A recent rash of sea turtle slaughters by bandits on horseback has spurred Mexican authorities into action. In the past three months, carcasses of at least 500 sea turtles have been found on Mexico’s Pacific and Atlantic coastlines, including 111 Leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) and Olive Ridley (Lepidochelys olivacea) turtles along a single, 1.2-mile (2-km) stretch of beach near Petatlán, in Guerrero state. Turtle conservationists in the region filed complaints with the Federal Attorney’s Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa) this month, claiming a gang of about 10 mounted men use rifles and machetes to kill the endangered reptiles on unprotected beaches. Mexico’s Environmental and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat) announced it has asked the Navy and Army to protect the beaches of Petatlán, considered one...
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Officials leading Colombia’s US$100 million, joint public-private Río Amoyá hydroelectric project say they have reached agreement to sell all greenhouse-gas reduction credits generated during the dam’s first 14 years to the Netherlands. Construction is expected to begin in the first half of this year on the hydroelectric station, an 80-megawatt run-of-the-river plant located on the middle stretch of the Amoyá River. Government planners say the station will come on line in the second half of 2006. The 5.7 million tons of greenhouse-gas reductions expected during the project’s first 14 years could generate credits worth US$25 million, though the final income figure is subject to further negotiation. On top of more than US$40 million already committed...
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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last month signed a measure permitting farmers to use genetically modified seeds for the 2003-4 soy crop. But before doing so, he stripped the measure of a key provision. The signing makes permanent a provisional decree the government issued Sept. 25 to allow use of transgenic seeds in the 2003-4 soy crop, which was then about to be planted. That decree was the result of heavy lobbying by farmers in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, where an estimated 50% to 80% of the soy crop has been grown illegally using transgenic seeds smuggled from nearby Argentina, where gene-altered soy is legal. In the rest of Brazil, less than 10% of the soy crop is...
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Just two weeks after Peruvian Achuar communities near the Ecuadorian border ousted their organization’s leaders, accusing them of negotiating with Occidental Petroleum over oil exploration on communal lands, Occidental held a meeting in one of the communities to make its case for drilling. In an assembly Nov. 24-26 attended by leaders of some 20 Achuar communities along the Huasaga River, new officers were elected for the Achuar Chayat Organization (Orach). The move came barely halfway into the term of the incumbent officers, who had met in August with executives of Occidental Petroleum, which holds the concession to Peru’s Lot 64. Since the 1990s, when Arco had an option on the lot, Achuar communities along the Huasaga and the neighboring Huitoyacu River have steadfastly resisted the...
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