BUENOS AIRES - Solar energy may seem to be a futuristic dream to most Argentine people, but a local manufacturer of photoelectric panels was recently acquired by one of the world's leaders in the industry.

The sale of Solartec to the Japanese Kyocera International for 50 million dollars is an indication of the economic potential behind transforming a renewable resource - solar radiation - into electricity. It is a business that is growing 20 percent each year, according to those who took part in this major transaction.

With that kind of expansion, a clean source of energy - compared to petroleum, coal, natural gas or nuclear energy - is establishing itself as a competitive alternative on the world market.

MEXICO CITY - Lead contamination persists in the city of Torreón, in northern Mexico, say ecologists, but the government and Peñoles, the mining company accused of causing it, claim that the problem has been resolved.

Environmental groups reached an agreement in August with the country's top producer of gold and lead to submit the case to the environmental health division of the US-based Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Torreón authorities blocked the initiative. According to researcher Iván Restrepo, it is an attempt to prevent this controversial issue from going beyond Mexico's borders.

Peñoles polluted the environment with tons of chemicals. The government imposed control measures on the company in 1999 after approximately 2,000 children in Torreón, a city of 500,000, showed symptoms of lead poisoning.

QUITO - Indigenous peoples and peasants who have made their homes on the slopes of Itchimbía mountain in the Ecuadorian capital do not have electricity or clean water, but did come up with an idea for a residential ecological park.

The houses of the Itchimbía Cooperative of Ecological Housing, created in 1996 by families who arrived in Quito from the countryside in search of work, were planned in a way that allows them to leave the native forest there intact.

The police tried to evict the residents, on the order of the municipal authorities at the time, but the inhabitants chained themselves together until the officials gave up. Now the municipal government has decided to adopt the Itchimbía project as a model for other environmental housing programs.

BOGOTA - Coffee plantations protect native forests and in turn benefit from their biological diversity, say the participants of the First International Forum on Coffee and Biodiversity, held in Colombia.

Coffee growers and other experts met in mid-August in the Andean town of Chinchiná and designed strategies for the sustainable use and conservation of biological resources in the coffee-growing areas of Colombia, the world's second leading producer of the bean after Brazil.

The forum participants pointed out that coffee plantations help protect native forest species, which find shelter among the coffee plants, while the forests and their biological wealth support the coffee crops by providing nutrients for the soil and natural pest controls.


*Source: Inter Press Service.