The Brazilian government has decided not to take part in the upper portion of a 2,100-mile (3,400 km) dredging project to create an aquatic highway for wide barge convoys through five countries along the Paraguay and Paraná rivers. Brazilian Transportation Minister Eliseu Padilha made the announcement last month and underscored it in a letter to Environment Minister José Sarney Filho. “…[T]his Ministry does not intend to implant a waterway on the Paraguay River [the stretch that borders Brazil]. Whoever wants to navigate its waters should adapt their vessels to it because it won’t be adapted to them.” Currently, Brazil’s Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul states use small barge convoys to float grain, minerals and other products down the Paraguay River to...
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Facing a citizens’ complaint at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), the Mexican government has defended its regulation of the country’s only producer of molybdenum—a metallic element used as an alloy in the manufacture of stainless steel. Having received Mexico’s response, the Montreal-based commission now must decide whether to investigate the case, the tri-national agency announced on Jan. 31. The Sonoran Human Rights Academy, a Mexican nonprofit group, submitted the citizens’ complaint last April to highlight what it describes as harmful pollution from the Chilean-owned plant, located in the Sonoran city of Cumpas. It alleges Mexican authorities failed to uphold laws requiring environmental-impact assessment, land-use zoning, return of hazardous waste to the company’s home country, and control...
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Hundreds of members of Brazil’s Landless Movement (MST) last month destroyed a portion of an experimental, transgenic-soybean crop Monsanto is growing in Rio Grande do Sul state. The MST, which takes positions on a variety of social and environmental issues, accused Monsanto of illegally selling genetically modified seed and vowed to storm other company farms and processing facilities. Its activists destroyed five acres of the experimental soy crop. The action took place near the southern city of Porto Alegre, where MST members were taking part in the World Social Forum, an event intended to denounce global trade integration and provide a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum then underway in Davos, Switzerland. Monsanto denies marketing transgenic products in Brazil. Though the sale of transgenic...
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Emergency crews have scrambled to prevent oil spilled from a French tanker from damaging beaches and mangrove swamps near Colombia’s Caribbean port of Cartagena. The Jan. 27 collision between a port tugboat and the French tanker El Touraine caused a spill of at least 70 tons of fuel oil (IFO 380). The tanker was preparing to dock at a port facility of Ecopetrol, the national oil company, when winds and currents apparently pushed the tug into its stern, rupturing one of its fuel tanks. Navy frogmen patched the hole, and vessels from the Navy and Ecopetrol set up containment booms and sprayed dissolving foams on the slick. Fisherman tried to clean beaches and mangrove stands by hand. And oil companies Amocar, Esso/Mobil and Texaco...
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Guatemalan government officials have joined forces with local merchants and police to try to save the highly endangered Guatemalan fir tree (Abies guatemalensis) from its newest enemy—Christmas. Over the past three decades many Guatemalans have dispensed with their tradition of displaying nativity scenes and bought Christmas trees—43,000 of them last year, according to an estimate by the National Forest Institute (Inab). This has stepped up pressure on the endangered evergreen, known here as pinabete, which now is found on just 5% of its original 1.3 million-acre (526,000-hectare) habitat. The cutting and sale of Guatemalan firs has long been prohibited. But tree vendors took to making their own trees using pinabete branches. These sold well; but they didn’t take much heat off...
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