Indians save the
once-endangered vicuña

Bush attacks environment
‘scare stories’

GM giant abandons bid to
grow crops in Britain

Indians save the once-endangered vicuña

By Abraham Lama

Lima, Peru, Apr. 3 (Tierramérica) — The vicuña, a delicate cousin of the llama that lives wild in the Andes Mountains at altitudes of more than 13,123 feet, is no longer facing extinction, thanks to the decision by the Peruvian state to hand authority over these animals to the highland indigenous communities.

In 1965, the international community was alarmed by estimates that only 25,000 of this species, native to Peru, were left. The vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) were pushed on to the endangered animals list by bands of poachers who shot and killed them for their precious wool.

The wool of the vicuña became one of the most expensive fibers in the world, with prices ranging from $437 to $650 per kilo.

The lower-end price “corresponds to so-called dirty wool, that is, the wool direct from the animal,” and the higher price is that of cleaned and processed wool, Rony Garibay, expert from the government’s National Council on South American Camelids (CONACS).

In 1975, the vicuña was added to the list of the Conventional on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES), which regulates the trade of wool and clothing made from its wool.

But that was not enough. In 1987, ownership of the wild herds of vicuña was handed over to the local indigenous communities.

Today there are 149,000 vicuña in Peru and 15,000 in Bolivia, and it is considered a species free of risk of extinction — if the current protection mechanisms remain in place, which have allowed the population to grow eight percent annually.

CONACS believes that this approach to management could lead to a population of 300,000 within a few years, says Garibay.

Antonio Brack Egg, an expert on vicuña, cites even more optimistic and ambitious figures: by 2021 there could be a million of these animals in Peru, and there are 10 million hectares of appropriate Andean mountain pastures.

“It is not an excessive figure, because it is estimated that in the times of the Inca there were around two million vicuña,” although “it is clear that the Incan Empire covered territories that now belong to Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina and Chile,” he added.

Vicuña wool is 10.8 to 11.4 micros (thousandths of a millimeter) thick, even finer than cashmere, which comes from an Asian goat and is 16 micros thick.

These cousins of the llama and the camel do not reproduce in captivity, and live in areas that are not suitable for conventional agriculture or livestock practices. As such, the only way to ensure their survival is to protect the conditions of their life in the wild.

In the Inca era, it was prohibited to sacrifice this animal, because it was property of the king. During the colonial period, they survived protected by traditional indigenous respect.

The Incas trapped the vicuña in “los chacos,” a festive massive ceremony in which hundreds of people, forming a human chain, would herd them — without causing them harm — into temporary corrals where the animals were sheared.

These delicate animals suffer serious harm if caught with a lasso, and because they produce relatively little wool (around 200 grams per animal), massive shearing operations are needed to collect sufficient amounts.

In the early 20th century, the major Paris fashion designers discovered the virtues of vicuña wool, which sparked a high demand and the uncontrolled persecution of the species. In order to make the shearing process easier, poachers would chase the animals in trucks and then kill them all once they were corralled.

In the 1940s, the first Peruvian government actions related to protecting the vicuña were to declare it a national heritage species, prohibit hunting and provide small sums in compensation to indigenous communities for the forage the animals consumed on their land.

Protection of the herds was entrusted to the rural police, but they proved insufficient in number to patrol the areas, and the Indians were not directly involved in the effort.

In 1987, along with the official decision to hand ownership of the wild herds over to the indigenous communities, official agencies were set up to support the marketing of vicuña wool through cooperatives or mixed companies.

The approximately 200 indigenous communities that own the vicuña are prohibited from killing them, and may only shear the animals every two years, under government supervision.

“We are working so that the communities will one day export the combed and carded fibres, but reaching that point will be a long process, because their local governments are always strapped for cash and want to sell the wool immediately after shearing,” said Garibay.

The Indians are organized to protect the herds and have set up patrols that carry firearms to scare off potential poachers.

Once a year, after the “pagapaga,” the individual ceremony of thanks to “pachamama” (Mother Earth), the residents of each village take part in the ancient and festive traditions of “los chacos.”

The human chains, amidst songs and the beating of drums, guide the vicuña from the plains to the corrals where they will be shorn of their wool, under the watch of CONACS supervisors, and often observed by invited environmentalists and journalists.

Bush attacks environment ‘scare stories’
Secret email gives advice on denying climate change

By Antony Barnett

New York, New York, Apr. 4 — George W. Bush’s campaign workers have hit on an age-old political tactic to deal with the tricky subject of global warming — deny, and deny aggressively.

The Observer has obtained a remarkable email sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen advising them what to say when questioned on the environment in the run-up to November’s election. The advice: tell them everything’s rosy.

It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is “getting better,” the world’s forests are “spreading, not deadening,” oil reserves are “increasing, not decreasing,” and the “world’s water is cleaner and reaching more people.”

The email — sent on Feb. 4 — warns that Democrats will “hit us hard” on the environment. “In an effort to help your members fight back, as well as be aggressive on the issue, we have prepared the following set of talking points on where the environment really stands today,” it states.

The memo, headed “From medi-scare to air-scare,” goes on: “From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation’s waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can’t stress enough that extremists are screaming ‘Doomsday!’ when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.”

Among the memo’s assertions are “global warming is not a fact,” “links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy,” and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 percent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming.

It gives a list of alleged facts taken from contentious sources. For instance, to back its claim that air quality is improving it cites a report from Pacific Research Institute — an organization that has received $130,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998.

The memo also lifts details from the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. On the Republicans’ claims that deforestation is not a problem, it states: “About a third of the world is still covered with forests, a level not changed much since World War II. The world’s demand for paper can be permanently satisfied by the growth of trees in just five percent of the world’s forests.”

The memo’s main source for the denial of global warming is Richard Lindzen, a climate-sceptic scientist who has consistently taken money from the fossil fuel industry. His opinion differs substantially from most climate scientists, who say that climate change is happening.

But probably the most influential voice behind the memo is Frank Luntz, a Republican Party strategist. In a leaked 2002 memo, Luntz said: “The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.”

Luntz has been roundly criticized in Europe. Last month Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, attacked him for being too close to Exxon.

Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace condemned the messages given in the Republican email. He said: “Bush’s spin doctors have been taking their brief from dodgy scientists with an Alice in Wonderland view of the world’s environment. They want us to think the air is getting cleaner and that global warming is a myth. This memo shows it is Exxon Mobil driving US policy, when it should be sound science.”

The memo has met some resistance from Republican moderates.

Republican Mike Castle, who heads a group of 69 moderate House members, senators and governors, says the strategy doesn’t address the fact that pollution continues to be a health threat. “If I tried to follow these talking points at a town hall meeting with my constituents, I’d be booed.”

Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who left the Republican Party in 2001 to become an independent partly over its anti-green agenda, called the memo “outlandish” and an attempt to deceive voters.

“They have a head-in-the-sand approach to it. They’re just sloughing off the human health impacts -- the premature deaths and asthma attacks caused by power plant pollution,” Jeffords said.

Republican House Conference director Greg Cist, who sent the email, said: “It’s up to our members if they want to use it or not. We’re not stuffing it down their throats.”

He said the memo was spurred by concerns that environmental groups were using myths to try to make the Republicans look bad.

“We wanted to show how the environment has been improving,” Cist said. “We wanted to provide the other side of the story.”

Source: Observer (UK)