RIO DE JANEIRO - A powder sprinkled over water, creating a thin film, could reduce evaporation, say scientists who are working on ways to fight water shortages. Evaporation is a problem in Brazil's semi-arid Northeast region, where 75 percent of the water in its reservoirs is lost to this natural phenomenon.

The product developed by Lotus Environmental Chemical, a company affiliated with a University of Sao Paulo research center, has the potential to cut evaporation by half, the project's scientific director Marcos Gugliotti told Tierramérica.

In open-air tanks, evaporation rates varied from 16 to 44 percent under different conditions.

Gugliotti hopes to conclude testing in different reservoirs next year, before releasing the product, which is low cost and one kilogram is sufficient to cover a hectare of water surface area. But application must be repeated every 48 hours, which makes its use in large reservoirs difficult.

GUATEMALA CITY - Local and national authorities are calling on the Guatemalan Congress to declare El Amay mountain, in the northern department of Quiché, a protected area, because it is one of the country's few cloud forests and is habitat for symbolic Guatemalan species like the quetzal bird.

"At the current rate, in some 12 years the forest cover of the mountain could be lost," Ronny Roma, of the government's National Council for Protected Areas, CONAP, told Tierramérica.

Roma says that the mountain is home to a great diversity of species, both plant and animal, but it also holds important water resources and archeological remnants from the pre-Colombus era.

"We recognize the ecological wealth and the tourism potential of our lands, which is why we want to preserve them," said Víctor Hugo Figueroa, mayor of Uspantán, a municipality which shares the mountain with Chicamán municipality.

The two are part of Quiché department, located some 170 km north of the Guatemalan capital and on the Mexican border.

BOGOTA - The Colombian Institute of Rural Development, INCODER, has banned tuna boats from fishing in the Pacific Ocean until Sep. 12. The measure is intended to protect the endangered yellowfin (Thunnus albacares) and bigeye (Thunnus obesus) tuna species.

The populations of the yellowfin and bigeye are both below their maximum sustainable average yield, according to official studies.

During the ban, which began Aug. 1, the trawlers cannot fish for these species, or they risk sanctions from INCODER.

Manuela Herrera, biologist with the University of the Atlantic, told Tierramérica that in 1992 Colombia signed the La Jolla Agreement of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, which establishes sustainable methods for capturing adult tuna.

The Colombian Pacific sees annual fishing reaching a volume of around 450,000 tons, of which 150,000 tons are tuna.

MEXICO CITY - Activists received with skepticism a scientific report released this month with great fanfare that assures that no trace of transgenic maize was found in a specific area of Mexico, a country where the presence of genetically modified corn has been recorded since 2001.

"There's something strange going on here, because behind the study, whose results could be legitimate, there seem to be transnational and local business interests," said Silvia Ribeiro, spokeswoman in Latin America for the Canada-based non-governmental ETC Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration.

The study, published in the U.S. journal of the Academy of Sciences, was edited by Barbara Schaal, who works in a laboratory of the University of Washington, sponsored by the transgenic seed production company Monsanto, Ribeiro said in a Tierramérica interview.

The authorities' fanfare surrounding the release of the report generated some suspicion, because other reports published by government agencies indicating that genetically modified maize does indeed exist in different areas of Mexico, have been kept quiet and hardly publicized.

According to José Tron, of the National Chamber of Industrialized Maize, the new study "levels the road for the commercial planting of transgenic corn."