Typical agriculture sectors like animal production and processing, aquaculture and its processing, and fruit and vegetable processing, can be water-intensive and generate complex and sometimes severe pollution. Controlling pollution hinges on knowing its quantity (wastewater and solid waste volume) and characteristics (major pollutants and their concentration range, nature of wastes, …
Only one-fifthy of the total number of lymphoma (tumor of the lymphid tissue or lymph nodes) cases reported in northern India are women says on going US-sponsored study at the ALL India Institute of Medical Scitnoes (AIIMS), New Delhi. Doctors at the Institute have examined 200 patients from several north …
Intellectual property rights have been given avirtualgoby in Pakistan. The evidence is the flood of pirated books, music, audio casets settes and computer software, mo smuggled in from the Far East Japan and Hong Ka China, Pakistani environmentalists, howe tend to challenge the concept of in lectual property rights as …
A QUIET revolution is gradually transforming the landscape in the villages of Rajasthan's Udaipur district, turning barren and denuded land into thriving patches of green vegetation; Sangwa is one such village. On August 4, Jagdish Chandra Ameta proudly received the Indira Priyadarshim Vriksharmtra Award for 1993, given to the Sangwa …
PROGRAMME for Technological Careers (Protec), a South African educational charity is hellbent on nullifying the myth created by the erstwhile apartheid regime: Blacks can't do science. It is now determined to rekindle Black children's enthusiasm for technology by introducing special school lessons. For the first time, technology is brought into …
TRYING to forge a strong link between the researchers and the industrialists has proved to be a thankless job for the British government. The office of science and technology is about to come up with a report on a unique scheme called Realising Our Potential Awards (ROPA). Introduced in the …
Sri Lankan environmentalists fear that unregulated exports of exotic species of birds and fish could spell big trouble in the y future. Jagath Gurawardena, spokesperson for the Society for Environmental Education, quoted in The it Sunday Leader, points out that nearly all of the indigenous species of fish that are …
MEMBERS of the Samahang Mangangwil 79 (Sm79), or the Hook and Line Fishers'Organisation - a fisherfoWs organisation in San Diego, Philippines, did not attend the recent UN Conference on Straddling Stocks and Highly Migratory Species. Nor have they heard about the drama enacted between Canada and Spain off Newfoundland in …
THERE has been lot of mixed reaction to the decision taken by the Voluntary Action Network India (vani), a Delhi-based voluntary organisation to look into the blacklisting of 564 ngos across the country by capart (Council for Advancement of People's action and Rural Technology). "We demand that the government set …
The Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project in China, once promoted as a major money-spinner for multinationals, is now turning out to be a liability for Beijing. The international financial agencies as well as private investors are steering clear of the project, which has been at the recieving end of a …
THE depleting fish stock of the world may yet not take a headlong plunge with the first international treaty to curtail overfishing in the open seas being approved by governments of more than 100 countries last month, at the UN headquarters in New York. The protocol marks the end of …
THE Egyptians are ready for battle to protect what they consider their nature- al right over the river Nile. The threat comes from neighbouring Sudan, which shares the river and has declared its plans of blocking it. The Nile travels 6,695 km from its remotest headstream in Burundi to the …
For the Chinese fish- erfolk operating in certain areas of the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea, it will be another 2-month wait before they can reach for their nets, as the ban on fishing has been extended by the min- istry of agriculture. The ban, which was in …
Filipinos in the island of Palawan are fighting to prevent an environmental catastrophe in their seas caused by cyanide fishing - a technique where cyanide is squirted on fish to stun and bag them. Since the dead ones are left to rot the corals gets irreversibly damaged. Now, Philippines' International …
On May 28,1995, 3 jeeps full of uniformed officers and forest guards along with a truck and a tractor arrived in Haliasahi, a remote Adivasi hamlet in Kashipur block, Rayagada district, Orissa, and seized the entire stock of hillbrooms belonging to the local Mandibisi Mahila Mandal (MMM). Hillbrooms are a …
Smoking in public places may soon become a punishable offence in Delhi. With effect to this, on August 7, Delhi state health minister Harsh Vardhan introduced a bill- christened as the "Delhi Prohibition of Smoking and Non-smokers Health Protection Bill" -in the legislative assembly. The first of its kind to …
In Angola, 95 children are dying everyday. Not from bullets or mines, but from disease and malnutrition. The United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has come up with this shocking fact. Thousands of Angolan children lost one or both parents during the 19-year-long civil war between Unita rebels and government …
The Bugasong Greenbelt Foundation (OGF), a voluntary organisation in the Philippines, has launched an ambitious "Plant for Life- campaign. Launched from the Bugasong town of Antique province on June 12 this year, it was started,to return abandoned fields that have been colonised by the useless weed, Imperata cylindrica, or cogon …
Tourism Concern, a London network drawing attention to the rights of people living in the tourist hotspots of the world, recently publiclsed Goa's tourism problems in the UK's mainstream media. The group's coordinator Tricla Barnett said to Down To Earth that it hadbeen 'telling tour operatort...for several years" that there …
THE ongoing controversy in the us involving the Endangered Species Act (Down To Earth, Vol 4, No 5) has taken yet another turn. This time, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has lit the fuse by proposing that the coho salmon should be listed as "threatened" under the Act. The …
The voyage towards consensus building on ocean resources has always been protracted. Take the 3rd United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which began in 1972. It took nearly 10 years to reach consensus on the single negotiating text. On the appointed date -- 10 December 1982 …
