Biodiversity being destroyed in North America

Clearcuts like this one in the Oregon coast mountain range are a threat to North America’s biodiversity. Photo courtesy of ENS.

By Danielle Knight

Washington, DC, Jan. 7 (IPS)— Loss of habitat for flora and fauna in Canada, Mexico, and the United States has caused a ‘’widespread crisis’’ of shrinking of biodiversity throughout the region, an inter-governmental environmental body warned Monday.

The remaining natural environments in the region are under enormous stress and have been fragmented, polluted, or damaged in other ways despite efforts to set aside protected areas, the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) said in a report to the three countries’ governments.

“Over the past few decades, the loss and alternation of habitat has become the main threat to biodiversity,’’ said Janine Ferretti, executive director of the Montreal-based CEC, which was set up under the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) at the request of environmental groups.

The report, “The North American Mosaic: A State of the Environment Report’’, was based on scientific papers prepared for the CEC by scholars and government experts in the three nations.

Half of North America’s most biologically diverse areas were severely degraded, said the report. At least 235 species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians - including the Monarch Butterfly and Northern Codfish - were threatened.

Freshwater species were especially at risk because physical barriers, including dams, prevented them from escaping to new ecosystems when their own habitat became destroyed or degraded.

“The United States contains the world’s greatest diversity of freshwater mussel species but more than 65 percent of these are threatened or extinct,’’ said the report.

Fragmentation and loss of forest mean that many migratory birds, which depend on healthy, contiguous forests, “are losing nesting, feeding, and resting areas,’’ it added.

In 1999, environmental groups in the three countries filed a formal complaint with the CEC, arguing that the United States was flouting international and domestic protections for migratory bird species.

Advocacy organizations accused US officials of having an unwritten policy of not investigating cases in which migratory birds were killed by logging operations. Tens of thousands of migratory birds are killed each year as a result of road building, cutting, bulldozing, and burning, they said.

Similarly, the monarch butterfly, an insect whose migratory path spans the three nations, faced habitat threats, according to the CEC report. These included coastal development in California, deforestation of oyamel fir forests in Mexico, and the use of pesticides on and around milkweed plants, the butterfly’s primary food.

The report said all three countries had taken action to protect biodiversity, such as increasing nature reserves. Mexico, for example, has created 10 new “biosphere’’ reserves in the past ten years, while Canada’s total area of protected land has tripled since 1970.

The total protected area in North America has increased by from less than 100 million hectares in 1980, to 300 million hectares, or about 15 percent of the continent’s land surface.

Looming threats to protected areas, however, overshadowed these positive achievements, according to the CEC. “Natural areas in all three countries are in danger of being overwhelmed by multiple factors,’’ it said.

Reserves and other protected areas did not have sufficient management funds and were harmed by an increasing amount of visitors. Lands surrounding parks and preserves were often developed and threatened the survival of the protected area, it said.

The report also warned that Canada and the United States were putting additional strains on the environment because they consumed more fresh water per capita than any other country in the world - using about twice as much per person as Mexico.

The heaviest demands for freshwater came from agriculture and thermoelectric power generation, which together accounted for about 80 percent of water withdrawals in the two countries.

A large share of irrigation water was pumped from underground aquifers created by the accumulation of small amounts of rain over many centuries. One of the world’s largest aquifers, the Ogallala aquifer that lies under the Great Plains in the United States, for example, was being depleted at a faster rate than it was recharged, it said.

For the most part, soil loss through erosion by wind and water was decreasing due to better conservation practices and programs, according to the report. Between 1982 and 1997, total erosion on all cropland in the United States decreased by 41 percent, from 3.08 billion tons in 1982 to 1.81 billion tons in 1997.

As a result of implementing reduced tillage agricultural practices in Canada, the risks of wind erosion in the county’s prairies dropped by 30 percent between 1981 and 1996, said the report.

Although soil erosion declined in many parts of North America, the report warned that more soil was being lost in agricultural areas than was being regenerated.

“Part of the problem is a lack of humus because of a heavy reliance on chemical fertilizers rather than on traditional fertilizers and soil amendments, such as manure and compost, that help maintain soil structure,’’ it said.

The report said that low-income communities, especially indigenous groups in the region, were hit hardest by environmental problems. Some of the wildlife and plants that are an important part of the diet of native communities in the Great Lakes basin and in the Arctic were unsafe to eat because they were contaminated with pollution.

“Across the continent, forest clear-cutting, unsustainable resource extraction, industrial pollution, and over-fishing often take the greatest toll on low-income communities,’’ said the report.

The report concluded that the three NAFTA nations did not adequately coordinate efforts to address cross-boundary environmental issues, including cross-border habitats, non-native species, and shared migratory species and water resources. None of the three nations have adequate methods of compiling pollution statistics, it said.

“There is an urgent need to develop mutually compatible economic, social, and environmental goals and policies across the three- country region,’’ it said.

Afghanistan’s woes not over: US sending troops near Somalia

Compiled by Sean Marquis

Jan. 9— United States planes continue to bomb civilians, more prisoners have been transferred to US hands and Somalia is firming up as the Pentagon’s top choice for its next wave in the “war on terror."

US forces have taken charge of a total of 307 Taliban and al Qaida prisoners, who are being interrogated for information on Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammad Omar and al Qaida’s international network.

Many are expected to be moved to a US military base on the coast of Cuba, and the Pentagon said Sunday that military police and extra troops were being sent to beef up the base.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld suggested today that some detainees from Afghanistan might be housed in prisons on military bases in the United States.

Rumsfeld said such bases would be used if the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, proved inadequate. A Spokesman said there was considerable confusion over when the transfer from Afghanistan to Guantánamo Bay, announced last week, would start. Rumsfeld suggested that the timing depended on how quickly parts of the base could be made into a maximum-security prison.

“Needless to say, our desire is to not have a lot [of detainees]. That is not what we’re about, gathering up maximum numbers,” Rumsfield said. “We would like to make sure that the ones that ought to be secured so they don’t go out and kill more people are, in fact, secured, and ones that need not be are not, and that, in every event, the maximum amount of intelligence is extracted from them first.”

A formal agreement has been signed on the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan.

The Afghan Interior Minister Younis Qanooni and the British General who will lead the force, John McColl, signed the deal at a ceremony in the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Friday.

The “military-technical agreement” - as the accord is known - spells out the details of the role of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which is expected to number 4,500.

The governor of the southern city of Kandahar, Gul Agha, said Mullah Omar had been talking with a grand council of tribal leaders. If Omar does not agree to be arrested, the Baghran region north of Kandahar, where he is believed to be hiding, faces possible bombing by US-led warplanes, said Afghan and Pakistani military officials. US president George Bush said al-Qaida and the Taliban should not underestimate America’s resolve. “They’re going to continue to learn the terrible lesson that says don’t mess with America.”

US military planners are preparing for a long stay in the region around Afghanistan, enhancing the armed forces’ ability to strike targets throughout much of the Muslim world. confirming regional fears about the Americans digging themselves in like in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War.

That the region offers the world’s largest oil and gas reserves after the Middle East gives credence to the theories about larger US designs in the region.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghanistan born consultant of the Bush government, had advocated all along establishing a permanent US air base in Central Asia while he was at the Rand think tank in 2000. Now he has been made President Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan.

The new buildup is occurring with almost no public discussion. Many see it as evidence of an American desire for hegemony and control.

“What America is storing up for herself is yet more enemies,” novelist John LeCarre said in an essay that appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

‘Slaughterhouse’ refugee camp

Maslakh camp, translated as Slaughterhouse in English, is on the brink of a humanitarian disaster, aid workers have warned. Situated 30 miles west of Herat city, the camp is home to more than 350,000 displaced Afghans, of whom 100 die each day of exposure and starvation.

With more than 15 years working in humanitarian disasters, Ian Lethbridge, executive director of the Berkshire-based charity Feed the Children, says Maslakh is among the worst he has experienced.

Izzah Burza, 38, and her family have been at the camp for a month. Escaping the war and drought, they were drawn by the rumor of food. But to date they have received none.

“We traveled more than 125 miles to this camp,” she said. When I arrived I had four children, now I have two. We’ve had nothing to eat for a week.”

Although Maslakh was set up four years ago to deal with the drought, the recent conflict has swollen the camp.

At the moment, the World Food Program has only a skeleton staff at Maslakh, not nearly enough to deal with the thousands already there, let alone those who show up daily.

Newcomers pitch whatever shelter they can muster on a barren plain littered with human waste.

“There are only four bakeries attempting to feed up to 100,000 people,” Lethbridge said. “The most bread they can turn out is 8,000 loaves a day. We plan to get 60 bakeries going in the next few weeks, helping people to feed themselves.”

US - backed looting warlords

The United Nations (UN) said that its humanitarian efforts in Afghanistan are being hampered by large scale looting of food stocks by Afghan warlords. “Someone is taking the food intended for the people,’’ said UN spokesperson Fred Eckhard.

The Eastern Shura, a group of anti-Taliban warlords working closely with the US military, has been accused of hijacking four of six trucks loaded with rice that arrived from Pakistan last week.

In Jalalabad, the Taliban are gone, and the city and the surrounding Nangarhar Province is run once again by warlords and guerrillas.

Upon crossing the Jalalabad city line, new visitors are informed that they must reside in hotels controlled by the Eastern Shura, the loose coalition of three warlords who rule the province.

In one case late last month, a commander at Tora Bora sent notice to network television crews that they could interview wounded prisoners, if only they would pay $5,000.

“I personally resent this blatant corruption, and I can’t help thinking this is an eye-opener for how this country has been run in the past. And it does not bode well for the future.” said Jacob Sutton, 47, an Associated Press television cameraman.

On Jan. 5, as a CNN team left Jalalabad for Pakistan was particularly menacing. As the crew packed its gear, the hotel management summoned a group of about 50 armed soldiers, who gathered outside the door or took posts on the steps. Then the hotel manager began to list his demands before the team could exit: in addition to paying the hotel bill, plus one extra night for each guest, CNN would have to leave behind a color television, a refrigerator, a satellite dish and an encoder.

Ingrid Formanek, the CNN producer, negotiated with the manager for more than hour, and was finally allowed to leave for the price of the extra night and the television set. Formanek managed to extract a signed receipt from the manager that even included a $220 charge for “pure extortion.”

US blows up wedding guests

US forces launched a fierce bomb attack on the village of Qalaye Niazi, in the Paktia province, before dawn Dec. 29, as its inhabitants slept after a wedding celebration. Ten homes were destroyed and dozens of people killed.

“The Americans received incorrect information to bomb that place,” said Haji Saifullah, head of the tribal council, or shura, in Paktia province. “Maybe someone told them that they were Al Qaeda or Taliban. The person may have reported that for revenge.”

Survivors said a tribal rival had manipulated the Americans into attacking Qalaye Niazi to further his political ambitions in Paktia province.

The residents of Paktia said they would not forget.

“These planes will not be here forever,” a tribal leader of Paktia, told Reuters Television in the village this week. We will have a reckoning with these people in Kabul when the time is right.”

Accounts are not completely consistent, but several people said the planes flew three sorties over the village and a helicopter hovered close to the ground firing flares and then rockets.

Villagers said a number of women and children ran from the houses toward a dry pond and irrigation canals, probably in search of protection from the rockets and bombs, but were killed as they ran.

UN officials, said that 52 people died: 17 men, 10 women and 25 children. Among them were six neighbors who rushed to the village to rescue victims but were fired upon.

Near the destroyed homes, the ground is covered with unexploded ammunition—much of it Russian- or Chinese-made varieties that the United States does not use. Three buildings that were damaged were packed with unopened boxes of bullets.

Survivors say they stored the ammunition six weeks ago on the orders of retreating Taliban troops. When the regime fell they notified authorities but no one came to collect the ammunition. “We left it. What else were we supposed to do with it?” said Taj Mohammad, the village elder. It is unclear why the United States left the ammunition intact rather than destroying it.

After the bombing raid, Commander Matthew Klee, a spokesman at the US central command in Tampa, Florida, had reassuring news: “Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage.” Some of the things his follow-on reporters missed: bloodied children’s shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.

The charred flesh sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden’s henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.

The Pentagon says the village in was a haven for al-Qaeda and Taliban loyalists and that, in any event, the estimate of casualties is “unfounded.”

Somalia top on list

After Afghanistan, the US will likely focus its authority on denying terrorist groups sanctuary in places like Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia and the Philippines, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told The New York Times.

“Obviously Somalia comes up as a possible candidate for al-Qaida people to flee to precisely because the government is weak or nonexistent,” Wolfowitz was quoted as saying. The Central Intelligence Agency, he added, is “looking for exactly those sorts of people” that the United States can use as proxy forces, as it did with anti-Taliban factions in Afghanistan.

At the moment, US, German and French warships are stationed off the Somali coast, inspecting any ship entering Somalia’s territorial waters, in a bid to check for fleeing al-Qaida members who had been defeated in Afghanistan.

Two German warships with 1,600 troops aboard arrived in Djibouti on Jan. 9 to take part in operations against armed groups in Somalia. The contingent is the biggest movement of German troops outside its borders since the Second World war.

Sources in Nairobi said the Germans would take part in the second round of the US government’s worldwide “war on terrorism” which analysts predict will target Somalia and possibly neighboring Sudan.

While Somalia admits that al Qaia had operated in the country in the past, Somalia’s transitional government has strongly denied the presence of terrorist cells, and diplomats have warned that opposition warlords may use the US “war on terror” to try and damage their opponents.

Diplomats have warned that militia chiefs, who flourished in the chaos of civil war and control large parts of Somalia, have seized on the US anti-terror campaign as their own route back to power. Somalia’s Prime Minister Hassan Abshir Farah said Sunday that “bin Laden can’t come to Somalia and get safe haven.” US officials have often expressed concern that Somalia, which has not had a strong central government since the fall of president Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991, is home to individuals or groups linked to the al-Qaida network.

Bush administration officials said this week that the United States and leading NATO allies have increased military reconnaissance flights and other surveillance activities in Somalia.

Also, the Pentagon will soon have in the Arabian Sea three Marine Expeditionary Units, each with about 1,200 troops.

Some experts speculated that the Marines might be used for large-scale raids in Somalia. But others dismissed that as unlikely, and said that the United States probably would rely more on low-profile intelligence actions. State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said the administration had not decided what action, if any, it might take in Somalia.

“I’m not convinced that Somalia will look like Afghanistan,” said a Pentagon official. “It might be one of those things Rumsfeld describes as something you don’t see.”

The reconnaissance flights over Somalia include aerial surveillance by US EP-3, British Nimrod and French Atlantique aircraft, the officials said. The aircraft are helping identify targets for future bombing raids, such as supposed terrorist training camps in the southern and northern parts of Somalia and port facilities, a Pentagon official said.

Sources: AfricaOnline.com, Agence France Presse, BBC News, Daily Jang (Pakistan), IPS, Guardian (UK), Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Reuters, Toronto Globe and Mail, Washington Post, Washington Times

Greens urge Congress to investigate Bush ties to Enron

Washington, DC, Jan. 7— Leaders in the Green Party of the United States urged Congress to extend its investigation of Enron to the company’s ties to the Bush administration, in the wake of revelations that Enron cheated employees and misled energy consumers and investors as the company went bankrupt in late 2001.

“Enron represents the exercise of corporate power at its worst,” said Anita Rios, a member of the party’s national steering committee. “On one hand, President Bush and his advisors and supporters preach privatization of Social Security and converting it into personal investment in Wall Street securities. On the other hand, his leading corporate backer, Enron, allegedly bilked its own employees out of their invested retirement money and defrauded investors.”

As the Houston-based energy company collapsed in 2001, Enron’s employees and retirees with 401K plans, who had been prohibited from selling their Enron stock, lost their life savings. At the same time, the upper hierarchy of company officials dumped about $1 billion of their own stock as Enron filed for bankruptcy on Dec, 2, 2001.

“Advisors to President Bush who have connections with Enron have helped engineer economic policy, based on the principle that deregulation, tax breaks, tort reform and other handouts for wealthy citizens and corporations are good for America,” said Ben Manski, a Wisconsin Green who is also a steering committee member. “It’s more than a case of undue influence from energy lobbies over the White House. With the Bush presidency, the petrochemical corporations run the White House.”

Greens cite the following reasons for expanding the investigation by the Senate’s governmental affairs committee:

•Enron chairman Ken Lay — President Bush’s principle financial backer since he first went into politics — and Enron have donated $2 million to George W. Bush since 1993; a company memo in 2000 shows that Enron pressured employees to donate heavily to the Bush campaign. Enron donated more than any other energy firm to the Bush campaign. Lay’s wife donated $100,000 for Bush Inauguration festivities. Lay was the only energy executive to meet alone with Vice President Dick Cheney while the latter was drawing up a new national energy policy in secret. According to a New York Times article in May 200, Lay “had access to the team writing the White House’s energy report, which embraces several initiatives and issues dear to Enron.” (Lay also sits on the board of directors of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, along with President Bush’s father.)

•Karl Rove, Bush’s top political strategist, sold over $60,000 perhaps as much as $250,000) in Enron stock in 2001 after exposure for conflict of interest. Rove and Lay are known to have frequently discussed energy policy. Enron paid Lawrence B. Lindsay, President Bush’s top economic adviser, $50,000 in consulting fees in 2000. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick went straight from Enron’s payroll to his federal job; Army Secretary Thomas White Jr. is a former Enron executive and has held an estimated $50-$100 million in Enron stock.

•Enron, a power broker in natural gas, wholesale electricity, water, and other needs and services, has lobbied extensively for utility deregulation, especially the right to price-gouge customers and to profit from the volubility of energy stocks. The California legislature is currently investigating whether Enron and other companies deliberately manipulated the state’s electricity supply during the recent California energy crisis in order to drive up prices.

•Enron persuaded then-Texas Governor Bush to exempt energy firms from regulation, and to corral support for export credit agencies that would ensure financial handouts and bailouts when US companies undertake risky international projects in developing nations.

•According to Enron investigator Senator Carl Levin, Enron engaged in a “massive shell game with multiple layers of conflicts of interest. One such conflict, which apparently triggered the collapse, was the fact that debt was transferred to paper partnerships in which Enron officials had personal financial interests to make Enron look financially better.”

The accounting firm Arthur Anderson may have played a role in concealing such practices during audits.

The Green Party insists that the public also deserves to know how much Bush administration officials may have known about these improprieties.

“All Americans should be outraged at President Bush’s disdain for executive accountability,” said Tom Sevigny of Connecticut, another steering committee member.

“The President’s Enron connections, his refusal to comply with the General Accounting Office’s demand for information on how the administration crafted its Energy Plan, his invocation of executive privilege to block a congressional subpoena necessary to investigate FBI abuses, his decision to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty without consulting Congress, his pressure on Congress to grant the president ‘Fast Track’ authority to determine trade policy with no Congressional or public oversight, the gutting of constitutional protections by Attorney General John Ashcroft — these are attacks on the checks and balances that are supposed to make the US a democracy. What’s equally shameful is the willingness of many Republicans and Democrats to indulge this power grab.”

Since 1990, Enron has made $5.8 million in contributions to both Republican and Democratic politicians, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Source: Green Party of the United States