news20100418gdn1

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > World news > Ethiopia]
White honey grows scarce as bees abandon Ethiopia's parched peaks
｛白蜜が希少に、蜂がエチオピアの乾き切った山々を去る｝

Drought forces bees into valleys in search of flowers, meaning they produce yellow honey
Alex Duval Smith, Ethiopia
The Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010
Article history

The truffle of the apiary world – rare white honey from Ethiopia's highest peaks – is in danger of disappearing, according to beekeepers in the Tigray region. "No rain for the flowers,'' said Ashenaf Abera as he stood on his rocky, parched slope in the northern Ethiopian region whose famine inspired Bob Geldof to stage Live Aid in 1985. "The bees need high-altitude flowers for the white honey. When they cannot find them, they go to other plants and produce yellow honey.''

Abera is paid £65 a month to mind 270 hives for the Asira Metira monastery, one of a dozen religious centres in an area whose 4th-century rock churches are among the wonders of the world. "We know about bees,'' said honey seller Sheikh Mohamed Ahamedin. He grips a large screwdriver with both hands to ladle a dollop of thick and lumpy white honey out of a plastic bucket. It is snow-white and tastes sweet and more waxy than yellow honey.

"The price is the highest it has ever been this year, because of scarcity,'' said Ahamedin who sells white honey for £7.75 per kilo. Last year he charged £4.50. Ethiopia is Africa's biggest honey producer and the world's fourth biggest beeswax exporter. After coffee, gold and cowhide, bee products are major contributors to the economy, especially through exports to Italy, where white honey is considered a delicacy. Bees' products are the only export item produced by Tigray's impoverished 4.6 million people, whose region is said to be one of the worst-hit in the world by climate change.

Such is Ethiopians' love of honey that apitherapy clinics offer treatments for many ailments. The national drink is tej – honey mead.

Beekeepers are increasingly scrapping traditional mud hives for square box-like hives from Europe which produce a higher yield. "The bees will not make white honey in the modern hives, but at least with them we can obtain a decent yield of yellow honey,'' he said.

The region's bee population is also in decline, with climate change and deforestation to blame. Tigray was a wealthy, lush region 150 years ago when its king, Johannes IV, brought a carpenter from Italy to fashion his imposing throne from local juniper wood. But wars with Italy, Egypt, Sudan and neighbouring Eritrea led to deforestation. '"Without the trees, the rainwater – which seems to be declining – does not run off the limestone in a useful way. That is why we end up with a landscape of rocks and little else,'' said local water expert Leul Fisseha.


[Business > Anglo American]
Anglo American under fire for prospecting in the Alaskan wilderness
｛英国系米国人、アラスカの野生荒廃で非難される｝

Alaskan tribal leaders say open-pit mine will endanger valuable salmon habitat
John Stevens
The Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010
Article history

Anglo American, the London-listed mining group, will this week face accusations that it risks damaging one of the world's most valuable salmon habitats.

Alaskan tribal leaders and fishermen will come to London on Thursday to tell the company's annual meeting that plans to build an open-pit gold and copper mine in the Bristol Bay region will destroy the breeding grounds of sockeye salmon.

They claim that mining the ore deposit, which is located underneath some of the most important salmon spawning grounds, will generate as much as 10bn tonnes of mine waste and require 160bn litres (35bn gallons) of water to be taken from rivers.

Bobby Andrew, a spokesman for Nunamta Aulukestai, a group representing eight local villages, said that he hopes to persuade shareholders to reconsider the project.

"We do not trust that they [Anglo American] will work in an environmentally safe way," he said. "I am not opposed to mining, but the mine is in a wrong location. We, the people who live here, rely on the renewable resource of salmon."

The mine's opponents have already won the support of large businesses in the UK and overseas. Six UK jewellers, including Goldsmiths and Beaverbrooks, have joined eight US retailers, led by Tiffany & Co, which have pledged not to source gold from the proposed mine.

However, Anglo American has said that it will pursue the development only if it can be operated responsibly.

James Wyatt-Tilby, a company spokesman, said: "At the moment this is just an exploration project and there is no mine plan at this stage. We have been very clear that if we cannot build this mine in a safe and responsible way then we will not build it at all."

The protest follows a string of revolts at annual meetings by environmentally aware investors. Last week, BP faced a call from several large investors to review its oil sands activities. A similar shareholder resolution will be voted on at Shell's annual meeting, to be held on 18 May.

news20100418gdn2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > World news > Brazil]
Avatar director James Cameron joins Amazon tribe's fight to halt giant dam
{アバターのジェイムズキャメロン監督、巨大ダムの中止を求めるアマゾン種族の戦いに参入｝

Avatar's stars and director James Cameron are supporting the Xingu people who say the giant Belo Monte hydroelectric project will wreck their rainforest way of life
Tom Phillips
The Observer, Sunday 18 April 2010
Article history

One by one, the tribal leaders of the Brazilian Xingu took to their feet, wearing yellow and red feather headdresses and clutching thick wooden clubs and spears. Having travelled for days to reach the gathering in the isolated village of Mrotidjam, the Xikrin Kayapó elders stepped forward to address their visitor, a man they knew simply as Camerón.

"If they build this dam, our children will die," said one, his eyes painted a fiery red with seeds from the urucum tree. "There will be no more fish, no more hunting," another told the outsider. "I want my grandchildren to live in peace," said a third. "The dam will take that away."

Sitting before them on a wooden schoolroom chair, the guest, better known outside the rainforest as Hollywood player and director of the blockbuster 3D film Avatar, James Cameron, listened intently before addressing his hosts. "We're here to listen to what you are saying, to hear your concerns and, because I am a film-maker, to share this with the outside world," he said. "We're just here to help in any way we can."

Sitting with him as he spoke were Sigourney Weaver and Joel David Moore, who starred in Avatar, which charts the fight of the fictitious Na'vi people against outside attempts to pillage their resources on the planet Pandora.

Until last month Cameron had never been to the Brazilian Amazon, home to the world's greatest tropical rainforest. Now, however, he has become the figurehead of an international campaign against Amazon destruction and specifically the multibillion-dollar Belo Monte hydroelectric dam project, which many of the Xingu region's indigenous residents believe will wreak havoc in communities, flooding land in some places, drying up rivers in others and triggering an influx of workers, prostitution and disease.

It seems Cameron has found his own Pandora, a situation, as he said, "where a real-life Avatar confrontation is in progress". Now he plans to shoot a 3D "experiential" documentary about the plight of the region's people and their battle against Belo Monte.

"We've got a bit of a spotlight on us right now to raise awareness in certain key areas… and I think that is important," Cameron, who is working in Brazil alongside the US-based NGO Amazon Watch, told the Observer last week during his most recent trip deep into the rainforest, where he travelled for more than 10 hours by speedboat to meet dozens of angry shamans who are fighting renewed plans to build the dam.

"They [the indigenous leaders] came to us and said, 'Look, we have been fighting this [dam] for 20 years and we are not succeeding. They [the authorities] are just steamrollering over us, they have broken their promises and in any way that you can help, please help us.' At that point it sort of becomes personal. It's not a bunch of environmental impact studies. It's personal," said Cameron.

The dam on the Xingu river would cost an estimated £7bn and be the third biggest of its kind. The Brazilian government has described the project as a "gift from God" and a key ingredient in attempts to boost the country's economy. But environmentalists and many indigenous leaders believe the dam is another step towards the destruction of the rainforest and its traditional peoples.

"We believe that Belo Monte is just the beginning," said Sheila Juruna, an indigenous leader from the Xingu region who has been involved in Cameron's two recent visits to Brazil. "If we let them do this they will end up… killing off Brazil's Indians once and for all."

Cameron said witnessing indigenous ceremonies and meetings in the Amazon had made him reflect on the plight of the North American Indians and inspired him to attempt to give the "global consciousness… a heads up".

"I felt like I was 130 years back in time watching what the Lakota Sioux might have been saying at a point when they were being pushed and they were being killed and they were being asked to displace and they were being given some form of compensation," he said. "This was a driving force for me in the writing of Avatar – I couldn't help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future… and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation… because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society – which is what is happening now – they would have fought a lot harder."

Not all Brazilians have taken kindly to Cameron's engagement with the indigenous cause. "This type of intervention strengthens the belief… that the aim of the ecological movement is simply to maintain the status quo of the world economy," one columnist wrote in the Monitor Mercantil newspaper last week, adding that "Cameron's colonialist message" was an attempt to "exterminate the future of Brazil". Brazil's outgoing energy minister, Edison Lobão, told the Record news channel that Cameron understood "nothing about electric energy". "We don't try to get involved in cinema, because we know nothing about it," he said. "I wouldn't try to make Avatar, would I? It would be horrific."

But in many of the Xingu's indigenous villages, the man they call Camerón has been an instant hit. "It's very important that he has come here," said Mokuka Kayapó, a leader from the Moikarako village, after meeting the Canadian director. "Now he must invite us to go where he lives to tell the people our truth, in our language."

Cameron also defends himself from accusations of meddling. "I think one of the biggest questions is: 'What is your standing? What are you gringos doing here? What gives you the right to tell us how to run things within our country? It's our problem, it's not your problem.' I get all that," he said. "But North America is Brazil's future. We can come to Brazil from the future and say: 'Don't do this.'

"If this goes forward then every other hydroelectric project in the Amazon basin gets a blank cheque. It's now a global issue. The Amazon rainforest is so big and so powerful a piece of the overall climate picture that its destruction will affect everyone."

Last week there appeared to have been a temporary stay of execution for those opposed to the dam after a judge suspended the Belo Monte bidding process, due to begin on Tuesday, arguing that the project could cause "irreparable [environmental] damage". But by Friday the decision had been overturned, paving the way for the dam's construction.

Before bidding farewell to the Kayapó elders, Cameron made a speech. "The rivers and the forests have a moral right to continue to exist as they have for thousands of years," he said. "And I believe that you have a moral right to exist as you have for thousands of years."

Inside the wooden hut, at the centre of the Mrotidjam village, the leaders responded with applause. Outside, by the riverbank, vultures hovered menacingly in a cobalt sky. "Probably the defining battle in human history is happening during our lifetime," said Cameron. "But the Chinese curse says, 'May you live in interesting times', [and] it's a curse, it's not a blessing, because if we fuck this up we've fucked it up for all of time."