Project
Preserving the legacy of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Heart of the World
Rising abruptly from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta reaches 5,775 meters (18,946 ft.) at its highest points, the peaks of Bolívar and Colón. It is the highest coastal mountain system in the world, a place where indigenous knowledge and nature’s own wisdom converge.
The sheer changes in elevation create a wide variety of ecosystems within a small area, where the diversity of plant and animal life creates a unique exuberant region. The melting snows of the highest peaks form rivers and lakes, whose freshwater flows down steep slopes to the tropical sea at the base of the mountains.
The indigenous Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo people protect and care for this natural treasure with an authority they have inherited from their ancestors. According to their worldview the land is sacred and shared in divine communion between humans, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and the spirts of their ancestors.
Despite this ancestral inheritance, development projects proposed for the region have failed to take the opinions of these indigenous groups into consideration. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is currently threatened by 251 mineral concessions, hydroelectric projects, agriculture, urban sprawl, and infrastructure projects.
Many of these concessions were granted without the prior consultation of the indigenous communities, which represents a persistent and systematic violation of their rights.
Mining, which implies the contamination and erosion of watersheds, threatens the health of more than 30 rivers that flow out of the Sierra; these are the water sources of the departments of Magdalena, César, and La Guajira.
These threats have brought this natural paradise to the brink of no return. With it, would go the traditional lives of its indigenous inhabitants, who are dependent on the health of their land and the sacred sites it contains.
The Sierra hosts the archaeological site of la Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, known as Teyuna, the cradle of Tayrona civilization. According to tradition, it is the source from which all nature was born—the living heart of the world.
The four guardian cultures of the Sierra are uninterested in allowing this natural and cultural legacy to disappear.
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By María José Veramendi Villa, senior attorney, AIDA, @MaJoVeramendi Some months ago my colleague at AIDA, Haydée Rodríguez, wrote an interesting post in this blog called Plastic bag? No thank you (Spanish only). I confess that it shocked me to read the post because although I had a general idea of the harmful effects of plastic bags on the environment, I didn’t realize the profound damage they can cause. This made me reflect on Peru, where plastic bags reign supreme, and where there is very little public awareness of their harmful impacts, that they poison and kill marine wildlife and pollute the environment, among other things. In most shops, almost all products are packed in plastic bags no matter how small. Some statistics An investigation entitled the Study on the Perceptions, Attitudes and Environmental Behavior regarding the Unnecessary Use of Plastic Bags was carried out in two districts of Lima. The results, published in a July 2012 article on the Ministry of the Environment's website (Spanish only), found that 94% of the businesses studied used plastic bags exclusively to package their consumer products, while 60% used between one to three plastic bags for every purchase and 36% used three to six. The article announced the launch of a campaign to reduce the use of plastic bags in the northwestern province of Piura, called “Healthy Living with Health Bags.” Other than this article, I couldn’t find any further public information on the campaign’s impact or whether it had changed people’s behavior, something that would have made it possible to gauge if the campaign had the potential to be replicated elsewhere in the country. The day to day In most Peruvian supermarket chains, plastic bag usage is exaggerated. Sometimes checkout assistants pack small items in separate plastic bags, generating a huge amount of unnecessary plastic. A few months ago I visited a well-known Lima supermarket and asked the clerk why they didn’t attempt to cut down on plastic bag usage. I suggested that the supermarket should charge money for plastic bags as an incentive for people to bring reusable bags made of cloth. He said, “Oh, if we did that people would stop coming… There are people who ask us to use more bags or double bags, and if we didn’t, they’d call us stingy.” Attitudes like this illustrate the disregard that various sectors of Peruvian society have for environmental protection. Biodegradable bags? In 2007, Peru’s largest supermarket chain, Grupo Wong, which owns the Wong and Metro supermarket chains and is now owned by Chile’s Cencosud, introduced the use of biodegradable bags, a practice then replicated by other supermarkets in the country. Wong bags come with a caption that reads, “This bag will biodegrade without leaving any contaminant residues.” The manufacture of the bags “includes a special additive that causes the bag to disintegrate into smaller pieces when it comes in contact with oxygen, sunlight and friction, a process which then allows microorganisms such as fungi or bacteria to feed on its remnants, converting the bag into water, biomass, salt minerals and carbon dioxide, just as we do when we exhale air,” Wong says on its website. A real alternative? The bags used by Wong supermarkets seem ordinary enough. The difference is the special additive ingredient that accelerates the disintegration of the bag. “This means that the plastic is broken down into smaller particles that are so small that you can’t see them. In the first phase, the waste cannot be assimilated with plants (Spanish only)”. Inapol, a Chilean maker of conventional and biodegradable plastic bags, says that while “a conventional plastic bag takes about 300 years to biodegrade, our bags that contain the special oxo-degradable additive reduces this time to approximately two years, depending on the external factors that accompany the process. Exchange of contaminants According to a European Bioplastics study, the additives in the oxo-biodegradable bags consist of chemical catalysts thatcontain transition metals like cobalt, magnesium and iron, among others. In this process the disintegration of the plastic bag is caused by a chemical oxidization of the plastic’s polymer chains, triggered by UV radiation or heat exposure. According to the study, the waste would eventually biodegrade in the second phase. The study points out that the breakdown of the biodegradable plastic bag is not a result of natural biodegradation but of a chemical reaction. The waste remnants remain in the environment, something that does not present an adequate solution to the problem. It only transforms visible waste particles into invisible contaminants. There have been significant advances and an increase in awareness in the business community on the need to take care of the environment. But doubts remain about the natural biodegradation of plastic bags such as those used by Wong supermarkets, and whether they present a real sustainable solution for the environment. As Peru is such a creative and perse country, why shouldn’t it adopt alternatives to plastic packaging such as reusable cloth bags and recycled materials, and employ their use across the country? Isn’t this something to think about? We must change our mentalities for things to improve. To paraphrase Haydée, we need to say, “No thank you” to plastic bags. We should learn to reuse and recycle so that we can take care of what we love and, above all, where we live.
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By Florencia Ortúzar, legal advisor, AIDA "Modern agriculture is not a system for producing food but for producing money"(Bill Mollison: Australian researcher, scientist, teacher, naturalist and the father of permaculture). Seeds are the beginning of life itself. They are the means of nature’s propagation and the building blocks of life. Patenting seeds hands their ownership rights to a select few, and this causes great resentment among many. What does all of this really mean? The UPOV: An international convention The International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) is an intergovernmental organization whose objective is to grant intellectual property rights to “breeders.” That is, to people who have created or discovered new varieties of seeds. Some countries in the Americas have signed the UPOV Convention, which was established in Paris in 1961 and revised three times (the latest in 1991), and others are considering it. A seed needs to be considered a new variety in order to be patented. New varieties can be generated through the use of traditional techniques or genetic modification in laboratories. It is difficult to measure the possible ramifications of something so new and novel as the privatization of the life contained in a seed and, for good reason, many people are worried. The situation in Chile (and other countries): To join or not to join? Chile’s Congress is currently debating legislation known as the “Monsanto law” that, if passed, would implement the UPOV Convention and the ability to patent new seed varieties. This means that someone could alter the genetics of a native seed to become its inventor and owner. This would give them the right to sell it, charge a fee every time the seed is used, prohibit its trade in the market and draw up a contract dictating what farmers can and can’t do with the harvested product (for more information, you can listen to the interview (in Spanish) with the co-founder of the NGO Chile sin Transgénicos (Chile without Transgenics)). Proponents of the law argue that it is a necessary protection to encourage innovation in the country's agriculture sector. Concerns Making native seeds obsolete: What chance does a native seed have for survival competing against a seed that is genetically modified to be more productive and efficient? According to market rules, the “new” cultivated seeds will displace the native ones. Even worse, GM crops could easily contaminate the remaining natural varieties. Monopolies: Those with the resources to create new seeds, especially genetically modified ones, which are the most profitable, are typically the huge corporations that today dominate the production of GM foods, like Monsanto. If the seed patent system were authorized in Chile, these companies would get a free pass to take control of the country’s cropland as they have already done with great efficacy in Argentina. What is more, the most profitable companies would gain access to the country’s most arable land, expanding monoculture practices while also forcing less profitable seeds out of the market even if they are more nutritional. Seed exchange: The “Monsanto law” grants great power to the seed owner by binding the seed purchaser to a contract that controls the entire harvest and the new seeds that are generated. Traditional practices such as the propagation, sale, gift giving and exchange of seeds, customs as old as agriculture itself, would be prohibited. The law would strip farmers not only of an essential part of their job but also a key source of income: the sale of cultivated seeds. As a consequence, the farmer would lose power and identity and become a mere cog in the corporate machine. Genetically modified crops: To the benefit of big companies, we inevitably favor the entry of genetically modified foods, the products with the greatest economic return. While the adverse side effects of eating GM food are not yet officially known, it seems wise to err on the side of the precautionary principle and avoid uncontrolled testing on humans. The advent of this law would protect GM crops. Natural products, which are less economical but generally more nutritional, would be overtaken by more productive seeds. There are many reasons to treat GM foods with caution. Rather than helping to end world hunger, we have increased the use of pesticides, destroyed biopersity, caused inequality between farmers and contaminated native varieties of seeds. It also is dangerous for people’s health to live near GM crops, as has been proven in Argentina. Environmental impacts: By allowing seed monopolization, crops will become homogenized to achieve the most economic harvests. This will lead to monocultures, many of them pesticide-resistant seeds that will require the use of alarming amounts of agrochemicals. Of particular concern, a lack of persity means crops become less resilient and adaptable to environmental changes, including those associated with global warming (You can read here (in Spanish) an article about the problems Argentina is experiencing with the expansion of GM soy monoculture). Unforeseeable risks: If a country drastically changes its agricultural system, the risks are difficult to predict. It is possible that a company could incite a plague that would force desperate farmers its new seed that is resistant to the plague. Another risk is that farmers could be unfairly penalized for using patented seeds, especially if farmers have not been properly educated about the new legislation. Could farmers face lawsuits, convictions and the burning and seizure of their crops? Conclusion The implementation of the UPOV Convention threatens to drastically change an essential part of the natural cycle. The most dangerous aspect is that the global initiative is attracting more followers. It does not seem fair that a person can pay a fee for a seed that should never really be the creation of a person. Although the “breeder” could have changed a gene, it should not give him the right to copyright and control the rest of the seed’s genetic information. In Europe, only two countries have permitted the entry of GM crops. Chile has enormous potential to produce organic crops, and it could position itself successfully in the European market. But the Chilean authorities haven’t considered this as a possibility. The approval of the patent law on new seeds favors multinational seed monopolies, and this would allow the entry of GM crops that would displace and contaminate original varieties without the possibility of turning back. On the contrary, Peru recently passed a law banning the import and production of GM crops for 10 years. This is a good example to follow.
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The organizations signing the declaration regret that " the Forum was far from a plural confluence of diverse actors. In the seven panels that made up the two days of the event, 47 people participated, of which only 10% came from communities affected by business activities or human rights NGOs that work with such communities." Therefore, organizations "respectfully but emphatically call on the Working Group, the Human Rights Council, and the international community to correct the aforementioned problems and guarantee the adequate participation of civil society and groups of affected peoples, both in form as well as content, in the Second Global Forum on Business and Human Rights, which will take place in Geneva on December 2-4, 2013".
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