TEGUCIGALPA - A group of Honduran investors built the first "clean energy" plant run on waste pulp from the African palm. Constructed in northern Honduras, it can generate 600 kilowatts per hour.

''It's a pilot project that we hope to expand to the rest of the country and throughout Central America,'' Carlos Menjívar, head of Palmas Centroamericanas (PALCASA), one of the project's promoters, told Tierramérica.

The energy plant, in the northern city of Guaymitas in Yoro department, was built with a five-million-dollar contribution from the Central American Economic Integration Bank, BCIE.

Its palm oil extraction capacity reaches 2,500 tons per month, and the plant is expected to supply up to 60 percent of Guaymitas energy demand.

PALCASA is the first Honduran company of its type involving small and medium farmers, and has more than 400 investors.

BUENOS AIRES - A delegation from Ecuador's Kichwa indigenous community, which is embroiled in a dispute with the Argentine oil company CGC in the Ecuadorian Amazon, will head to Buenos Aires this month to meet with civil society groups and officials to seek support for their cause.

A thousand Indians from the Amazon town of Sarayacu since 1996 have been fighting oil drilling by the CGC in what is known as Block 23, located on indigenous ancestral lands. The Kichwa are demanding their right to maintain the virgin forest free from exploitation.

Headed by indigenous leader Marlon Santi, the delegation will try to meet with Argentine officials from the Foreign Ministry, with representatives of CGC itself and others.

The Sarayacu case has already won the support of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights (an independent body of the Organization of American States) and the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

LIMA - Peru lacks an effect system for preventing extreme impacts from natural disasters, despite being one of the world's most seismically unstable countries and bearing the brunt of El Niño climate phenomena, including floods, drought and mudslides, says president of Red Cross - Peru, Edgardo Calderón.

''It is not enough to hold talks at schools and disseminate information through the press. We must renew preventative strategies throughout the country,'' said Calderón, whose organization revealed that from 1994 to 2003, 445 people died and some four million were left homeless as a result of natural disasters, including earthquakes.

The Civil Defense Institute is drawing up an initiative to be presented to Parliament for setting up a disaster prevention plan and conducting studies of the city of Lima's vulnerability to earthquakes, he added.

Health Minister Pilar Mazzetti told Tierramérica that, among other things, it is essential to increase resources to deal with unseasonable freezes in the mountainous Andes region, ''where geographic vulnerability is aggravated by extreme levels of poverty.''

MEXICO CITY - Many types of air pollution in the Mexican capital, including many that cause cancer, cannot be monitored due to the lack of financial support from the government, which ''appears to be uninterested in research,'' complain scientists.

''There are many carcinogens in the city's air, such as benzene, mercury and others, whose levels, origin and health impacts are not known because there is no money to pay for studies,'' Violeta Múgica, a scientist working with the Metropolitan Autonomous University, told Tierramérica.

In the Mexican capital -- also an air pollution capital of the world -- there are state funds for monitoring contaminants like ozone at ground level, nitrogen oxide, lead and suspended particulate. ''There is follow-up for the principal substances, but many other contaminants are excluded,'' said Múgica.

In Mexico, less than 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product is spent on scientific research in general.