biodiversity

Summary

How the Finnish government is abusing the rigts of Sàmi reindeer herders in Lapland.

Summary

This report describes the multiple threats now jeopardising the marine life and ecology of the North Sea and Baltic Sea. It proposes an approach to countering these threats involving the establishment of networks of large-scale marine reserves in which fishing and other extractive activities are prohibited. Finally, it considers what progress has already been made towards the effective conservation of the North and Baltic Seas, and assesses the opportunities towards that goal afforded by recent political developments.

The crisis in Argentina in late 2001 illustrated again a frustrating and unjust reality: there is no direct relationship between the amount of food a country produces and the number of hungry people who live there. In 2001, Argentina harvested enough wheat to meet the needs of both China and India. Yet Argentina's people were hungry. Argentina's status as the world's second largest producer of GM crops - largely for export - could do nothing to solve its very real hunger problems at home. For fifty years conventional agriculture has been getting less and less sustainable.

Centres of diversity are places where the special interrelation between our crop plants and their wild relatives is still apparent. In such places, tens of thousands of varieties of rice, potato, maize, or other food staples are still grown and used by local people. Centres of diversity are the basis not only for food security, but also for cultural traditions.

The Amazon rainforest is one of the biologically richest areas in the world containing more than one-third of the world's remaining ancient forests and supporting up to 50% of the planet's land-based animal and plant species. The Amazon contains more than 2.5 million species of insects, more than 300 species of mammals, 2000 species of fish and more than 60,000 species of plants.

Publication date: May 2000

Summary