www.expressindia.com H.S. Rao (Press Trust of India)

London, March 14: Founder-Director of the Bangalore-based Asian Elephant Research and Conservation Centre Professor Raman Sukumar has won the Whitley Golden award, the most prestigious international award in the field of environment conservation, for his work in saving endangered Asian elephants.

Sukumar received the award popularly known as the "Green Oscar" along with a cash prize of 50,000 pounds from Princess Anne at the Royal Geographical Society in London on Thursday night.

This is the fourth year in succession that an Indian has bagged the award. Last year, a Pune scientist, Dr Anand Karve won the award for developing a technique to produce clean fuel from sugarcane waste.

In 2001, Vivek Menon, Chief of the Wildlife Trust of India, was chosen for the award for his fight against poaching of elephants. In 2000, Gargi Banerji, a botanist, won the golden award for work in conserving medicinal plants in Himachal Pradesh.

After receiving the award, Sukumar said he planned to spend the cash prize to provide support to local farmers to mitigate the impact of elephants on their lands as well as to help his field research team which acts as a "watchdog"—identifying threats such as poaching for ivory and monitoring the health of the elephant population.

The Asian Elephant Research and Conservation Centre, founded by Sukumar works closely with the government's project elephant. His area of operation is the Nilgiris in Tamil Nadu where there are 8,000 elephants in the wild, the largest concentration in the world.

He said it offered the best opportunity of ensuring the long-term survival of the species.

Sukumar said his work dealt with three main problems—destruction and fragmentation of the elephant's habitat as a result of development projects; conflict between elephants and humans; and reduction of the herds by poaching.

To provide a safe habitat to the pachyderms, Sukumar carried out surveys and sought to establish protected corridors, so that elephant herds could move from one area to another. To prevent conflict, he experimented with forms of fencing and sought to get the co-operation of villagers in schemes to keep the animals away from crops and human habitation. He coordinated with the wild life authorities to combat poaching.

Others who received cash awards of 25,000 pounds each included Jon Paul Rodriguez of Venezuela for his work on saving yellow-shouldered parrot in Venezuela, Victor Vera of Paraguay for his conservation work in the Paraguayan Atlantic forest, John Waithaka of Kenya for developing community-based eco-tourism business, Gregor Maclennan of Peru, for helping local people in the Peruvian rainforests and Dale Lewis of Zambia, for converting poachers into skilful farmers.

At the award ceremony, Edward Whitley, the founder of the Whitley awards, described Sukumar as "a truly exceptional person, who most probably knows more about elephants than anyone else in the world and has devoted his professional life to their survival."

www.alternet.org By Deborah Knight, Grist March 13, 2003

Joy Grant was born in a house with no indoor plumbing in the tiny Central American country of Belize. That was 52 years ago. Last year, she accepted one of the top positions at the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy. For both parties, the marriage is a calculated gamble.

I spent a morning with Grant recently in Belize City. Her voice has a throaty roughness to it, softened by the Belizean Creole lilt. She founded Programme for Belize, a private nonprofit conservation organization that during her 12-year tenure acquired 300,000 acres of forest land – 4 percent of the country.

Impressive as that was, the organization operated in a country the size of Massachusetts with an annual budget of just $2.5 million. The Nature Conservancy, by contrast, is a $250 million-a-year organization, and Grant was brought on as program director for one-third of its global operations: the U.S. mid-Atlantic and southern states, the Carribean, and Central America. "I had to think about that," she said, "moving onto the world stage."

To show me her roots, Grant drove me around Belize City. She steered with unflappable precision through its crammed streets: cars parked along either side, narrow or nonexistent sidewalks, bicycles, pushcarts, pedestrians, vendors selling bananas on the sidewalk. We passed the unpaved alley where the house in which she was born once stood (it burned down a few years ago) and the drugstore around the corner where her father worked 60 to 70 hours per week as a pharmacist.

As a child, Grant conducted much of the family's banking and shopping, because she always negotiated the best deals. We passed her old high school, where in her senior year she was selected as "head girl" based on her grades and leadership. Her parents had the highest expectations for their three daughters, within the constraints of the world as they knew it: "Since we had only girls, my father would say, 'I want you to be the best secretary Belize has ever seen,'" Grant told me.

After high school, Grant worked for a year for Barclay's Bank, then went to Alberta, Canada – "a cold shock" – where she earned a bachelor's degree in commerce and a master's in business administration. From there, she went to Barbados for eight years, where she worked for the Caribbean Development Bank. She approved loans for development projects in 13 Caribbean countries, but back then, she says, no one ever considered the environmental impact of a project. "For an Antigua fisheries project, we considered how many people can you employ, will they be able to pay the loan back. Whether the amount of fish you were taking was sustainable never entered into the equation."

Grant next went to work for the Belize Embassy in Washington, D.C., where one day some people from the Massachusetts Audubon Society made a presentation to the prime minister of Belize about a proposal to buy 110,000 acres of land in Belize and turn it over to a local entity for conservation. It was Grant who kept asking questions, and the next day, she recalls, Massachusetts Audubon called her and said, "'You caught onto this concept. We have money for a salary for three months. Would you like to start an organization to protect this land in perpetuity?'"

At the time, Grant knew nothing about environmental issues. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of creating something from scratch, something that would last, as she put it, "beyond me." She returned to Belize in 1989, assembled a board for her new organization, and got herself out into the "bush," where she learned about birds, snakes, and red-eyed tree frogs. With help from a number of U.S. scientists and funders, including the Nature Conservancy, she aggressively acquired additional land and embarked on projects that she hoped would use a portion of the land to produce local income and jobs in an environmentally friendly manner.

Back then, the idea of sustainable development was not yet well-known, let alone well accepted, Grant says. One of her projects involved logging mahogany by cutting a limited number of trees and removing them carefully from the forest to limit damage to the surrounding ecosystem. She won two different sustainability certifications for the operation, but in the end, could barely sell the logs at all, and certainly not for any premium. She also pursued ecotourism, building cabanas and dormitories that now house visitors and school groups.

You Gotta Belize

At the Nature Conservancy, Grant is the only member of the seven-person top management team who was born outside the U.S. She sees part of her role as getting her fellow managers out "in the mud." She took the organization's information systems manager into the jungle in Guatemala, by helicopter, foot, boat, and car, then by boat to Belize. Now, she says, he understands why people in the field can't be online monitoring their email all day. She took the human resources manager to Costa Rica, where they released turtle hatchlings and went into the forest to learn about the local trees. "It's crucial," she said, "if we are to be a global organization that the leadership understand what global means."

"Certain things I would take for granted that everybody knows, they don't know," she said. For example, in the U.S., the Nature Conservancy has long followed the model of owning land to protect it – but in developing countries, this model often doesn't work. "I know that if you try to set large tracts of land aside in the developing world, you have to get buy-in of the local people. You cannot police it," Grant said. Rather than recreate its original model everywhere, Grant says, the Nature Conservancy must work with local partners to develop conservation methods that involve the community. "People," she said, "are the key to everything we do."

Dan Campbell, the director of the Nature Conservancy's program in Belize, worked with Grant for years when she ran Programme for Belize. He sees her entry into the Nature Conservancy's top management as a reflection of a larger change in the organization, from simply buying land and setting it aside to a more varied approach that encourages greater involvement of local community members such as fishers, ranchers, and indigenous people. This change, he says, is occurring in the U.S. as well, although it has been driven by the organization's international work. In this sense, he says, the tail is wagging the dog, because just 20 percent of the Nature Conservancy's work is international. "We have an organization that sometimes tries to reduce things to models that don't fit the culture of the nations where we work," Campbell says. "Joy can hold up a mirror and say, 'This doesn't work.'"

Grant is leading the charge on a new project: development of a greater Caribbean basin marine program that would stretch from Cuba to Venezuela. The program will require the cooperation of at least 20 countries; in many of those, the Nature Conservancy doesn't yet have a presence. "I am taking a huge risk," Grant told me. When I asked her if she'd consulted with groups in all these countries first, she seemed surprised. No, she had simply seen the need and launched herself into the project. Now, though, she is spending a lot of time involving local people in planning the program. That, Dan Campbell told me, is vintage Joy Grant: someone willing to launch into something new, but rooted in cautious, methodical implementation.

On the wall in Grant's part-time office in Belize hangs a line drawing of a tropical tree draped with vines. Young sprouts erupt from its trunk, but a thick buttress holds it solidly in place. "I think I know that tree," Grant told me. "It's a mahogany." I couldn't help but see a resemblance.

Deborah Knight is a freelance writer living in San Diego. She writes primarily about environmental topics.

english.pravda.ru 10:22 2003-03-13

According to conservationists, oil & gas mega-projects in the area could destroy world's largest rain forest system in a relatively short period of time

The Amazon Basin contains the world's largest tropical rainforest and houses nearly fifty percent of the planet's terrestrial biodiversity. Located in nine countries along South America, this mankind treasure is today at serious risk, as world's energy giants develop simultaneous infrastructure projects that threaten millions of hectares and the isolated indigenous cultures.

Mega-Projects are massive infrastructure projects - pipelines, power lines, roads, dams, and waterways-designed to open the Amazon rainforest frontier to large-scale industrial development. Mega-projects enable industries to extract and export raw materials (oil, gas, timber, gold, etc.) to regional and global markets.

Most of those projects require large-scale deforestation to go ahead and the economically weakened Andean countries cannot control the advance of the multinationals. In some cases, like Peru and Ecuador, the necessity of meeting extraordinary foreign debt payments make them surrender to global corporations and support their threatening investments.

One of the most notorious cases is the Camisea Project in southeastern Peru. Financed by public funded banks like the Export-Import bank of the U.S. and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Camisea is meant to export to the USA, 13 trillions cubic meters of gas. According to Amazon Watch, it has already taken the life of 15 Indians from the Nanti community, who died of diseases previously unknown in the area.

Camisea is pushed forward by an Argentine - US consortium headed by Pluspetrol (Arg) and the Hunt Oil Co., from Texas. Halliburton, another Texas based oil company, in which Dick Cheney served as CEO before joining George W. Bush administration, will construct the Pacific Ocean oil terminal to export the gas production to Peru to the Western ports of the United States. According to very well informed sources, Camisea would increase Peruvian GDP in a 15% once finished.

Amazon Watch says "the Camisea companies clearly care little about meeting international environmental standards as the project even violates minimal World Bank policies by destroying critical natural habitat, affecting endangered species, failing to assess and mitigate adequately environmental impacts and refusing to implement independent expert oversight or monitoring. As such, an April 2002 Independent Assessment of the project predicted irreparable impacts on the region."

Ecuador, another country in serious troubles to meet foreign debt obligations as Peru, also holds dangerous energy projects. Another consortium of multinational oil companies is driving ahead with a controversial new oil pipeline project known as OCP (heavy crude pipeline). The 300 miles pipeline to export heavy crude through country's Pacific ports, is expected to be finished by June 2003. Amazon Watch warns that this would place fragile ecosystems and dozens of communities in jeopardy.

Ecuador struggled hard during the year 2000 to seal an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. According with the independent media and sources in Ecuador, one of the IMF requirements at that time was to hike in oil production to meet payments on its US$16 billion national debt. Therefore, the Ecuadorian Government embarked on a massive oil exploitation program that endangers the central and southern Amazon rainforests.

The situation in Colombia is even more difficult. To the debt problems, the analyst has to add the long-running conflict between the authorities and the Marxist rebel groups operating along the country. To secure foreign investments, the Government usually militarizes oil regions and pipelines. Therefore, those areas turn into battlefields as oil wells and pipelines are juicy targets for guerrillas. For instance, an oil pipeline in the northern Department of Arauza has been blown up over 700 times.

Then, the paramilitary groups go to these areas to counterattack rebel actions, which leads to increased violations of the basic human rights of indigenous communities and cause the forced displacement of many from their ancestral homelands.

Bolivia is another paradigmatic case. The country went through a severe social crisis after neo-liberal policies were imposed to the impoverished population. Continuos rural uprisings that sometimes reach the largest cities, like the last popular rebellion that stormed La Paz, are the expression of the deep social instability the country is in.

However, its vast gas resources look very attractive to foreign investors. In the last four years, Bolivian gas reserves have leapt up to 52.3 trillion cubic feet from 5.6 trillion cubic feet. To export an estimated 75% of this gas, plans are underway to expand the gas pipeline system through the heart of Bolivia's globally renowned forests and indigenous territories. Again, oil giants like Brazil's Petrobras, in their fight to dominate the market, pass over the opposition from the farming communities that live in the path of gas development.

Brazil and Venezuela also have a part on this. In joint and individual projects, both countries put the fate of the Amazon basin into an uncertain future. Amazon Watch warns on the construction of a 470 mile long power line that would bring electricity from Venezuela to Brazil. According to this conservationist group, "the mega-project will have serious impacts on the health, the land and the way of life for more that 24.000 indigenous people".

Multinational interests, lobbying power and local indebted economies combine to threat a treasure that belongs to the entire humanity. The consequences of the destruction of the world's richest ecosystem are unpredictable. No question, the most affected will be the man himself.

Hernan Etchaleco PRAVDA.Ru Argentina

Based on reports from Amazon Watch, Amazon Alliance and National Geographic

www.falkland-malvinas.com

Experts from Mercosur and other South American countries agreed that without a joint effort and common objectives it will be hard to eradicate foot and mouth from the continent, a cattle disease that causes terrible losses to beef exporting countries of the region. During a meeting in Santiago de Chile sponsored by the Chilean Agriculture and Livestock Service, participants from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and the host country agreed that “eradicating FAM was urgent and top priority. The disease is alive and latent and its impact can generate terrible blows to the local economies”. Chilean delegate Carlos Parra revealed that Argentina and Chile are considering the possibility of satellite surveillance along the border to impede cattle smuggling. An operation that if successful would then be extended to other sensitive areas. Uruguayan delegate Recaredo Ugarte indicated that unless targets and objectives are not clearly defined, and simultaneously, “we will be leaving open gaps that will not ensure a successful end to the FAM eradication battle”. The meeting was held in the framework of the annual assembly of the South American FAM Office that depends from FAO.

www.gristmagazine.com by Deborah Knight 11 Mar 2003

Joy Grant was born in a house with no indoor plumbing in the tiny Central American country of Belize. That was 52 years ago. Last year, she accepted one of the top positions at the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy. For both parties, the marriage is a calculated gamble. Joy, oh, Joy. Photo: Deborah Knight.I spent a morning with Grant recently in Belize City. Her voice has a throaty roughness to it, softened by the Belizean Creole lilt. She founded Programme for Belize, a private nonprofit conservation organization that during her 12-year tenure acquired 300,000 acres of forest land -- 4 percent of the country. Impressive as that was, the organization operated in a country the size of Massachusetts with an annual budget of just $2.5 million. The Nature Conservancy, by contrast, is a $250 million-a-year organization, and Grant was brought on as program director for one-third of its global operations: the U.S. mid-Atlantic and southern states, the Carribean, and Central America. "I had to think about that," she said, "moving onto the world stage." To show me her roots, Grant drove me around Belize City. She steered with unflappable precision through its crammed streets: cars parked along either side, narrow or nonexistent sidewalks, bicycles, pushcarts, pedestrians, vendors selling bananas on the sidewalk. We passed the unpaved alley where the house in which she was born once stood (it burned down a few years ago) and the drugstore around the corner where her father worked 60 to 70 hours per week as a pharmacist. As a child, Grant conducted much of the family's banking and shopping, because she always negotiated the best deals. We passed her old high school, where in her senior year she was selected as "head girl" based on her grades and leadership. Her parents had the highest expectations for their three daughters, within the constraints of the world as they knew it: "Since we had only girls, my father would say, 'I want you to be the best secretary Belize has ever seen,'" Grant told me. After high school, Grant worked for a year for Barclay's Bank, then went to Alberta, Canada -- "a cold shock" -- where she earned a bachelors degree in commerce and a masters in business administration. From there, she went to Barbados for eight years, where she worked for the Caribbean Development Bank. She approved loans for development projects in 13 Caribbean countries, but back then, she says, no one ever considered the environmental impact of a project. "For an Antigua fisheries project, we considered how many people can you employ, will they be able to pay the loan back. Whether the amount of fish you were taking was sustainable never entered into the equation." Grant next went to work for the Belize Embassy in Washington, D.C., where one day some people from the Massachusetts Audubon Society made a presentation to the prime minister of Belize about a proposal to buy 110,000 acres of land in Belize and turn it over to a local entity for conservation. It was Grant who kept asking questions, and the next day, she recalls, Massachusetts Audubon called her and said, "'You caught onto this concept. We have money for a salary for three months. Would you like to start an organization to protect this land in perpetuity?'" Sustainable logging on land owned by Programme for Belize. Photo: Deborah Knight.At the time, Grant knew nothing about environmental issues. She was intrigued, however, by the idea of creating something from scratch, something that would last, as she put it, "beyond me." She returned to Belize in 1989, assembled a board for her new organization, and got herself out into the "bush," where she learned about birds, snakes, and red-eyed tree frogs. With help from a number of U.S. scientists and funders, including the Nature Conservancy, she aggressively acquired additional land and embarked on projects that she hoped would use a portion of the land to produce local income and jobs in an environmentally friendly manner. Back then, the idea of sustainable development was not yet well-known, let alone well accepted, Grant says. One of her projects involved logging mahogany by cutting a limited number of trees and removing them carefully from the forest to limit damage to the surrounding ecosystem. She won two different sustainability certifications for the operation, but in the end, could barely sell the logs at all, and certainly not for any premium. She also pursued ecotourism, building cabanas and dormitories that now house visitors and school groups. You Gotta Belize At the Nature Conservancy, Grant is the only member of the seven-person top management team who was born outside the U.S. She sees part of her role as getting her fellow managers out "in the mud." She took the organization's information systems manager into the jungle in Guatemala, by helicopter, foot, boat, and car, then by boat to Belize. Now, she says, he understands why people in the field can't be online monitoring their email all day. She took the human resources manager to Costa Rica, where they released turtle hatchlings and went into the forest to learn about the local trees. "It's crucial," she said, "if we are to be a global organization that the leadership understand what global means." The ecotourism project run by Programme for Belize has created jobs for locals. Photo: Deborah Knight."Certain things I would take for granted that everybody knows, they don't know," she said. For example, in the U.S., the Nature Conservancy has long followed the model of owning land to protect it -- but in developing countries, this model often doesn't work. "I know that if you try to set large tracts of land aside in the developing world, you have to get buy-in of the local people. You cannot police it," Grant said. Rather than recreate its original model everywhere, Grant says, the Nature Conservancy must work with local partners to develop conservation methods that involve the community. "People," she said, "are the key to everything we do." Dan Campbell, the director of the Nature Conservancy's program in Belize, worked with Grant for years when she ran Programme for Belize. He sees her entry into the Nature Conservancy's top management as a reflection of a larger change in the organization, from simply buying land and setting it aside to a more varied approach that encourages greater involvement of local community members such as fishers, ranchers, and indigenous people. This change, he says, is occurring in the U.S. as well, although it has been driven by the organization's international work. In this sense, he says, the tail is wagging the dog, because just 20 percent of the Nature Conservancy's work is international. "We have an organization that sometimes tries to reduce things to models that don't fit the culture of the nations where we work," Campbell says. "Joy can hold up a mirror and say, 'This doesn't work.'" Grant is leading the charge on a new project: development of a greater Caribbean basin marine program that would stretch from Cuba to Venezuela. The program will require the cooperation of at least 20 countries; in many of those, the Nature Conservancy doesn't yet have a presence. "I am taking a huge risk," Grant told me. When I asked her if she'd consulted with groups in all these countries first, she seemed surprised. No, she had simply seen the need and launched herself into the project. Now, though, she is spending a lot of time involving local people in planning the program. That, Dan Campbell told me, is vintage Joy Grant: someone willing to launch into something new, but rooted in cautious, methodical implementation. On the wall in Grant's part-time office in Belize hangs a line drawing of a tropical tree draped with vines. Young sprouts erupt from its trunk, but a thick buttress holds it solidly in place. "I think I know that tree," Grant told me. "It's a mahogany." I couldn't help but see a resemblance.

Deborah Knight is a freelance writer living in San Diego. She writes primarily about environmental topics.