CARACAS - Twenty farmers from Ocumare de la Costa, 120 km northwest of Caracas, produced 5,000 kilograms of cacao without using agro-chemicals in their cultivation, qualifying it as an "organic product" for the certifying entity Biolatina, based in Peru.

"It was a joint effort, over nearly three years, of the association of farmers, government agencies and our (non-governmental) Tierra Viva Foundation," project director Moisés Mérida told Tierramérica.

"Now we hope to open a market for this in the United States and Europe, where it can sell at 10 to 15 percent more than conventional cacao," he said.

The project aims to "reach all farmers near the Henri Pittier National Park," an unusual mountain rainforestalong Venezuela's central Caribbean coast, where Chuao cacao is produced, one of the most aromatic in the world.

RIO DE JANEIRO - Brazil's National Anti-Drugs Council decided to create a multidisciplinary work group to draft norms and create a list of the institutions that use in religious rites the Amazonian plant ayahuasca, which has hallucinogenic properties.

Official regulation that "consolidates the legitimacy" of ayahuasca is a positive step, overcoming the obstacles of sending to followers in other countries, said Alex Polari, coordinator of ecological agriculture projects for the religion known as Santo Daime.

But "we propose to take the issue out of the anti-drug policy sphere," assigning it, for example, to an inter-ministerial commission for religious minorities, he told Tierramérica.

Ayahuasca, also known as "yagé", has been consumed for millennia by indigenous tribes in the Amazon Basin, and is legal in many Latin American and European countries, and even the United States.

TEGUCIGALPA - An annual average of 145,000 cubic meters of latifoliate and 600,000 cubic meters of conifer lumber are illegally traded in Honduras, costing the country 18 million dollars a year in lost revenues, according to an official source.

Ramón Custodio, national human rights commissioner, said that according to a World Bank study, illegal lumber production in Honduras is "alarming".

"We are going to confront the major predators who are behind the lumber trafficking and the destruction of our forests," Custodio told Tierramérica, as he announced the country's first independent forest monitoring effort, which will oversee public policies for protecting natural resources and is supported by the international organization Global Witness.

SANTIAGO - An international offensive led by the U.S.-based International Rivers Network seeks to prevent financial agencies from funding the Spanish transnational Endesa for building four huge hydroelectric dams on the Baker and Pascua rivers, 1,800 km south of the Chilean capital.

Flavia Liberona, head of the non-governmental group Ecosistemas, entrusted with coordinating the campaign locally, told Tierramérica that "in Chile the government doesn't have the ability to regulate Endesa, which decides how and when it will build the dams, and the National Energy Commission can't say no."

"The environmental impact evaluation isn't responding either," she said. That is why "we believe the campaign has to be international."

According to Endesa, the project will be ready in 2008 and activated between 2012 and 2018. It will generate 2,430 megawatts, requiring the construction of 2,000 km of transmission lines and flooding of some 9,000 hectares.

HAVANA - Drought and hurricanes are the greatest climate challenges for small farmers in Cuba, who are reducing the impact of disaster through preventive measures, technology, and cultivating crops that require less water.

"Planting the platano between July and August helps to reduce damage from tropical cyclones, more frequent in Septeber and October, because the plants are still small. In the following June I can already have my harvest," Julio Torres, a farmer outside the central city of Santa Clara, told Tierramérica.

Torres also protects his land against fire, most frequent in this time of year when rain is scarce. "I always make a firebreak trench with the tractor," he explained. This and other steps against disasters in rural areas were implemented beginning Feb. 28 in all Cuban provinces.

MEXICO CITY - A respected marine researcher said there is no evidence to confirm, as environmentalist groups do, that the periodic death of dolphins on the Pacific coast at Ciudad del Carmen are caused by oil exploration and drilling activities.

From 2004 to now, 41 dead dolphins have been found on Ciudad del Carmen beaches, an area where the dolphin population is around 800.

"Many of the animals died when they were trapped in nets or by some sort of human intervention. The others we are not clear on the caues, but we are investigating, and soon there will be a report," Gerardo Rivas, a licensed expert at the Autonomous University del Carmen for conducting cetacean autopsies, told Tierramérica.

So far there is no evidence indicating that the deaths were due to petroleum activities, he said.

The environmental group Mangrove Network maintains that these marine mammals have died as a result of petroleum industry activities of the state-run company Pemex, and that the officials are trying to hide the evidence.

SAO PAULO - SAVE Brazil, a non-governmental organization here representing BirdLife International, has completed the first map of threatened Brazilian bird, indicating 163 key areas for bird conservation in 15 states.

These ecosystems include the Mata Atlantica, Caatinga, Cerrado and Pampas.

The study shows that 37 percent of the conservation areas in the Mata Atlantica have no effective protection. In the other ecosystems the situation is also alarming.

"Of the eight areas locatedin the Pampas, five have no legal protection; in the Caatinga, eight of the 27 areas identified are protected; and in the Cerrado it's just three in 20," Pedro Develey, biologist and co-author of the study, told Tierramérica.

The five-year study will be released this month during the 8th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba.