Leaders of the 200,000 member Ngöbe-Bugle autonomous territory in Panama won a battle last month in their campaign to cancel the 28-megawatt Barro Blanco dam on the edge of their lands when an independent oversight body found major flaws in the awarding of loans for the project. The Independent Complaints Mechanism of FMO and DEG, the Dutch and German development banks which together lent US$50 million for the $130 million project, found in a report issued May 29 that the banks disregarded international standards when the loans were extended to Genisa, the facility’s Honduran builder. The report says the banks failed to ensure that affected communities had been consulted about the project. It also states that the dam’s environmental and social-action...
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The Peruvian government on May 22 declared a two-month state of emergency in Islay province, Arequipa department, a week after a Mexican mining company announced a 60-day “pause” in a controversial open-pit mining project there. The measures followed more than a month of protests and roadblocks that left one police officer and three civilians dead and dozens of people injured. Southern Copper Corporation, which is owned by Grupo México, announced the temporary suspension of the project on May 15. President Ollanta Humala made a televised address on the same day, saying, “The government does not defend individual interests or those of a particular company; it defends the rule of law, juridical stability, the country’s legal framework and conditions for peaceful coexistence.” This...
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Pastureland expansion, particularly to produce beef, was the driving force behind the nearly 63 million hectares (156 million acres) of agriculture-related forest loss in Latin America during 2001-13, says a report in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The March report, authored by researchers from Canadian and Latin American institutions, finds that in 2001-13, Latin America lost an area of wilderness roughly the size of the United Kingdom to agriculture. The report says the clearing of new grazing lands accounts for 87% of the deforestation, which marks the greatest destruction of tropical forest in any region of the world. Though the Brazilian Amazon lost the most wilderness overall, deforestation rates were especially high in other regions, especially in the dry Chaco forests of western Paraguay...
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Authorities in the Argentine community of Ramallo found themselves in a political crossfire as green groups pushed them in March to pass restrictions on agrochemical use and pressure from agricultural producers prompted them this month to ease the new rules. The officials in Ramallo, a municipality comprising a small city and surrounding farmland some 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Buenos Aires, approved the measure on March 31 at the urging of the local environmental group United for Life and environment (UPVA). The measure prohibits agrochemical use within 300 meters of settled areas. It also prohibits the use of all agrochemicals except for those that have been awarded green status under a color-coded national ranking system in which green means the product “normally does...
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