BOGOTA - A thousand families in the southern Colombian department of Putumayo committed themselves on Mar 16 to take part in a government-sponsored initiative to eliminate 1,000 hectares of illegal coca crops by hand - in exchange for reliable supplies of food.

The government has launched a program for the manual and voluntary eradication of illicit coca crops - the raw material for cocaine - involving farm families that own fewer than four hectares of land.

Such pacts with farmers replace aerial spraying, a coca destruction method local communities reject because it jeopardizes human health and the environment. Authorities say manual eradication methods will be implemented on 15,000 of the 130,000 hectares planted with coca in Colombia.

NAIROBI - The executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Klaus Toepfer, has criticized US President George W. Bush for refusing to enact measures that would curb emissions of gases that contribute to global warming.

''Without US leadership, effective global action on climate change may not be possible,'' Toepfer stated.

Bush announced on Mar 13 that his government would not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from electrical energy plants in the United States, due to the costs it would imply for the already suffering energy industry and for consumers.

Carbon dioxide emissions, generated from the combustion of fossil fuels like coal and oil, are the principal cause of climate change.

HAVANA - Brazil, Argentina and Cuba inter-connected themselves in mid-March through a regional radar network, a project that will strengthen Latin American cooperation in the fight to halt climate change, say the authorities involved.

This monitoring system, based on laser, allows scientists to measure the atmospheric concentration of gases that contribute to the depletion of the ozone layer or to global warming.

The Cuban station is based in Camaguey, 570 km from Havana, and is the only one of its kind in the Caribbean.

Cuban researches hope this accord with the South American partners will serve as a foundation for a future bi-continental network that would even include Canada and the United States.

BUENOS AIRES - Some 60 civil society organizations, including farmers' groups, have joined forces in Argentina to fight the construction of the Corpus dam on the Paraná River, a joint Paraguay-Argentina project that was already rejected in a 1996 plebiscite.

The movement, with support from Catholic and Baptist religious groups, opposes the government's initiative to revive plans to build a four-billion-dollar hydroelectric plant shared by the Argentine province of Misiones and Paraguay's Itapúa province.

The project was rejected five years ago by 90 percent of the participants in a Misiones plebiscite, which had a turnout of 63 percent of registered voters.