, this whole thing is largely semantic,” he said. ”Paul (Hawken) believes that green should be associated with something larger than the environment.”

Makower said his group is not promoting McDonald’s health and environmental track record.

”Are we making any claims about McDonald’s? Absolutely not," he said. "Are we holding them up as an example of the greenest of the green companies? Absolutely not.”

McDonald’s too says that it did not seek the appointment but was invited by GBN as a way to share its experience in social responsibility.

The company says it has no immediate plans to use its GBN link to advertise its environmental record.

”It’s not what’s in it for McDonald’s,” Bob Langert, senior director of social responsibility at the company, told IPS. ”It’s what we can do to help the cause and the mission of Green Business Network.”

But Hawken says the company brandishes its membership in and contributions to some environmental groups as evidence of its "social responsibility," which is not accurate.

”McDonald’s contributes money to many groups in this age of imploding foundations,” he said.

”They get in and then use the names (of green groups) backwards in their social responsibility reports; they used all the organisations that they contributed money to.”

The company says money had nothing to do with the appointment and that it only contributed five thousand dollars to the group’s budget of 325 thousand dollars.

But other activists agree with Hawken. "It’s a fact that they can use this in their self-done social responsibility report,” said Mittal. "McDonald’s tried to show how much they put back to the community but failed to mention how much money they paid to place advertisements near schools and get school children into their system."

The company issued its inaugural Social Responsibility Report last year with much fanfare.

”Are we perfect?” asked Langert. ”Absolutely not. Can we do more in the future? Yes we can. We are committed to doing more,” he added, suggesting his company is ready for more dialogue with its critics.

”I think that rather than people launching attacks and shutting the door on companies like McDonald’s, I always believe that open education and dialogue is the best to make progress in a society,” he said. ”And I think more of that needs to happen.”

Hawken says that by naming McDonald’s to the advisory board – a role that implies the company has set environmental standards – GBN is exalting the corporation.

”That’s like, ‘Whoa, these people have made it’. But what I am saying is that they don’t have it. And therefore, it’s tantamount to green washing.”

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, Jun 3 2003 (IPS)

A tree plantation is not a forest, says forestry engineer Rodrigo Herrera, of Greenpeace-Chile, one of many environmentalists in Latin America fighting to preserve native forests as integral ecosystems – with many frustrations and relatively few advances to show for their efforts.

Africa and South America were the regions of the world that lost most natural forest in the 1990s, when deforestation reached an average annual rate of 16.1 million hectares, 15.2 million hectares in tropical regions, according to a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The problem affects all Latin America, but Argentina, Brazil and Mexico were among the countries with greatest loss of forest coverage in the 20th century, alongside Burma (Myanmar), Congo, Indonesia, Nigeria, Sudan, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In Chile, after 11 years of tedious bureaucratic back-and-forth in Congress, just now is the possibility emerging for a Native Forest Recovery and Forestry Development Act.

The government, environmental groups and logging companies have hammered out positions that are closer to each other, despite seemingly irreconcilable demands.

President Ricardo Lagos announced that in early June he would send to the Senate a set of guidelines agreed by the Forestry Panel, a dialogue group that was on the verge of breaking up in May, when environmentalists accused the government of failing to comply with a protocol accord signed in June 2001.

The presidential guidelines will give footing to the final step to be taken by Congress to approve the law, and could reopen legislative talks on mechanisms for designating subsidies for native forest recovery projects, said Hernán Verscheure, of the National Pro-Defence of Fauna and Flora Committee (CODEFF), in an IPS interview.

"The Treasury Ministry wants those funds to be competitive, which would limit access to them for small and medium farmers who own native forests in remote areas. The citizen groups are asking that these funds be designated directly," said Verscheure, coordinator of the CODEFF Forests Programme.

The mechanism the environmentalists are asking for is the same applied by dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) when he expedited Decree 701 in 1974, which used subsidies and tax exemptions to foment large-scale forestry plantations, turning the country into one of the world’s leading exporters of lumber and wood pulp.

But unlike the intentions of the new law, the Pinochet decree proved to be an incentive to cut down natural-growth forests in order to plant fast-growing exogenous species, like the radiated pine and the Australian eucalyptus. This became yet another threat to the survival of Chile’s native forests, in addition to logging for firewood, the expansion of farmland, and forest fires.

Between 1985 and 1994, the area in Chile covered by autochthonous forests shrank from 7.5 million to 5.2 million hectares, according to a 1996 report by economist Marcel Claude, then director of environmental accounting for the Central Bank. He said that if that pace continued, the country’s native forests would disappear within 30 years.

The government and the CORMA lumber company rejected the study, and the Central Bank fired Claude. And a subsequent report by the governmental National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) stated that the area covered by natural forests, on the contrary, had expanded in the period studied from 7.5 million to 13.4 million hectares.

CODEFF, Greenpeace, Defenders of the Chilean Forest, Terram Foundation (created by Claude) and other environmental groups objected to CONAF’s version of the land-use register because it included areas of native vegetation such as bushes, which do not officially qualify as forests.

Technically, to be considered forests, the plant species growing in the area should be a minimum of two metres tall.

Environmental groups issued a declaration in July 2002 stating that the decline of autochthonous forests in Chile was occurring at a faster pace than even Claude had reported in his controversial study for the Central Bank.

In neighbouring Argentina, the authors of a 1914 inventory calculated that there were 106 million hectares of natural forests. By 2002, the total tree-covered area in the country had been reduced to 33 million hectares, according to an official study, which underscored the rapid deforestation in the northern provinces in particular.

There are numerous protected forests in Argentina, but national and provincial forestry laws have been reformed based on criteria that give priority to economic development and investment. As a result, cultivation of areas with non-native tree species expanded from 20,000 hectares annually in 1992 to 100,000 hectares in 2001.

In the north of the South American continent, the Colombian government issued a decree in October 1996 to promote reforestation, a law that lifted the environmental licensing requirement for tree plantations.

In Venezuela, a country that in 1976 became the first Latin American country to establish a Ministry of Environment, 48 percent of the national territory is protected. But only this year was a plan initiated to take inventory of the Venezuelan forests, an endeavour costing eight million dollars and slated to conclude in 2007.

Brazil, the South American giant, has a Forest Protection Law establishing that large rural properties in the Amazon region must preserve 80 percent of their forest coverage.

But where laws to protect forests and promote reforestation are lacking is along Brazil’s Atlantic coast, home to 60 percent of the Brazilian population. Only seven percent remains of the original Atlantic forest.

In Mexico, the Vicente Fox government enacted the General Law on Sustainable Forest Development in February, unifying a range of different forestry regulations. Most importantly, the law upholds the ban on logging in protected areas, which cover most of the country’s native forests.

The Lacandona jungle, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, in the past two centuries lost 75 percent of the two million hectares of humid forests. The constant pressure of expanded human settlement lies behind the region’s prolonged conflict, as well as the poverty and violence it suffers, say experts.

In Chile, says activist-expert Herrera, the expansion of massive plantations of pine and eucalyptus over the past 25 years has contributed to poverty and migration of peasant farmers and indigenous peoples, due to the reduced production or deteriorated soils of their lands.

The fragmentation of native forests has also taken its toll, as it entails the destruction of ecosystems, loss of biological, genetic and ecological diversity, and an alteration of the landscape that cannot be compensated by tree plantations, said the Greenpeace representative.

The "native forest law", which began its long path through the Chilean Congress in 1992, will allow autochthonous forest recovery and management programmes to develop in harmony with government plans to reduce rural poverty, says CODEFF activist Verscheure.

According to the Lagos government, the legislation will provide benefits in the form of preservation, recuperation and development of more than two million hectares of native forests in the hands of small and medium rural landowners.

"The long absence of legislation means that there are not very many people interested in working and managing native forests. What this law does is establish the game rules," Juan Eduardo Correa, executive vice-president of CORMA and active participant in the Forestry Panel, said in comments to IPS.

"With clear rules, the private sector will be interested in managing these forests in order to aid in their recovery, and to look ahead to a future in which it is not only a natural resource that produces lumber, but also has other uses," such as eco- tourism, said the lumber company official

* This report includes contributions from Diego Cevallos (Mexico), Yadira Ferrer (Colombia), Humberto Márquez (Venezuela), Mario Osava (Brazil) and Marcela Valente (Argentina).

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
PUYO, Ecuador, Jun 3 2003 (IPS)

Illegal logging activity in Ecuador’s Amazon region appears to form the backdrop to conflict between indigenous groups that recently claimed the lives of around 30 Tagaeri Indians at the hands of the Huaorani in the remote eastern jungle province of Pastaza.

Local police and the Organisation of the Huaorani Nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon (ONHAE) say loggers operating in the region instigated the conflict and provided the two sides with weapons.

”The loggers complain that the Tagaeri” – an indigenous group that refuses contact with the outside world – ”keep them from felling trees by attacking them. In March last year, the Tagaeri used spears to kill three loggers who were cutting down the forest,” said ONHAE leader Manuela Omari.

The loggers are ”directly responsible,” she maintained. ”They paid a group of 12 Huaorani Indians from Tiguino to kill the Tagaeri, so the loggers could work in that area.”

However, Ecuador’s police chief, Edgar Vaca, clarified that until police investigators make it into Tiguino, the isolated area where the indigenous men, women and children were slain on May 27, to ”investigate the facts,” no one will know what the motive was, or who was involved.

Footage shot from an army helicopter that overflew the area on Sunday but was unable to land due to foul weather shows the bodies of a number of adults and children alongside burnt huts.

It was also reported that members of the Tagaeri ethnic group set fire to a tourist complex located near the town of Tiguino last Friday, presumably in revenge for the deaths, although it appeared to be only a warning, as no one was killed.

The Tagaeri were described as a ”fearsome warrior people” by anthropologist Miguel Angel Cabodevilla. The group, a branch of the Huaorani people, shuns contact with the Western world and other indigenous communities, and fiercely defends its territory with spears.

Estimated to number less than 150, the Tagaeri – also known as ”Aucas” – live a nomadic lifestyle in the jungle, hunting and fishing, and are in a state of permanent war to keep others out of their territory.

The ONHAE has repeatedly complained that logging and oil companies are exploiting natural resources with no regard for the environment in territory that the government declared off-limits two years ago, where the nomadic Tagaeri live.

The Tagaeri have thus been pushed towards areas in closer contact with the Huaorani and Kichwa (Quechua) Indians.

The representatives of oil companies claim their activity is legal and meets all environmental requisites, as required by the Ministry of Energy and Mines.

But logging operations are carried out illegally by people who claim to be acting independently.

The debate on the consequences of logging and oil-drilling activity in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle region began to heat up again on May 29, when reports of the killing of the Tagaeri reached Puyo, the capital of the province of Pastaza.

A group of Huaorani from Tiguino reportedly used shotguns to kill around 30 Tagaeri people, including women, children and elderly persons. They were said to have exhibited the head of a veteran Tagaeri warrior as evidence of their triumph.

Despite the violent incidents between the Tagaeri and Huaorani, an army officer said before heading off to the remote area, which can only be reached by air or by river, that ”our patrol will not interfere with the ancestral customs or punishment procedures of the Huaorani.

”The military are very respectful in that sense, and we will only carry out an inspection,” he said before boarding the helicopter last week that was not able to land.

One of the local police officers who reported the killing late last week said that ”Only the loggers in the area could have given firearms to the community in Tiguino, because the site of the massacre is practically inaccessible.”

In March 2002, the correspondent for the Quito newspaper El Comercio in Puyo reported that 16 groups of loggers had been found ”indiscriminately cutting down the primary forest” with chainsaws. The timber was floated down the Tiguino river to the nearest road.

”Up to 400 logs at a time are floated out and taken away by highway. On some days, between four and six vehicles loaded with wood drive out of the area,” the newspaper reported last year.

Around that time, the Tagaeri killed three members of a group of people felling trees in the area of Tiguino.

The ONHAE’s Omari said the Huaorani people were in mourning over last week’s killings, because ”the Tagaeri, the people of Tiguino, and all Huaorani communities are one family, and we are saddened by what happened..”

A commission of ONHAE leaders that flew into the area in a military helicopter last Friday to attempt to mediate was forced to turn back by bad weather.

Shuar indigenous leader Marcelino Chumpi, the president of the Council of Indigenous Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador, which has the rank of a ministry but is autonomous, explained that mediation in such cases is very difficult.

”The Tagaeri do not accept contact with the Western world, which means mediation must be between leaders of the ethnic groups involved in the confrontation, with the participation of some other community that is not involved in the conflict,” he said.

Chumpi added that a tradition that is sometimes followed in order to bring about peace is for ”the aggressor community to send the sons or daughters of their warriors to live with and become part of the community that was attacked.”

In November 2001, members of the Tagaeri community killed two elderly Kichwa Indians who lived in a community that grew crops and collected turtle eggs along the Curaray river, also in the province of Pastaza.

The elderly Kichwa were staked to the earth with 14 spears, in a death ritual that is followed by the Tagaeri when they kill an enemy.

The attack occurred after the Tagaeri were pushed out of their territory by oil company activity and began to fish and hunt in the area inhabited by the Kichwa.

On that occasion, Armando Vargas, one of the local Kichwa inhabitants, said the Tagaeri had not attacked them in 35 years, despite the fact that the Kichwa were living near Tagaeri territory.

”This would seem to indicate that they are desperate at the unstoppable penetration of their territory by the oil and logging operations,” said Vargas.

After the attack, many of the local Kichwa abandoned the area, for fear of new violence by the Tagaeri.

Giovanna Tassi, director of the environmental press agency Tierra, in Puyo, said last week’s attack on the Tagaeri should be seen as a wake-up call over the oil company and logging activity in lands inhabited by indigenous people in the Amazon, which could cause severe environmental damages.

An oil pipeline is now being laid along the Auca road that divides the ancestral territory of the Tagaeri in half, while farther north, loggers are cutting down the jungle along the Tiguino river.

”The Tagaeri flee the noise, the harassment, and now are living along the Curaray river. It is turtle egg season, and the monkeys are fat and ready to be hunted, which is why they are staying there,” said Tassi.

The world’s first encounter with the Tagaeri was in 1956, when five U.S. citizens were killed along the Curaray river. There have been isolated attacks since then, of oil company workers and Huaorani Indians.

But the group made headlines around the world in 1987, when over 100 spears were used to kill Bishop Alejandro Labaka and a nun, Inés Arango, who had flown into Tagaeri territory by helicopter in an attempt to make contact and inform the group of the advance by the oil companies into their territory, and discuss ways to help them.

Around 30 percent of Ecuador’s 12.5 million people are indigenous people belonging to 12 ethnic groups, the largest of which is the Kichwa, who live in the highlands as well as the Amazon jungle.

The Amazon jungle is also home to the Cofán, Siona, Secoya, Huaorani, Achuar, Shuar and Zápara, while the Awa, Chachi, Epera and Tsáchila live in the area along the country’s Pacific coast.

Ecuador’s indigenous people are perhaps the best organised in Latin America. They have fielded candidates in elections since 1996 through the Pachakutik Movement, and are now allied with the government of President Lucio Gutiérrez, in office since Jan. 15.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, May 30 2003 (IPS)

From Acapulco to Viña del Mar, the most beautiful beaches of Latin America are turning into dangerous places for bathers, the result of increasing contamination from various sources, but mostly from sewage discharged into the sea.

This is a common phenomenon throughout the region, and often pits health authorities and ecologists against local officials and businesses, the latter seeking to preserve the lucrative tourist economy associated with beaches and coastal areas.

Acapulco, on Mexico’s southwestern Pacific coast, Colombia’s Cartagena, on the Caribbean, and Viña del Mar, on the Chilean Pacific coast, are feeling the effects of these debates.

So, too, the Brazilian beaches of Rio de Janeiro, on the Atlantic, where authorities decided two years ago to establish a swimming beach on the shores of an artificial lake.

The ‘Piscinao (big pool) de Ramos’, made famous in Brazil by the popular TV series ‘The Clone’, was created to give the 130,000 residents of the nearby ‘favelas’ (slums) an alternative to bathing in the polluted waters of Rio’s otherwise beautiful Guanabara Bay.

At Ramos and other beaches along the bay, measurements taken in 1998 to 2000 revealed concentrations of 4,000 faecal coliform bacteria per 100 millilitres of water, when the internationally accepted maximum is 1,000 per 100 ml.

Sewage is the biggest enemy of the beaches, but also taking their toll are oil spills, garbage brought in by tides and even natural phenomena, like die-offs of sea birds or fish.

In Viña del Mar, officials assure that the coastline is no longer contaminated, thanks to the construction in the 1990s of a system that carries sewage far out to sea, and to the water treatment plants along the Aconcagua and other nearby rivers that flow into the Atlantic.

Municipal waste is subject to treatment processes in Cartagena, Colombia, and in Mexico’s Acapulco, where mayor Alberto López Rosas, of the leftist opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), countering the health authorities’ ban on two beaches, went for a swim at both.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) says in a recent study that urban wastewater has been identified as one of the greatest threats to sustainable coastal development worldwide.

According to the UNEP, the economic value of goods and services provided by oceans is 23 trillion dollars a year, while the infectious diseases that the contaminated coastal waters cause among bathers and seafood consumers have an annual economic impact of some 10 billion dollars.

The problem takes on particular importance in Latin America and the Caribbean, where 60 percent of the population lives less than 100 km from the sea.

The rehabilitation of beaches thus emerges as a shared responsibility in defence of marine resources and human health, an endeavour that requires extensive investment, monitoring systems, and environmental education campaigns targeting local populations, say experts.

Rodolfo Lacy Tamayo, chief advisor of the Mexican Environmental Secretariat, said in comments to Tierramérica that the key is to provide systematic information about coastal water quality to alert bathers about health risks.

But when the Secretariat imposed a ban on Tlacopanocha and Caletilla beaches in Acapulco during the recent Holy Week, the mayor actively rejected it, saying the measure was excessive and inappropriate. The mayor was backed by local Roman Catholic archbishop Felipe Aguirre Franco, who proposed pouring holy water into the Acapulco sea.

Acapulco took in 200,000 tourists during Holy Week, 8.6 percent more than in the same period in 2002. Five million people visit the resort city each year, says mayor López Rosas.

The Cartagena Centre for Ocean and Hydrology Research states in a report that the water in the city’s bay has "high levels of contamination, sedimentation and overall environmental deterioration," as a result of wastewater discharge with organic compounds and fuel, oil, and fertilizer.

But Cartagena mayor Carlos Díaz said in a conversation with Tierramérica that those problems are now a thing of the past, dating to when the city’s sewage system could not keep up with the waste created by newly constructed properties. He said the current state of Cartagena’s bay is "excellent".

In nearly all Latin American countries there are bodies that monitor the coastal environmental conditions, and beaches in particular. In Chile this is the task of the Joint Commission on the Coastal Border, made up of the militarised Carabinero police, the navy and the local municipal authorities.

In November 2002, of the 415 beaches tested along the Chilean coast, eight were closed to bathers because they had higher coliform levels than the permitted 1,000 per 100 ml of water.

But the people who use the beaches say the clean-up efforts are not very rigorous. Tourist Renato Moya complained: "Two years ago my right foot was infected with the staphylococcus bacteria in Viña del Mar. I had to take two months of medical leave."

The major beaches of Rio de Janeiro, like Copacabana, Ipanema and Barra de Tijuca, do not suffer high levels of contamination because they face the open sea, unlike those of Guanabara Bay, where mayor Anthony Garotinho inaugurated the ‘Piscinao de Ramos’ in December 2001.

Environmental activist and Rio resident Maria do Carmo Serra Lopes told Tierramérica that she shed tears of happiness when she saw the beautiful park built around the artificial lake in an area where she had played as a child.

The "big pool" is a public work that not only improved the quality of life of the impoverished local residents, it also has had a positive effect on the bay itself, where fisherfolk have seen the fish population swell as a result of the clean water that flows into the bay from the artificial lake.

* Originally published May 24 in Spanish by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme: www.tierramerica.net

(Gustavo González is an IPS correspondent. Yadira Ferrer/Colombia, Pilar Franco/Mexico and Mario Osava/Brazil contributed to this report.)

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BRUSSELS, May 30 2003 (IPS)

The European Union will assess the development of its green policies since the last year’s Earth Summit next week as it welcomes environmental actors to Brussels.

More than 3000 delegates will participate in this, the third and biggest edition of Green Week, which runs from June 2 to June 5. They will debate three key major environment policy areas outlined at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, also known as the Johannesburg Earth Summit 2002.

Representatives from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), public authorities and national governments will travel to the Belgian city from across the world to review the progress made by the EU on key issues such as sustainable consumption and production, renewable energy and climate change and water. They will also assess what needs to be done in the future.

This year the EU, notably its executive arm, the Commission, hopes that Green Week 2003 will encourage European citizens to change their behaviour and lead “a more environmentally friendly lifestyle” to respond to the environmental challenges within the 15 member states.

One of the main aims of this year’s Green Week is to encourage people to “think aloud” about how citizens, businesses, policy makers, teachers and scientists can really change their environmental behaviour and the world a more environmentally friendly and healthy place to live in.

Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallström says that the EU’s Green Week is one of the Commission’s ways of conveying its environmental message to European citizens. She hopes that the event will encourage participants to learn about and develop environmental commitments made in Johannesburg.

“The European Commission, along with actors at every level of society, is determined to translate words into action and meet the commitments on sustainable development that were made last year.

“By focusing and changing our behaviour and emphasizing the important role that all stakeholders play in bringing about that change, Green Week 2003 underlines the need for concerted effort and for a results-orientated approach on issues that really count,” she says.

There will be a series of conferences and events to debate what the EU has done so far to address environmental problems. As well as showcasing the work already achieved by the Commission, Green Week 2003 will assess what still needs to be done.

Since the Johannesburg Summit, the EU has been committed to developing a number of new environmental initiatives, including a 10-year framework for programmes on sustainable consumption and production of renewable energy.

Industrialised countries have agreed to take the lead in this global effort to correct current unsustainable patterns and help developing countries put in place policies and tools to respond to the problem, says an EU briefing paper.

Members of the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to address the issue of a changing global climate, also recommitted themselves to the constitution at the Summit and have since pledged to uphold the Protocol.

In September 2002, the EU launched the ‘Water for Life’ initiative as a direct result of discussions at the Johannesburg Summit. The programme aims to halve the number of people without access to safe water and basic sanitation by 2015.

This is currently being carried out through institutional capacity building, targeted research and scientific cooperation in developing countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

With 26 conference sessions, workshops and press conferences, Green Week has become one of the most important events in the Environment Directorates-General’s (DG) agenda. It is the largest forum for debate of its kind on the international calendar, says the EU.

Besides the main conferences and debates, there will be a Green Week exhibition, which is a showpiece for the presentation of the latest innovative projects to solving environmental problems around the world.

In conjunction with Green Week, European citizens are being encouraged to organise ‘Green Days’ – regional events throughout the EU to raise environmental awareness at local level.

The Environment DG aims to promote Sustainable Development and environmental efficiency and to encourage the equitable use of common environmental resources.

This week the Commission adopted a paper called ‘Towards a Thematic Strategy on Waste Prevention and Recycling’, which invites stakeholders to comment on issues such as: how to avoid generating waste, how to reduce the use of resources, and which wastes to recycle.

According to a report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) early May, environmental issues are still a cause for concern in Europe.

‘Europe’s Environment’ found that although the state of the environment across Europe has improved in several respects over the past decade, much of the progress is likely to be wiped out by economic growth because governments have yet to make significant strides towards decoupling environmental pressures from economic activity.

This year’s Green Week coincides with the United Nations World Environment Day (WED) commemorated each year on June 5.

This day is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations encourages worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political attention and action. The WED theme this year is ‘Water – Two Billion People are Dying for It!’ which is calling on people to help safeguard the most precious source of life on our planet.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
MANILA, May 30 2003 (IPS)

As genetically modified corn began to be harvested for the first time this month, the focus of the Philippines’ debate on biotechnology crops is shifting to fears that the commercial planting of this corn variety may lead to the contamination of other agricultural produce.

Farmers and environmentalists opposed to the commercial distribution of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) corn, the transgenic crop now being sold to corn growers by the giant U.S. seed company Monsanto under the brand name YieldGard 818, have been alerting the government and the public to the potential risks of this move.

They say this may lead to the irreversible contamination of non-genetically engineered seeds and crops as a result of cross-pollination.

"That is the inevitable outcome of this scheme given that corn is a wind-pollinated crop," asserts Beau Baconquis, genetic engineering campaigner of Greenpeace Philippines.

With wind action, she says cross-pollination between Bt corn and native corn varieties will lead to the latter being contaminated with the Bt toxin gene, and this would be passed on to subsequent generations and neighbouring fields.

Baconquis also doubts if there are enough containment measures in place to guarantee non-contamination, noting that the Department of Agriculture had only started identifying the location of organic farms when planting of Bt corn began.

Bt corn is named for the naturally-occurring soil bacterium from which a synthetic gene version is inserted in the plant, so that it produces its own Bt toxins to kill pests like the Asiatic corn borer.

Bt corn was approved for commercial propagation by an interagency review panel of the agriculture department’s Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) in December 2002.

The final endorsement was preceded by assessments by government agencies and field tests conducted by Monsanto in at least eight pilot areas in the Philippines, in both Luzon island in the north and Mindanao in the south.

Artemio Salazar, acting director of the agriculture department’s corn programme, himself acknowledges corn’s nature as a cross-pollinated crop, which, he says, follows such a natural process of perpetuation "95 percent of the time”.

To avoid its adverse effects, Salazar says the agriculture department has advised farmers to employ "temporal isolation," planting Bt corn 21 to 25 days before or after the non-Bt corn is planted. This is the same method used to avoid cross-pollination between white and yellow corn varieties.

But the country’s corn programme chief allays fears of a runaway breeding of the YieldGard corn, which Monsanto is selling at around 4,200 pesos (80 U.S. dollars) per 11-kilogramme bag. That is twice as expensive as a 23-kg sack of the traditional hybrid variety, which is good enough for a hectare of land.

"Bt corn is not to be planted anytime, anywhere. We have arrangements with Monsanto regarding its deployment strategy. It’s to be used only when needed, one of the options available to farmers who want to make full use of the technology," Salazar says.

The plan, says Noel Borlongan, Monsanto director for government and public affairs, involves making available through its local distributors 15,000 bags of YieldGard 818 for the wet season, which starts in May-June and another 20,000 bags for the dry season which begins in October-November.

In December, Monsanto distributed 120 bags for the planting of its Bt corn’s F1 seeds for the propagation of future seeds.

Based on initial reports from Monsanto on the May harvests in the northern Luzon provinces of Isabela and Quirino, there have been marked increases in crop yields, at least as compared to those of conventional hybrid corn varieties sown during the wet planting season. This is usually the time when borer infestations are reported to be high.

In Luna, Isabela province, the recent average yields of Bt corn were pegged at 5.5 metric tonnes per hectare compared to 2.5 to three metric tonnes per hectare for non-Bt corn. In Ilagan, also in Isabela, an average harvest of nine metric tonnes of Bt corn per hectare eclipsed the six to seven metric tonnes yield of the conventional variety.

The results, Borlongan says, are generally consistent with the outcome of Monsanto’s field trials. Tests done in General Santos City in Mindanao in 2000 registered Bt corn yields 30 to 69 percent better than those of traditional corn varieties, attributed to corn borer damage-free leaves, stalks and ears, he adds.

But independent studies in 2000 disputed in the first place the belief that tremendous yield losses from corn borer infestation are still a grave concern in the 80s as it was in the seventies.

"The general trend is decreasing (yield losses)," says Pamela Fernandez, seed and science and technology division head of the University of the Philippines Los Banos’ agronomy department. Government scientists at the Philippine Rice Research Institute confirm this claim.

Greenpeace’s Baconquis is sceptical in the first place about Monsanto’s claims of increased yields in its field tests, arguing that there was no natural infestation in the area, which required the company to introduce corn borers. This scepticism has also been seen in countries like India, where the reported higher yields of Bt cotton have also come under criticism.

As far as the actual harvests are concerned, Baconquis says the data remain inconclusive given the comparison between two different planting seasons in the Philippines.

Anti-GMO activists have also complained about the secrecy shrouding the location of areas planted to Bt corn, which makes independent monitoring of the harvest yields difficult. Protesters staged a month-long hunger strike that ended in May to dramatise their opposition to Bt corn and called for a moratorium on its commercial release.

But Agriculture Secretary Luis Lorenzo Jr, a former executive at the rice institute responsible for propagating hybrid rice, made it clear that the government would only entertain calls for a review given new "overwhelming" scientific evidence to reverse the commercialisation of Bt corn.

The government also dismissed recent appeals from the Independent Science Panel (ISP), composed of about 600 world scientists from 72 countries, to go slow on the release of genetically modified organisms into the environment and to initiate a public inquiry into the matter.

It likewise ignored the position of 18 renowned Filipino scientists and medical experts, warning against the spread of antibiotic-resistant genes.

Saying that the government is "not taking sides to the exclusion of the other," Salazar assures that the plant industry bureau will be monitoring the propagation of Bt corn for risks it could eventually pose to human health and the environment.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
MBOUR, Southern Senegal, May 28 2003 (IPS)

Frustrated by years of fruitless campaigns, researchers are now turning to the last line of defence: schools – to protect Senegal’s endangered medicinal plants.

”We must create botanical gardens, which include endangered plants, on school grounds,” says Sidi Diallo, a teacher at Mbour secondary school.

Mbour is a coastal town, located some 90 kilometres south of the capital Dakar, where the project to protect the endangered medicinal plants was launched a few years ago.

”We have planted a hundred endangered species in our school garden,” says Diallo, adding that ”students run the garden and keep it safe.”

”Our goal is to educate the community about endangered medicinal plants through school children. We want the children to grow up aware of the value of the plants,” says Badji Abba, the school’s principal.

The message is getting through. Ndiate Kane, a 16-year-old student from Mbour Secondary School, says ”after spending a lot of time in our botanical garden, I have learned how to look after plants and have more respect for nature now.”

The revolution, which began in Mbour four years ago with the assistance of Enda Third World, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), is sweeping through Senegal.

In the countryside, the threat to medicinal plants, which have been used for centuries to treat illnesses, is blamed on drought, poor soil quality and overuse of some plants.

”That is what is happening with the baobab. In villages, some people use its fruits to relieve diarrhoea, its leaves to season millet, its branches to feed cattle, and its wood to cook food,” says Boubacar Cisse Fall of Enda Third World’s medicinal plants team.

In the cities, patients, who cannot afford drugs in the pharmacy, resort to medicinal plants, overusing them. Among them are acacia Italica, which is a laxative, and fagara Xanthyloidef, which is used to remedy sickle-cell anaemia.

In the Moustapha Beydi School in Fatick, some 155 kilometres southwest of Dakar, students are involved in protecting endangered plants. ”One of them is cade which requires a lot of water. And because of climatic changes, it is dying out one by one. A few years ago, we devised a plan to save the plant,” explains Abdou Karim Ndiaye, a teacher at the school.

The oil extracted from the cade tree is used to treat skin disease. This species also helps regenerate soil. ”Since the disappearance of the species, the soil has suffered and crop yields have deteriorated. Today, our countryside is almost deserted because young people have left for town to look for work,” says Ndiaye.

”We’re encouraging the children to get more interested in protecting the environment by offering theoretical courses and hands-on workshops to familiarise them with our species,” explains Siment Tchou, another teacher at the school. ”We have started a nursery and we are working with the Centre for Traditional Medicine in Fatick to teach children how to grow medicinal plants.”

Students are also involved in protecting a group of islands in the Saloum Delta, 120 kilometres south of Dakar, which is threatened by higher sea levels. ”Every year we lose 50 centimetres of land,” explains Rahim Ba, of the Gardens of Africa, a non-governmental organisation. ”The problem is caused by global warming and people who steal coconut trees without replanting them, which causes erosion.”

A coconut tree fetches 30,000 CFA (about 53 U.S. dollars) in the local market.

The islanders use coconut fruits to treat certain maladies, and the tree – which is endowed with extensive network of up to 5,000 roots – to hold the soil together.

In the Saloum Delta, Ba teaches plant and environmental management. ”Tomorrow, these pupils will be the leaders of these islands,” he points out.

”It’s a big challenge to involve children in the protection of plants and our deteriorating environment,” says Fall.

Medicinal plants provide 80 percent of Senegal’s health needs.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
NAMCHE BAZAAR, Nepal, May 27 2003 (IPS)

In the heart of Namche Bazaar, the village that is the unofficial capital of the Everest region, yet another lodge is being built.

The sound of machine-driven saws, construction workers breaking stones and hammering away at wood resounds around this prosperous hamlet of more than 100 sturdy stone and wood buildings with brightly painted and corrugated tin roofs.

Ever since Tenzing Norgay Sherpa and Edmund Hillary first conquered the world’s highest peak in 1953 and tourism took off, peaking in the 70s and 80s, Namche Bazaar has turned into a trekkers’ paradise that boasts of modern amenities like laundry services, bakeries with mouth-watering goodies, and half a dozen cybercafes.

”Never in my wildest dreams did I envision such change and development in Namche,” 84-year-old Gyalzen Sherpa says, as Nepal prepares to mark the 50th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt Everest on May 29.

In the past 50 years, Namche’s oldest man and his 88-year-old wife Pemba Lhaki have witnessed an economic revolution that has transformed this impoverished potato-growing and portering community – located at an altitude of 3,440 metres – into one of the world’s most famous tourist destinations.

A veteran of seven mountaineering expeditions, including the 1953 Everest Expedition, Gyalzen recalls a past that was extremely frugal and hard. ”People were very poor. There were few houses. Most Sherpas from Kunde, Khumjung, Pangboche, Thame, everyone, worked as coolies transporting loads for the few rich traders that lived here. The expeditions changed that.”

The oldest of four surviving climbing Sherpas of the historic 1953 Everest Expedition, Gyalzen got his big break from Tenzing, who hired him as a climbing Sherpa in 1953.

With money saved from expeditions, Gyalzen turned to trading Nepali paper, butter and silver in Tibet across the Nangpa Pass, about three days’ walk from Namche. Today, he is regarded as one of the wealthiest men in Namche.

Kancha Sherpa, another surviving member of the 1953 expedition, also marvels at the changes in his village since then. ”Tourism has made a large difference between my time and my father’s time. There were 40 houses in my time, about six in my father’s time. Now there must be 150 houses, most of them lodges. People were simple back then, they only knew how to carry loads. Today, Sherpas fly planes, they are doctors and engineers.”

Up in Tengboche, about three hours’ walk uphill from Namche, tourism has allowed successful lodge owners like Mingma Yangzi Sherpa to lead a varied lifestyle. In summer, the 37-year-old visits the United States. Winter is spent with her two children in the capital Kathmandu. During the spring and autumn tourist seasons, she is up at Tengboche, running the lodge.

Mingma was a member of a 2000 Nepali Women’s Everest Expedition – and this has been good for business. ”People seek me out. They take pictures. They ask me questions about Everest. My English is not that great, but I try to explain the best I can.”

Along with the flood of tourists that began visiting the Everest area following the first successful ascent of the mountain 50 years ago, subsequent foreign assistance also contributed to development of the region – largely through Sir Edmund Hillary’s charitable Himalayan Trust.

”Sir Edmund Hillary loves the Sherpas and has done a lot for us. There are many others who love the Sherpas and think of our welfare, but he’s the biggest supporter, ” says Sonam Gyalzen Sherpa, former village development committee chairman and alumni of Khumjung School, the first school built by Hillary in 1960. Today, more than two dozen schools are supported by the Trust.

On May 29, a metal statue of Hillary will be installed on the school premises amidst Buddhist prayers and celebrations.

But tourism has also resulted in conservation headaches.

Ang Danu Sherpa, a resident of Khumjung, is concerned about the pressure on the environment. ”The original inhabitants of the Khumbu must be around 5,000. About 25,000 tourists visit annually. Then there are jobseekers – hundreds of porters, labourers, construction workers and government servants who add immense pressure on natural resources. Tourist demands are also increasing.”

Increasing pollution problems led to the formation of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee in 1991. ”Initially, locals felt it was the committee’s responsibility to clean up. Now there’s more awareness and local participation in conservation activities. We have eco clubs and volunteer youth groups in various villages,” says SPCC official Dorji Lama Sherpa.

The SPCC also monitors the numerous expeditions up at various base camps in the region. ”After expeditions, we hold clean-up camps with the help of national park officials and locals,” Dorji Lama adds.

The growing realisation that there can be no tourism without conservation is accompanied by the realisation that this tourism must also be more equitable. ”There are villages lower down that do not enjoy the benefits of tourism. We have to try to understand their needs. Otherwise, there will always be space for conflict,” says Sonam Gyalzen Sherpa, chairman of the buffer zone committee.

The aim of the recently set up buffer zone committee – introduced by the Sagarmatha National Park in which the Everest region falls – is to ensure that resources are decentralised and that the benefits of tourism trickle down to the grassroots communities, many of which remain poor.

”What is most important is to plan now in order to prevent problems in future. We haven’t reached a destruction phase, yet. But everyone has to work to prevent this, ” adds Sonam Gyalzen.

Excerpt:

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 27 2003 (IPS)

When Indian and Pakistani members of a commission on the sharing of the Indus waters meet in the Indian capital this week, it will be with the knowledge that the outcome of their talks on sharing glacier-fed waters have a bearing on subcontinental peace.

When the Permanent Commission on Indus Water (PCIW) met early February in Islamabad, it failed to sort out differences over the design details of a 450-megawatt hydroelectric dam that India is constructing at Baglihar village on the Chenab river.

This week’s meeting will be from May 28-31. The sensitivity of this issue to Pakistan can also be seen from the fact that Pakistan’s foreign ministry recently advised the Ministry of Water and Power not to talk to the media about it.

The Chenab is one of the five tributaries of the shared Indus river, whose headwaters lie in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir. Under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan is supposed to get exclusive use of the Chenab.

The February meeting, an unscheduled one, was called by Pakistan, the lower riparian state, to express apprehensions that the design of the Baglihar dam’s spillway violated the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty and would allow India to partially divert the waters of the Chenab.

But on Apr. 8, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee extended his hand in peace to Pakistan, offering to settle all issues outstanding between the quarrelsome neighbours through a resumption of dialogue.

Since then, the two countries have moved to build trade ties, restore full diplomatic relations and resume transport links that were suspended as a consequence of an armed attack against the Indian Parliament in December 2001, one that New Delhi blamed Islamabad for.

After that, the ensuing tensions between India and Pakistan led to the nuclear-armed neighbours massing a million troops on their common border. War was prevented only by intense international shuttle-diplomacy led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

At the height of the hostilities, Pakistan President Gen Pervez Musharraf let it be known that his country’s ”nuclear threshold” would be crossed if India attempted to block the water resources the two countries have shared for decades.

Musharraf’s fears were not unfounded as there have been calls here for abrogating the Indus water treaty.

”The incongruity of unabated terrorist killings by Pakistani ‘jihadists’ while the water lifeline flows uninterrupted to Pakistan from India stares us in the face,” said Jasjit Singh, former director of the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a think tank.

But there are contrary voices too. Ramaswamy Iyer, a former top bureaucrat and authority on water resources, said an interview with IPS that asking for abrogation of the treaty was a bad move since it was ”negotiated over several years and agreed upon by all sides”.

However, both Singh and Iyer say that the treaty should be renegotiated since the lion’s share of the Indus waters now goes to Pakistan.

Under the Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan got exclusive use of waters from the Indus and its westward flowing tributaries, the Jhelum and Chenab, while the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers were allocated for India’s use.

Negotiated and signed under World Bank mediation, the Indus Water Treaty was necessitated by the carving out of Pakistan in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims on the subcontinent, following the decolonisation of British India.

The treaty has survived the severest of diplomatic rows and three conflicts that have broken out between the two neighbours, a fact held up by the World Bank as an example of waters being peacefully shared by countries that are bitter rivals in other respects.

Still, decades of hostility and mistrust between the two countries have made Pakistan uncomfortable with its status as the lower riparian state and with having to live with the idea of its main water resources flowing through Indian territory.

Following the failure of the February talks on the Baglihar dam, Pakistan issued notice to India that it was asking for a neutral expert to resolve the dispute under the provisions of the Indus Water Treaty. Islamabad prefers to have a World Bank official as this mediator, and this promises to be a key issue in this week’s talks.

This is the first time since the treaty was signed that a dispute looks set to get referred to a neutral expert.

”They have refused our requests for on-site inspections (of the Baglihar project), and once when they allowed such inspection, they (Indians) made it clear that they would not be incorporating any Pakistani proposals for a change in design,” said an official at the Pakistani water and power ministry.

Because efforts to settle the issue bilaterally have not borne fruit, Islamabad is left with little choice but to seek outside mediation, he added. This move has not gone down well with Indian experts. ”The demand for international arbitration will only spoil the mood for peace especially at this juncture,” Iyer said.

Iyer said India had refrained from seeking international arbitration to sort out a round-the-year navigation project at Tulbul on the river Jhelum, permissible under the treaty but held up since 1987 as result of Pakistani objections.

Pakistan’s fears are visible in a paper published by its Institute of Strategic Studies, which said the Tulbul navigation project would give India ”a strategic edge during a military confrontation enabling it to control the mobility and retreat of Pakistani troops and enhancing the manoeuvrability of Indian troops”.

Earlier this month, the prime minister of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), Sikandar Hayat Khan, openly supported the revival of a proposal for the formal partition of Kashmir between India and Kashmir along the Chenab river as a practical solution to the long-standing dispute over the territory.

Khan was quoted as saying that such a division would result in the Muslim-majority areas of the territory going to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority parts going to India, satisfying the basic principle on which the 1947 partition of British India was carried out.

It would also result in Pakistan gaining full control over the Chenab, on which the Baglihar dam is now coming up, and expanding the territory it holds to cover Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir state, which lies west of the river.

Excerpt:

By Mehru Jaffer
VIENNA, May 23 2003 (IPS)

About 300 experts from around the world concluded an international symposium on water resources management here Friday, but could not discuss the acute crisis in Iraq.

Iraq could not be represented because it is under foreign occupation. Only governments of member states can send scientists to meetings of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency).

And since Iraq could not speak for itself, no one else could either. ”I do not know the state of the waters of the Tigris and Eupharates rivers,” Pradeep Aggarwal, head of the Isotope Hydrology Section at IAEA told IPS. ”Iraq was not on our agenda.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the first water resources symposium hosted by the Vienna-based IAEA and held every four years. The meetings are called to review the role that nuclear science can play in sustainable human development.

Apart from its role as the world’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA works with governments and other international institutions to explore how nuclear science can help understand and address a range of problems including climate change, pollution of fresh water resources and contamination of the atmosphere and of oceans.

The IAEA has consistently promoted use of the isotope – the energy of a nuclear atom – to improve knowledge of water resources. The IAEA is employing techniques using isotopes in 150 projects in 60 countries.

The techniques have been found useful in tracing underground sources of water, in determining whether they are at risk of saltwater pollution, and even in separating waste from good water.

By determining how rapidly water moves isotopes, scientists can get critical information where to extract water. The isotopes of pollutants like trace metal or chemical compounds present in water also offer clues.

”In Bangladesh high levels of natural arsenic groundwater was found in many communal tube wells and efforts are being made to mitigate a complex set of problems by use of isotope hydrology,” Aggarwal said.

Dug in the seventies to provide an alternative to contaminated surface water, these wells have become a source for arsenic poisoning, causing deaths, widespread illness and disabilities.

Efforts are now made to test water from these wells and to identify other wells suspected of containing high levels of arsenic.

Only 2.5 percent of all water on earth is freshwater. Most of this is frozen in icecaps. Some is present as soil moisture and other reserves deep underground are inaccessible. This leaves just about 1 per cent accessible for use, scientists pointed out at the meeting.

With more than a third of global food production based on irrigation, the world is relying on unsustainable groundwater sources, according to official data. More than a billion people are estimated to lack adequate fresh water.

Water is becoming scarce particularly in North Africa and West Asia. Demand for water is expected to rise 40 percent over the next two decades. By 2025 two- thirds of the world’s population may live in countries with moderate or severe water shortages, going by some of the alarming statistics presented at the conference.

The IAEA believes isotope technology can play a vital role in addressing such shortage. One of the significant new projects is being conducted through the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Isotope techniques are being used to trace groundwater resources in Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and South Africa.

More than 30 institutions in Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay are gathering data on water using both conventional and nuclear isotopic techniques, according to the IAEA. But little is being done in Iraq where the needs are most acute.

The IAEA plans to use these techniques also sto monitor rivers and their relationship to climate change.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SANTIAGO, May 23 2003 (IPS)

A draft law introduced by the Chilean government that would create a pollution credit system has run into resistance from environmentalists and even ruling coalition lawmakers, who allege that it transforms the principle of ”the polluter pays” into ”the polluter gains.”

Those were the words of parliamentary Deputy Alejandro Navarro of the co-governing Socialist Party, a member of the Environment Commission of the lower house of Congress, who criticised the proposed new law in a conversation with IPS.

Prominent environmentalist Sara Larraín, the head of the Sustainable Chile Programme, is also opposed to the initiative.

Larraín, who ran for president in the 1999 elections as a ”green” candidate, said ”certain sectors” are trying to confuse the public by comparing this ”curious national invention” known as the decontamination bonds law to the mechanisms created by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, that link foreign investment to carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction programmes.

The decontamination bonds law would set global pollution limits in specific zones and assign companies in those areas the right to pollute up to those predetermined limits.

If a company pollutes below that level, due to the use of cleaner technologies or other measures, it would be able to sell the balance of its pollution rights. As pollution control standards become more stringent, the limits would be gradually reduced.

Industries or mobile-source polluters like bus companies could thus use their emission reductions to compensate emissions from existing polluters that exceed the limits, or from new polluters that must compensate for adding new emissions.

Navarro said President Ricardo Lagos plans to send the bill to Congress before the end of June, as indicated by statements made in the lower house of Congress by Gianni López, the director of the National Commission on the Environment (CONAMA), the government environmental regulatory body, which was set up in 1994.

The controversial initiative forms part of the ”Pro-Growth Agenda”, a set of proposals agreed by the government and the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA) business association aimed at bolstering economic growth in this Southern Cone nation, CONAMA technical expert Enrique Calfucura told IPS.

SOFOFA, which represents Chile’s large industrialists, is one of the country’s most powerful business associations, whose president, Juan Claro, frequently converses with Lagos, a moderate socialist.

One of the reasons the industrialists support the decontamination bonds is that the plan would be strictly local, which means the mechanism would not be open to foreign investment, Navarro explained.

Larraín and Navarro both complain that the decontamination bonds would essentially set ”quotas for air pollution” based on a company’s toxic emissions, legalise the quotas by issuing bonds, and thus basically ”create property rights over air.”

”The bonds and the legal mechanisms that would allow them to be traded would grant companies the right to pollute the air, and permit them to sell their excess rights to pollute to another industrial concern that has used up its quota for polluting,” said Larraín.

Navarro argued that the bonds, which will be limited to Santiago, one of the world’s most polluted cities, would have a ”perverse effect”: industries in the rest of the country would have an incentive to generate more and more emissions in order to be assigned bigger quotas and gain more bonds to trade on the market.

The parliamentarian said the motivation underlying the proposal is that the government ”wants to try to reduce air pollution in the capital without curbing the horizontal and tremendously damaging urban sprawl in the greater Santiago.”

CONAMA designed the plan to help address Santiago’s extremely serious air pollution problem and the difficulties it has run into in implementing and enforcing decontamination strategies that have a high economic cost, requiring an investment of 1.4 billion dollars over 11 years, said Navarro.

Calfucura did not agree with the criticism of the proposed new law. The CONAMA technical expert told IPS that if it is enacted, it will set pollution limits based on a company’s medium- to long- term emissions, which ”must closely comply with environmental standards.

”It is not correct to say that this is a quota for polluting. It would be more accurate to call it a quota for decontaminating,” according to the CONAMA official, who said that despite the local reach of the bill, it is ”very much in line with” the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and the principle that ”the polluter pays.”

Companies that must reduce emissions to avoid exceeding the pollution limit could purchase decontamination bonds from sources of air pollution whose costs for cutting CO2 emissions were low, said Calfucura.

Although the initial idea is for the bonds to be sold directly, more complex financial transactions on the stock market have not been ruled out, he added.

But Larraín objected to the application of market-based criteria to pollution, saying the bonds would turn it into ”a tradeable asset.”

”Those who have polluted the most in the last few years will be assigned higher quotas to pollute and thus more tradeable bonds. That contradicts the principle of ‘the polluter pays’,” she said.

Navarro agreed, saying that companies that have been polluting in the past ”will convert their environmental debt into an economic asset” through the new law, and ”while the aim of the bill may be to reduce pollution, the principle of ‘the polluter pays’ is translated into ‘the polluter gains’.”

According to Larraín, the initiative runs counter to the Kyoto Protocol mechanisms of ”joint implementation and clean development,” which allow an industrialised state to meet its emissions reduction targets by investing in developing countries.

She pointed out that such investment must specifically go towards forestry plantations that serve as carbon sinks or into alternative energy projects based on renewable sources that do not generate CO2 emissions, like the sun, wind, or micro-hydropower plants.

One of the hurdles keeping such investment from coming to Chile is the lack of a law aimed at promoting renewable, green-friendly energy sources, said Larraín.

But Calfucura said Chile is in a good position with respect to the Kyoto Protocol, due to its low volume of CO2 emissions in global terms, even though emissions are actually higher than the Latin American average, because of the fact that fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas) are the main sources of energy in this country of 16 million.

In terms of emissions in relation to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the Latin American average is 0.74 kgs/GDP per day, while Chile produces 0.91. With respect to per capita emissions, Chile generates 3.61 kgs per person compared to the Latin American average of 2.15.

Excerpt:

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, May 22 2003 (IPS)

The persistent gap between rich and poor nations, continued environmental decline and higher military spending are all undermining global stability, according to the latest annual edition of WorldWatch Institute’s ‘Vital Signs’ report.

Global poverty is directly linked to environmental degradation, as well as the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and possibly SARS, according to the report, produced this year in co-operation with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

”The world’s failure to reduce poverty levels is now contributing to global instability in the form of terrorism, war, and contagious disease,” said the report’s co-author, Michael Renner on Thursday. ”An unstable world not only perpetuates poverty, but will ultimately threaten the prosperity that the rich minority has come to enjoy,” he told a news conference.

Almost one-half of the world’s more than six billion people survive on less than two U.S. dollars a day, while the disparity in per capita income between the 20 richest and 20 poorest countries more than doubled in the past 40 years, even as the world economy has become increasingly integrated, the report said.

”It’s terribly important to not lose sight of the fact that there is a very large share of the human population that has been left behind,” said WorldWatch Director Christopher Flavin. ”That is the bottom line”.

The world is now divided between a minority that enjoy ”plentiful food, seemingly unlimited mobility, access to cutting-edge technology and other amenities of life” and a large majority that have ”scant opportunity to look past the worries of daily survival”, adds the report.

Two different types of environmental destruction occur under these conditions: ”the wealthy impose the heaviest toll on the planet by dint of their materials-intensive, pollution-laden lifestyles, whereas the poor generally live with some of the worst local environmental conditions, eking out a meagre living only by taxing their croplands, forests and waters resources to the limits”.

The consumption choices of the rich inevitably hit the poor hardest, making their life even more difficult.

While the United States, for example, produces roughly one quarter of the world’s carbon emissions from the burning of oil, gas and coal that contribute to global warming, it is the poor nations who suffer the brunt of the weather-related and other disasters that are believed to result from warming.

Last year, for example, rains in Kenya forced more than 150,000 people to leave their homes, while almost one million Chinese were affected by the most severe drought in more than a century.

Over the past two decades, floods and other weather-related disasters forced some 10 million people to migrate from Bangladesh to India, while people living on at least seven small-island nations may soon have to give up their homes due to rising sea levels caused by warming.

”It is almost impossible to ensure lasting peace and stability when massive inequalities exist and the natural systems that support us remain under threat,” said UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer in a statement. ”Little will ever be achieved in terms of conservation of the environment and natural resources if billions of people have no hope, no chance to care.”

”People are losing hope that there is a better future out there,” added Renner, who noted that ”young people who are unemployed or don’t have educational opportunities” make up a potent recruiting ground for terrorism.

Unfortunately, he added, the response from the United States and other governments engaged in the ”war on terrorism” – is to use military force without addressing the economic, social, and environmental roots of these problems. ”The lessons being given out by these governments is that, ‘Violence pays’,” he added.

Indeed, rising military expenditures may be contributing to these problems if for no other reason than money spent on weapons and soldiers is money that cannot be used to address poverty, inequality and environmental decline.

Military spending, which was in steady decline during the 1990s, is now rising once again, led in particular by the United States, which now accounts for nearly 40 percent of total global military spending, the report said.

And while the world’s 51 poorest countries account for only about seven percent of total spending on arms, that amount still represents double their share of the world’s gross economic product. In some countries, such as Eritrea, Burundi and Pakistan, military spending equals or exceeds the combined government budgets for education and health.

There is also a link between armed conflict, poverty and wealth gaps between the industrialised and developing countries, the report noted, as most of the world’s recent wars in poor countries have involved a struggle for control of natural resources that are ultimately sold to wealthy countries.

Such conflicts have displaced million of people, especially in Africa, who are forced to fend for themselves in already-overcrowded towns and cities or in wilderness areas where they try to carve out a living at the expense of the environment.

Another threat to both the poor and the environment is the international trade system, which, according to WorldWatch, is ”rigged against the interests of the poor”. Farm subsidies of more than 300 billion dollars a year permit food crops exported by farmers in rich countries to be sold at prices 20-50 percent below the cost of production.

Unable to compete, farmers in many poor countries have turned to drug crops – like opium or coca – in remote parts of the countryside, further encroaching on wilderness areas.

”The human tragedies behind these statistics are compelling reminders that social and environmental progress are not luxuries that can be set aside when the world is experiencing economic and political problems,” said Flavin, who expressed ”deep concern” that a faltering global economy and new attention on the Middle East may divert resources needed to reduce poverty.

”Suffering that is allowed to fester today will lead to adverse and unpredictable consequences for many tomorrows to come,” he said.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
HO CHI MINH CITY, May 22 2003 (IPS)

When the great sea turtles come ashore to lay their eggs at the Nui Chua national park in southern Vietnam, there is an ally waiting for them.

Old Le Nuoi knows that it will be 40 days before the eggs hatch, and that they will be particularly vulnerable during this time. So the 72-year-old man guards them until the baby turtles break out of the shells and make their first dash into the sea.

Le Nuoi knows sea turtles very well indeed, for he has hunted them for most of his life. Two years ago, he attended one of the seminars often held in Vietnam’s coastal towns and ecological hot spots by a chapter of the global conservation organisation World Wide Fund for Nature, WWF Indochina.

What Nuoi learnt there transformed him from a hunter to a conservationist. ”Before, I did not know how precious sea turtles were,” he said. ”I was not aware of the harm I did when killing these poor creatures.”

As one of the professional sea turtle hunters along the coast of the Ninh Thuan province, Nuoi had honed his skills from when he was 17. ”I only need to watch the direction of the wind or the waves to know where the turtles can be found,” he said. He made deadly use of his skills, sometimes catching up to 10 turtles a night.

Yet at the seminar, moved after hearing of the threat to the survival of the creatures, Nuoi volunteered to help. Sea turtles will return to the place of their birth – the old nesting grounds – to lay eggs, as the ex-hunter knows. At the very same beach, now a national park, where he once caught and killed them, he helps keep their numbers alive.

WWF Indochina has worked to drive home the message in Vietnam’s coastal communities that the sea turtle must be protected. The seminars, which have been taking place regularly since 1992, help participants understand that the presence of the peaceful animals is an important indicator of the local environment’s health.

Sea turtles date back to long before the age of the reptiles, when their ancestors shared the world with dinosaurs. They live in the oceans from the far north to the far south, but only breed in warm waters.

Despite conservation efforts, the steep decline in the numbers of sea turtles remains a serious concern. Three species are found in Vietnam: the green turtle (chelonia mydas), the Olive Ridley (lepidochelys olivacea) and the leatherback sea turtle (dermochelys coriacea), which is the largest of the sea turtles.

All three are listed in Vietnam Red Data Book of Endangered Species. While demand for turtle meat and products made from its shell exists globally, the largest consumers of turtle products are China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Tonnes of live turtles of various species are traded each day to make their way to southern China from South-east Asia, and some estimates place the number at more than 10 million turtles traded each year.

The sale of turtle meat is prohibited in Vietnam, but city restaurants do sell it illegally as a delicacy, even under the threat of being fined because it is lucrative. Just as economically attractive to turtle harvesters is selling the live animal to dealers from the China market – a 10-kilogramme turtle may fetch between 100 to 150 U.S. dollars.

Yet the hapless creature is not destined for cooking pots alone. Tourism adds a new dimension to the turtle conservation crisis.

In Vung Tau, a city on the coast 100 kilometres east of Ho Chi Minh City, stalls and shops openly sell souvenirs made from tortoise shells. ”We discovered 400,000 tortoise carapaces when we raided the spot in March,” said Nguyen Oanh, an official at Vung Tau’s department of fisheries.

Further south at Ha Tien, near the border with Cambodia, Oanh’s colleagues found another cache of thousands of tortoise shells, processed and ready for use. In the tourist market, this represented a huge sum because a tortoise shell of 20 centimetres by 30 cm can fetch up to 100 dollars.

”Large shells are difficult to find nowadays,” said Tran Manh, a souvenir shop owner in Ha Tien. ”If you were fortunate enough to find one, you could sell it at 12 to 15 million Vietnamese dong (800-1,000 dollars).”

Turtle skin can be turned into leather and is used for shoes and handbags, while its shell is used to make sunglasses, trinkets and jewellery.

The problem is a particularly poignant one in Vietnam, where the turtle is – in legend and in folklore – one of the four sacred animals in Vietnam, the others being the dragon, the phoenix and the unicorn.

Vietnam is a member of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and the trade in sea turtles is illegal. Local and international pressure and awareness are helping, for instance, to throttle the tortoise processing that keeps the Ha Tien stalls supplied.

Environmentalists hope it is not too late, but this month the Turtle Conservation Fund released its first list of the ‘World’s Top 25 Most Endangered Turtles’ to highlight the crisis facing these animals. Twelve species on the Top 25 list are found in Asia, and more than half of Asia’s 90 turtle species are endangered or critically endangered.

The effects of the destruction of the sea turtles’ habitats and overfishing are plain to see. Beaches that were once home to abundant populations are now bare. The gentle animals can today be spotted only at three southern beaches – Tho Chau in Kien Giang province, and Con Dao in Vung Tau province, and at the Nui Chua national park, where old Nuoi solemnly patrols the shore.

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By IPS Correspondents
PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 20 1997 (IPS)

Trinidad and Tobago is recording some progress in fighting one of the more pervasive problems of Caribbean territories — the inability of small countries to adequately feed themselves.

Experts here are finding that in addition to rendering existing modes of production more efficient, new alternative bases of production can provide a viable source of local food and increase, in turn, the sector’s contribution to exports.

The 3,000 year old practice of aquaculture has been specifically targeted for exploitation by the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) which is looking at improving old modes of production and introducing new approaches.

IMA researcher Paul Gabbadon says aquaculture offers the country the option of “sustaining production, maintaining businesses and a way to generate income.”

“It offers a viable means of producing food and aquatic products for profit without detrimental effects to the environment,” he says. He points to the fact that aquaculture now produces 15 percent of the world’s fish and more than 25 percent of the shrimp market.

Total world production is more than 2.2 billion pounds annually, representing more than 20 billion dollars a year.

“The shortfall in marine fisheries stock, the effects of pollution on existing stocks and the unavailability of some products locally … emphasise the importance of aquaculture for future development,” Gabbadon says.

“Trinidad and Tobago has good potential for aquaculture production and possesses many of the resources required to support a growing aquaculture industry,” he says. “These resources include but are not limited to … good water, solids with substantial clay content, flat terrain, a long growing season, access to markets, infrastructure, funding and technical expertise.”

Research here has covered many areas. There have been studies on hatchery methodologies, production systems and the marketing of aquaculture products for local available species. The products being looked at include the black conch, cascadura, tilapia and freshwater prawns.

Gabbadon says there is much interest in these areas and, already, a few producers are involved in commercial endeavours.

He however believes that some opportunities are going abegging. “The sad fact is that farmers, entrepreneurs and businessmen have not grasped the opportunities for this non-traditional crop or business venture.”

In traditional areas, though, there have been improvements. The country’s food import bill is, according to the Basdeo Panday administration, on a path of consistent decline after reaching 2.2 million dollars last year and accounting for under 13 percent of all imports.

The ratio is skewed because of increases on a number of other import accounts, but forecasts of a further fall in the cost of all food imports for 1997 are matched by improvements in agricultural outputs.

In 1996, local agricultural output improved by seven percent and in the first quarter of this year the sector improved its income by 14 percent over the same period last year.

“I firmly believe that we should continue to attract more people into agriculture to enhance the purchasing power of the peoples of the rural communities,” Panday told agriculturalists recently.

But researchers are stressing that the vision of what the sector constitutes has to be expanded. “Aquaculture is an alternative means of food production, a business and an opportunity for the future,” Gabbadon says.

He however advises that there are risks. “Aquaculture is much more than stocking fish in a pond,” he says. It is a risky and sometimes expensive form of agriculture.”

He identifies under-capitalisation, a failure to realise that the product is a live animal, poor marketing practices and poor management as the main obstacles. “Intensive fish culture requires 24 hour per day management and, unless you are willing to provide this type of management, you should look to another enterprise,” Gabbadon says.

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By IPS Correspondents
LONDON, May 22 1997 (IPS)

The glossy leaves of beans, potatoes and cabbages poke through the rich soil of terraces that wind about the mountains high above the river in Peru’s Patacancha valley.

Yet for almost 500 years those same terraces lay barren, ruined when the mighty Inca empire was crushed by the Spanish invasion in the sixteenth century.

The neat stone channels that carry glittering snow water from mountain tops to the crops were until two years ago heaps of tumble down stones, many of them hidden beneath burnt-out soil that provided only a meagre living for subsistence farmers.

It took an archaeologist to visualise that out of the rubble would grow bountiful crops, sown in land maintained using traditional, cost-free methods.

Back in the 1970s British archaeologist Ann Kendall was scraping away at Inca ruins in the neighbouring Cusichaca valley, also in the Ollantaytambo district, when she was struck by the possibility that the terraces could be restored.

“The farmers were practising only rain fed agriculture producing scanty crops that weren’t enough to keep body and soul together. We felt we couldn’t justify spending money on observing ancient rural life without doing anything to help them,” she says.

So in 1977 she founded the Cusichaca Trust, a British non- governmental organisation, to help raise food production in the Andean villages.

Peruvian agriculture was at an all time low, laid waste by years of economic depression throughout the 1970s and guerrilla and counter-revolutionary activities the 1980s and early 1990s. Unable to command decent prices for their crops, people had left the land in their thousands for the cities, many of them headed for slums and poverty.

The sad irony was that agricultural innovation was the basis of the country’s pre-Columbian success; the Incas were magnificent engineers and agriculturists.

In places terraces were built up dangerously precipitous hillsides with massive inclined walls supporting a metre deep fill of stones for drainage and a metre of excellent soil, often brought in from elsewhere.

Clay was used for foundations to retain water and to encourage roots to decay so that the biological activity would keep the soil a few degrees warmer than the chilly mountain air all year round.

Incan terraces still occupy about a million hectares of land but three quarters of them are abandoned, a process that began with the Spanish conquest of 1534 when the Conquistadors sent defeated rural communities to work in mines while they lived off the Inca storehouses and allowed the terraces to fall into disrepair.

The centuries of oppression that followed took their toll on villagers, robbing them of their initiative to build up agriculture once more, according to archaeologist David Drew. “First the Spaniards and then the hacienda aristocracy ordered around the indigenous locals to the point where they lost the confidence to get things done,” he says.

When the haciendas were broken up during the 1960s the land was parcelled out to peasants who limped along as subsistence farmers, without the will to work efficiently in cooperatives, according to Drew. While restoration of the terraces might appear an obvious solution to outsiders, it wasn’t to the villagers.

“It’s pretty difficult for a tiny isolated village to make that leap between observing the rubble of terraces and getting a surveyor in to see if they can be rebuilt,” he says.

Studies show that the Inca system could have supported 100,000 people from the produce of terraced lands in Ollantaytambo, a far cry from the scattering of families living there in the early 1980s who had not enough food to eat let alone crops to export.

When Kendall first investigated the terraces she discovered the soil was severely depleted from over cropping and grazing. “And being in a geologically granitic area, the soil contains lots of sand which had accumulated on the surface as the good soil beneath was washed away.”

The Trust’s first project was in Cusichaca itself to rehabilitate 45 hectares of land by restoring seven kilometres of a canal system so it could bring water to the terraces and peoples’ homes.

A surveyor pronounced the project feasible, and under the supervision of a master mason from Cusco, members of the local community set off to clear and rebuild fallen sections, some of it lying in ruins 100 metres below them.

They used simple wood and stone tools like those of the Incas before them to shape stones where necessary and lever them into place on canal foundations and walls. Like their predecessors they sealed the channels with clayey soil to make the structure impermeable.

It took a little persuasion to get the farmers to abandon their preferred cement which costs money, needs outside help to prepare and in any case is unsuitable for use in an earthquake region because, unlike clay, it has no elasticity to cope with movement.

The job took three years to complete whereupon the Trust handed out tools, seed money and planting advice. The soil has recuperated through natural farming methods and land that was barren for centuries today produces crops including the grains maize, quinoa and kiwicha. Surplus product is taken to the market and the profits have revitalised the entire community.

A bit further along the Urubamba valley, farmers in Patacancha who’d watched the burgeoning crops of their neighbours asked the Trust to work similar miracles on their own terraces. In 1991 the Trust set out to restore six kilometres of canal to irrigate 160 hectares of land, returning them to their former glory.

The job was financed largely by the British government’s aid arm the Overseas Development Administration (now the Department for International Development) and took four years to complete.

Since last year the land has been under permanent cultivation resulting in the economic transformation of the valley. The community has doubled with farming families coming back from Cusco and Lima to claim their rights to the land.

“The country way of life needs to be set up again and families reunited. Villagers were reduced to eating only potatoes and a little meat as they had no vegetable gardens or agriculture. There is a need for health programmes, nutrition and small scale enterprises such as tool shops and mills.” says Kendall.

The restoration of the Patacancha canal provided on the job training for future master masons, foremen, engineers and labourers who now have the ability to restore terraces in other valleys. With the Trust’s encouragement a local NGO called Adesa has been set up to lead such projects and incorporate credit facilities to help people get farming and small business off the ground.

Already set in motion are schemes for vegetable gardens, greenhouses, tree nurseries, guinea-pig farms, health and nutrition programmes for women and the supply of potable water to 1000 families. This year the Trust is aiming to set up a horticultural centre in Ollantaytambo which will be run by Adesa and will sell tools, seeds, and plants.

The Trust is now turning its attention to the Ayacucho and Apurimac areas, where 20 percent of the communities were displaced by guerrilla movements and are now returning to the land.

“We can only work in areas where terraces are most run down and hope other communities will come and see and be inspired by our work,” says Kendall. She adds: “It’s entirely possible that other ancient irrigation systems around the world can be rehabilitated and made to produce good crops.”

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