CARACAS - The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) is putting together a plan in Venezuela to provide training to indigenous communities about environmental issues.

Enrique Leff, coordinator of the UNEP Environmental Training Network, told Tierramérica that his organization is designing a pilot project for indigenous groups, to provide them with information on the sustainable management of natural resources.

The program, a joint effort with the Venezuelan Environment Ministry, will work together with other higher education centers that are also involved with native communities, Leff said.

The Network operates through the efforts of public officials, environmental experts, academics and representatives of non-governmental organizations.

RIO DE JANEIRO - The Brazilian Enterprise for Agricultural Research (EMBRAPA) has several genetic modification projects underway, but has not run up against the protests environmentalists have launched against other transgenic endeavors.

At its biotech center, the company is attempting to produce a papaya plant that is resistant to the virus that causes "aneliform spotting," a disease that forced Brazil to move papaya plantations away from the major cities - and their markets.

EMBRAPA plans also to develop plants using human genes in order to produce hormones in a more cost-efficient way than through chemical methods.

Such development projects, which reduce the need for agro-chemicals, generate fewer protests from environmentalists than others, such as the genetically modified soy produced by the transnational giant Monsanto that is resistant to the secondary effects of the company's own herbicide Roundup.

The Brazilian Consumer Defense Institute and the international environmental group Greenpeace, which have won lawsuits to ban genetically modified seeds, maintain that no transgenic process should be commercially produced without first proving there are no risks to the environment or to human health.

SAN JOSE - A network of non-governmental organizations symbolically declared Costa Rica a nation free of oil exploitation, and asked the government to reject any future plans for extraction of fossil fuels.

The National Anti-Petroleum Association, which unites more than 40 environmental groups, stated in a manifesto presented before the national Congress - and addressed to the international community - that it rejects all oil exploration and drilling in Costa Rica.

The association also called on the government to make an official declaration that the country shall be free of all petroleum exploitation projects.

In September, the Supreme Court of Justice annulled a concession to the US-based company MKJ Exploration because the permit had been granted without the consent of the communities living in the affected area.

LIMA - The secretariat of the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), based in the Peruvian capital, is drawing up an ecological action plan for the meeting of the Andean Committee of Environmental Authorities, to be held in January in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.

The plan in the works calls for the creation of an early warning system in the exchange of environmental emergency information between Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, the five CAN member countries.

Once approved in Santa Cruz, the initiative will be debated at the CAN ministerial meeting, slated for May, along with other measures related to the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

* Source: Inter Press Service