<a href=www.abs-cbnnews.com>ABS-CBN News

An official of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Thursday said that the lack of funding has been hampering the effective management of the country’s protected areas.

Mundita Lim, assistant director of the DENR’s Protected Areas and Wildlife Bureau (PAWB), pointed out that her office is having difficulty sourcing out funds, both from the public and the private sector, to be used in conservation programs.

Lim admitted that the national government doesn’t have enough resources to come up and implement programs focused on the country’s protected areas.

“There is a need to devolve this kind of responsibility of seriously taking care of our natural resources. The local government units [LGUs] should play a role for the effective supervision of said resources,” she said in an interview at the opening of the “Southeast Asia Regional Meeting of International Union for Conservation of Nature-World Commission on Protected Areas” at the EDSA Shangri-La Hotel in Mandaluyong City.

Lim added that more can be done by the PAWB if there will be an increase in budget allocated for environmental conservation.

“The national government can’t do it alone. The LGUs can initiate its own protection programs though this doesn’t mean that they are being neglected by the national government. Some form of coordination should also be executed between the concerned parties,” she added.

Of the country’s 30 million hectares of land area and 220 million hectares of archipelagic waters -- home to more than 52,177 species of plants and animals, and more than half of which are found nowhere else in the world only 12.8 percent is “legally protected.”

“The diversity of plants and animals makes life possible on Earth, playing a critical role in food security, poverty alleviation, provision of water and a healthier environment. But sadly, the richest countries in biodiversity are unfortunately among the poorer countries,” Environment Secretary Elisea Gozun said.

The Philippines, ranked eighth in the world in total diversity and seventh in endemism, has joined Group of Like-minded Mega Diverse Countries like Bolivia, Brazil, China, Columbia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, South Africa and Venezuela.

PAWB records in 2001 show that there are 244 protected areas under the National Integrated Protected Areas System in the country, covering an estimated total area of 2.5 million hectares. These include national parks, natural parks, marine parks, marine reserves, game refuge and bird sanctuaries, wilderness areas, watershed forest reserves, mangrove swamps, protected landscapes/seascapes, natural monuments/landmarks, resource reserve, wildlife sanctuary and natural biotic areas. R. Villanueva

Please send your comments or feedback to newsfeedback@abs-cbn.com

Environment News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, April 2, 2003 (ENS) - U.S. agricultural imports are being treated unfairly by the European Union, Russia, China, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Taiwan and Venezuela, according to the latest annual report from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Issued Tuesday, the report says the U.S. lost agricultural export opportunities worth $200 million a year.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick : "Bringing down barriers to trade promotes growth and prosperity, for the United States and for the world," said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. "American workers, businesses, and farmers expect a level playing field abroad. The Bush administration is committed to identifying unfair barriers to U.S. exports and to working aggressively with our trading partners to eliminate those barriers."

The persistence of trade barriers affirms the need for the United States to remain actively engaged in promoting and enforcing trade liberalization at all levels, said Zoellick.

The U.S. will pursue its interests globally, in the ongoing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations; regionally, through the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations; and bilaterally, through free trade agreements with trading partners such as Chile, Singapore, Morocco, Australia, the five members of the Central American Common Market, and the five members of the Southern African Customs Union.

U.S. geneticist Victor Raboy examines a plant from a new line of corn he developed. The new corn is designed to be lower in phytic acid, a compound that may reduce nutrient absorption during human digestion. (Photo by Keith Weller courtesy USDA) Since the European Union imposed a moratorium on imports of agricultural biotech products in 1998, U.S corn [maize] exports to the EU have declined by 55 percent, the USTR report says.

U.S. poultry exports to Russia have decreased by almost 45 percent since import restrictions on U.S. poultry went into effect. Russia is the top U.S. export market for poultry, and the import restrictions helped contribute to a $500 million decline in U.S. poultry exports to the world last year.

Other examples the USTR gives of unfair treatment of U.S. agricultural exports include Chinese tariff-rate quotas on imports of wheat, corn, rice, cotton, barley, oilseed and vegetable oils.

Mexican anti-dumping duties on beef, rice, swine, and apples, an illegitimate tax on beverages containing high fructose corn syrup, and restrictions on fruit and dry beans, are issues the USTR complains about. A "dramatic increase" in trade barriers to agriculture was reported for Mexico over the past year, the report says.

The World Trade Organization is holding negotiations on altering international agricultural trade rules, but the organization's member governments missed a March 31 deadline for establishing “modalities” in the agriculture negotiations.

These modalities are targets, including numerical targets, for achieving the objectives of the negotiations, as well as issues related to rules. They will set parameters for the final agreement in the agriculture negotiations, for example how far import duties should be cut, and subsidies reduced or eliminated, and over what periods of time.

Along with almost all the other negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda, so named for the place where they began in Doha, Qatar, the agriculture talks are scheduled to end by January 1, 2005. This timetable was agreed in November 2001, at the Fourth WTO Ministerial Conference in Doha.

U.S. government food scientist Gene Lyon checks chickens for tenderness. (Photo by Stephen Ausmus courtesy USDA) Zoellick and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman expressed disappointment but not surprise that the deadline passed without agreement. The negotiators can work through the problems and "should not settle for insignificant changes," they said in a joint statement Monday.

The WTO negotiations are attempting to find ways for wealthy nations to reduce their agricultural subsidies, the issue at the core of the current round of negotiations at the WTO. The developing nations would benefit if amounts to $300 billion a year in subsidies paid by rich nations to their farmers were reduced.

If the developing nations, most of which have economies based on agriculture, are not satisfied with the agricultural talks, they may withhold agreement to the opening of markets favored by the industrialized nations, especially in services like banking, telecommunications and information technology.

Veneman and Zoellick said jointly, "The U.S. proposal to reform the world agricultural trade takes a long stride toward the goals we should be seeking, and which were detailed in the Doha mandate. We want to eliminate export subsidies. We want to cut other subsidies that distort farm production by $100 billion, in the process harmonizing the amount of permitted subsidies at much lower levels - moving toward fairer, more equal treatment on the path to eliminating these subsidies, too. We want to cut global agricultural tariffs by 75 percent, with no tariff higher than 25 percent."

Dr. Supachai Panitchpakdi of Thailand is Director-General of the World Trade Organization until September 1, 2005. (Photo courtesy WTO) WTO Director-General Supachai Panitchpakdi also expressed disappointment over the failure by WTO member governments to agree on a framework for future agriculture trade reform, but he said progress in the global trade negotiations can still be achieved provided governments continue to work towards bridging their differences.

“The Doha Development Agenda negotiations are a single undertaking," said Panitchpakdi. "No element of them will be agreed until all areas are agreed. But significant progress in some areas often provides negotiators with an incentive to overcome their differences even on the most politically sensitive questions."

In a press briefing Monday, Zoellick said he still believes the Doha round of negotiations could be completed on schedule by January 2005. Looking ahead to the WTO ministers' meeting scheduled for September in Cancun, Mexico, he sought to play down the missed March 31 deadline and wide differences that remain over agriculture.

"This is not the first time a deadline has been missed, and it won't be the last," he said.

Zoellick said he found no evidence that the Iraq war was hurting the WTO negotiations. If anything, he said, the war should reinforce the need to help developing countries expand their economies through open trade.

<a href=www.enn.com>From Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Tuesday, April 01, 2003 12:00:00 AM New analysis of sediment samples from the southern Caribbean indicate that severe droughts occurred at the same time as the known collapse of the Mayan civilization. In a study in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, lead author Gerald Haug of Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany, together with Konrad Hughen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues report that sediments from the Cariaco Basin in northern Venezuela clearly show a dry spell across the Caribbean region starting in the seventh century and lasting for more than 200 years. The study looked at titanium concentration in undisturbed sediments recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program. Titanium varies with input from rivers and rainfall patterns over northern tropical South America, with titanium decreasing with decreasing rainfall. The international team focused on sediments from 750 AD to 950 AD, the period when the Classic Maya civilization collapsed in the lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula. The data show a clear link between the chronology of regional droughts and the demise of the culture. Multi-year droughts in the region occurred at approximately 810, 860 and 910 AD and are believed to have placed enough strain on resources in the region to contribute to the demise of the civilization. The Maya flourished for about 1,000 years and had a peak population of more than one million. They built pyramids and elaborate cities with irrigation systems on the Yucatan, now part of Mexico. They depended on a seasonally consistent rainfall to support agriculture. Although some cities were repopulated at various times, many of the cities were abandoned in the 9th century AD. "The resolution of many paleoclimate records has limited us in the past from documenting a clear link between climate change and the detailed, often complex evolution of some of the great cultures around the world.," Hughen says. "Evidence of long periods of drought had been found previously in sediments from lakes in Guatemala, but the resolution was not sufficient to identify the three phases of abandonment known from historical data. Our records have annual resolution so we can measure both the timing and the durations of the drought periods that caused each incremental collapse." How this once great civilization collapsed has been the subject of continued debate. Paleoclimatologists have developed an increasingly accurate record of climate change for the past few thousand years, covering the same period in which human societies developed and flourished. Until recently, archaeologists and historians lacked information on short-term climate change, but now high-resolution records from ice cores, tree rings and some deep sea sediments provide evidence that climate shifts often coincided with sudden changes in human history. Hughen, an assistant scientist in the Institution's Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, said the sediment records show a dry period beginning about 1,200 years ago that was punctuated by periods of three to nine years each when there was little or no rainfall. Each event placed more stress on the civilization, leading to a collapse of a portion of the population each time. The remaining population could not survive the last severe drought at about 910 AD. Archeological data show that the Mayan communities in the southern and central lowlands collapsed first, while those in the northern highlands lasted for another century or so, possibly because they had access to more ground water resources. In the end, however, they couldn't survive the final dry period. The study was conducted by Gerald Haug of Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, who is currently at Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany, Detlef Gunther of ETH in Zürich, Switzerland, Larry Peterson of the University of Miami, Daniel Sigman of Princeton University, Konrad Hughen of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Beat Aeschlimann of ETH in Switzerland. Their work was supported by the Schweizer Nationalfonds (SNF) in Switzerland, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and by British Petroleum and Ford Motor Company through the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative. WHOI is a private, independent marine research and engineering, and higher education organization located in Falmouth, MA. Its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean's role in the changing global environment. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, the Institution is organized into five departments, interdisciplinary institutes and a marine policy center, and conducts a joint graduate education program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

For more information, contact: Shelley Dawicki Director of Public and Community Relations Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution media@whoi.edu Web site: www.whoi.edu

<a href=news.independent.co.uk>By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 30 March 2003

Genetically modified crops specially engineered to kill pests in fact nourish them, startling new research has revealed.

The research – which has taken even the most ardent opponents of GM crops by surprise – radically undermines one of the key benefits claimed for them. And it suggests that they may be an even greater threat to organic farming than has been envisaged.

It strikes at the heart of one of the main lines of current genetic engineering in agriculture: breeding crops that come equipped with their own pesticide.

Biotech companies have added genes from a naturally occurring poison, Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is widely used as a pesticide by organic farmers. The engineered crops have spread fast. The amount of land planted with them worldwide grew more than 25-fold – from four million acres in 1996 to well over 100 million acres (44.2m hectares) in 2000 – and the global market is expected to be worth $25bn (£16bn) by 2010.

Drawbacks have already emerged, with pests becoming resistant to the toxin. Environmentalists say that resistance develops all the faster because the insects are constantly exposed to it in the plants, rather than being subject to occasional spraying.

But the new research – by scientists at Imperial College London and the Universidad Simon Rodrigues in Caracas, Venezuela – adds an alarming new twist, suggesting that pests can actually use the poison as a food and that the crops, rather than automatically controlling them, can actually help them to thrive.

They fed resistant larvae of the diamondback moth – an increasingly troublesome pest in the southern US and in the tropics – on normal cabbage leaves and ones that had been treated with a Bt toxin. The larvae eating the treated leaves grew much faster and bigger – with a 56 per cent higher growth rate.

They found that the larvae "are able to digest and utilise" the toxin and may be using it as a "supplementary food", adding that the presence of the poison "could have modified the nutritional balance in plants" for them.

And they conclude: "Bt transgenic crops could therefore have unanticipated nutritionally favourable effects, increasing the fitness of resistant populations."

Pete Riley, food campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said last night: "This is just another example of the unexpected harmful effects of GM crops.

"If Friends of the Earth had come up with the suggestion that crops engineered to kill pests could make them bigger and healthier instead, we would have been laughed out of court.

"It destroys the industry's entire case that insect-resistant GM crops can have anything to do with sustainable farming."

Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, said it showed that GM crops posed an even "worse threat to organic farming than had previously been imagined". Breed- ing resistance to the Bt insecticide sometimes used by organic farmers was bad enough, but problems would become even greater if pests treated it as "a high-protein diet".

<a href=www.ascribe.org>Ascribe Mon Mar 24 12:40:07 2003 Pacific Time

       WOODS HOLE, Mass., March 24 (AScribe Newswire) -- New analysis of sediment samples from the southern Caribbean indicate that severe droughts occurred at the same time as the known collapse of the Mayan civilization. In a study in the March 14 issue of the journal Science, lead author Gerald Haug of Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany, together with Konrad Hughen of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and colleagues report that sediments from the Cariaco Basin in northern Venezuela clearly show a dry spell across the Caribbean region starting in the seventh century and lasting for more than 200 years.

       The study looked at titanium concentration in undisturbed sediments recovered by the Ocean Drilling Program. Titanium varies with input from rivers and rainfall patterns over northern tropical South America, with titanium decreasing with decreasing rainfall. The international team focused on sediments from 750 AD to 950 AD, the period when the Classic Maya civilization collapsed in the lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula. The data show a clear link between the chronology of regional droughts and the demise of the culture.

       Multi-year droughts in the region occurred at approximately 810, 860 and 910 AD and are believed to have placed enough strain on resources in the region to contribute to the demise of the civilization. The Maya flourished for about 1,000 years and had a peak population of more than one million. They built pyramids and elaborate cities with irrigation systems on the Yucatan, now part of Mexico. They depended on a seasonally consistent rainfall to support agriculture. Although some cities were repopulated at various times, many of the cities were abandoned in the 9th century AD.

       "The resolution of many paleoclimate records has limited us in the past from documenting a clear link between climate change and the detailed, often complex evolution of some of the great cultures around the world," Hughen says. "Evidence of long periods of drought had been found previously in sediments from lakes in Guatemala, but the resolution was not sufficient to identify the three phases of abandonment known from historical data. Our records have annual resolution so we can measure both the timing and the durations of the drought periods that caused each incremental collapse."

       How this once great civilization collapsed has been the subject of continued debate. Paleoclimatologists have developed an increasingly accurate record of climate change for the past few thousand years, covering the same period in which human societies developed and flourished. Until recently, archaeologists and historians lacked information on short-term climate change, but now high-resolution records from ice cores, tree rings and some deep sea sediments provide evidence that climate shifts often coincided with sudden changes in human history.

       Hughen, an assistant scientist in the Institution's Department of Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, said the sediment records show a dry period beginning about 1,200 years ago that was punctuated by periods of three to nine years each when there was little or no rainfall. Each event placed more stress on the civilization, leading to a collapse of a portion of the population each time. The remaining population could not survive the last severe drought at about 910 AD.

       Archeological data show that the Mayan communities in the southern and central lowlands collapsed first, while those in the northern highlands lasted for another century or so, possibly because they had access to more ground water resources. In the end, however, they couldn't survive the final dry period.

       The study was conducted by Gerald Haug of Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, who is currently at Geoforschungszentrum (GFZ) in Potsdam, Germany, Detlef Gunther of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, Larry Peterson of the University of Miami, Daniel Sigman of Princeton University, Konrad Hughen of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Beat Aeschlimann of ETH in Switzerland. Their work was supported by the Schweizer Nationalfonds (SNF) in Switzerland, the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and by British Petroleum and Ford Motor Company through the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative.

       Related Links:        Ocean Drilling Program: www.oceandrilling.org        Paleoceanography at WHOI: www.whoi.edu        ETH Home Page: www.ethz.ch GFZ Home Page www.gfz-potsdam.de Schweizer        Nationalfonds www.snf.ch NSF Home Page: www.nsf.gov CMI Home Page: www.princeton.edu percent7Ecmi        Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Media Relations: www.whoi.edu/media       -30- AScribe - The Public Interest Newswire / 510-653-9400 www.ascribe.org