Albeit for some unfortunate reasons, recycling is making headway in Argentina’s capital. Amid the country’s brutal economic crisis, some 35,000 unemployed people now converge on Buenos Aires every day from outlying communities to collect discarded material they can sell for recycling. These so-called “cartoneros”—literally, cardboarders—enter the capital in such numbers and with such regularity that the railroad serving the capital operates a daily train for them from the poor suburb of José León Suárez. In response, the city government has unveiled a voluntary trash-separation program to aid recycling. It is distributing marked bags so residents can segregate paper and cardboard from the rest of their trash. The effort aims to help the city’s informal army of collectors work quickly and cleanly...
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Brazil’s environmental-enforcement agency has fined Petrobras $8.7 million, charging that the state oil company allowed environmental licenses for 33 of its offshore oil platforms to expire. The agency, Ibama, says Petrobras failed to maintain up-to-date provisional or permanent environmental licenses for all but three of its 36 platforms in the offshore Campos Basin, source of 80% of Brazil’s oil output. “Because these licenses had expired, they hadn’t made the required safety and technical upgrades needed to make [the platforms] operationally safe from an environmental point of view,” says Carlos Henrique Mendes, head of Ibama’s office for Rio de Janeiro state. Ibama also alleges that none of the 33 platforms in question had adequate emergency plans in place. As a result, Mendes reports...
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A multi-sector governmental commission created on Nov. 11 has until the end of the year to design a strategy for fighting illegal logging in Peru’s jungles. An estimated 1,500 illegal loggers operate in areas set aside for conservation or as reserves for indigenous peoples. The commission includes representatives of the interior, defense, agriculture and justice ministries, as well as tax authorities and the National Council of Indigenous and Amazonian Peoples, a state agency. Non-governmental, indigenous and peasant organizations also have been invited to participate. “This problem has never been attacked at the political level,” says Fabiola Muñoz, advisor to Agriculture Minister Alvaro Quijandría and executive secretary of the panel. “The commission’s formation shows it’s a policy of the government to fight illegal logging...
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Brazilian officials want color-coded seals attached to Amazon timber sales and transport invoices to confirm the wood’s legal origin and, they hope, help curb illegal logging. Under a program unveiled late last month and slated to take effect next March, Ibama, Brazil’s environmental-enforcement agency, will require the use of five types of seals to help authorities verify whether Amazon timber is legally cut, felled in a managed forest, transported, sold to a domestic end-user or exported. Ibama plans to apply the seals program to all wood sold nationwide by the end of next year and to all Brazilian forest products by the end of 2004. Each seal has a bar code and a number that, when entered into an Ibama database, tells...
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Ecuadorian Environment Minister Lourdes Luque has signed an agreement with a top indigenous leader, pledging that new government authorities slated to take office in January will back a planned, binational sustainable-development project aimed at benefiting the Amazon’s Achuar people. The four-year project, to get underway next year, calls for conservation in Ecuador of tropical forest in Pastaza and Morona Santiago provinces, where some 5,000 Achuar live—more than half of them children. Work in Ecuador is being funded with $3.3 million that the German government provided in support of the Binational Peace Plan Ecuador negotiated with Peru in 1998 after an undeclared border war. Luque on Nov. 18 signed a letter of intent for the project with Santiago Kawarim, president of the Interprovincial...
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