Venezuela is a country of huge rivers, vast lakes and so much water that hydroelectric power has become a major industry. Yet the country faces a water-supply crisis. The reason is that just 20% of Venezuela’s fresh water is located north of the Orinoco River. And north of the Orinoco is where 90% of Venezuela’s population lives. With this region facing diminishing water supplies and growing demand, competition for water among agricultural, industrial and residential users is on the rise. Though Venezuela in the past has done little to promote water conservation, the state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVA), now promises to tackle the issue. The oil giant says it will develop a management program for four critical watersheds with help from the...
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Peru’s pristine Candamo River Valley is now off-limits to oil companies, miners and loggers following President Fujimori’s surprise decision to declare the area a national park. This month Fujimori signed a decree that more than doubles the existing Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, which is located in southeastern Peru along the Bolivian border. The new area includes the 350,000-acre (142,000-hectare) Candamo Valley, one of the world’s last jungles uninhabited by humans. Peruvian and international conservationists had long stressed the importance of preserving the pristine patch of rainforest. But until Fujimori’s Sept. 7 announcement, the Candamo Valley was part of Block 78, one of many potential exploration areas the government had identified in hopes of attracting foreign investment. Preliminary exploration conducted by Mobil and...
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Mexican authorities have dealt Sol Meliá a blow by rejecting the Spanish hotel developer’s controversial plans for a resort at Xcacel, about 75 miles (125 kms) south of Cancún in Quintana Roo state. Environmentalists in Mexico and abroad have long opposed the project on grounds that it would threaten the most important nesting grounds of two of the seven species of protected sea turtles found in Mexico—loggerheads and Atlantic greens. (See “Sea turtles slow Sol Meliá on Riviera Maya”—EcoAméricas, January ‘99.) Sol Meliá filed an environmental impact statement in part to blunt that opposition. But now that Mexico’s National Ecology Institute (INE) has rejected the blueprint, Sol Meliá must decide whether to redraft the document and file again. As it does so, the...
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The Secretariat of the tri-national Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) announced this month that it sees grounds for investigating an environmental group’s claim that Mexico has allowed a massive shrimp-aquaculture to operate in violation of conservation laws. Filed by the Mangrove Ecological Group in 1998, the complaint alleges that the government failed to prosecute the Aquanova shrimp farm on Mexico’s northwest coast for violations of laws protecting mangroves, migratory birds and fish. The Mexican environmental group also charges that officials have failed to enforce an agreement between authorities and the company to ensure environmental damage is assessed and remediation options explored. Aquanova’s shrimp ponds cover nearly 2,000 acres (780 hectares) in the municipality of San Blas, Nayarit. They are run by Agrobios, a...
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Dugouts have a long history in the Amazon, but now an Ecuadorian Indian community wants to replace the traditional wood canoes with fiberglass ones—and build a micro-enterprise in the process. With start-up assistance from Ecuador’s Environment Ministry and the European Community, the Cofán tribe plans to manufacture fiberglass canoes and sell them to Amazon residents and ecotour businesses in the region. The immediate goal of the Ecocanoes project is to spare mature cedar and other rainforest trees long used in canoe construction. To make canoes, river dwellers often fell trees as old as 100 to 300 years and hollow them out; if the wood is unsatisfactory, they abandon the tree and cut down another. Ecocanoes was organized by the Cofán Survival Foundation...
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