PAUCARÁ, Peru, Nov 21 (IPS) - As if he were showing off a treasure, Dionicio Sarmiento holds up his seed potatoes with a smile. "Look how nice they are, all ready to plant. It'll be a good harvest," says the peasant farmer from Huancavelica, Peru's poorest province, where most of the population depends on subsistence farming.

Good seeds can make the difference between going hungry or putting food on the table for your family.

Sarmiento lives in the village of Tinquerccasa, more than 3,500 metres above sea level, where the houses are made of adobe, farmers use simple tools, and food production barely covers the families' needs. Piped water is available here only one hour a day, and there is no sewer system.

Tinquerccasa is in the district of Paucará, where more than 90 percent of the population is poor. In Huancavelica as a whole, where indigenous people make up the majority of the population, nearly 86 percent of people live in poverty, and approximately 45 percent of children in native communities are malnourished.

Despite these grim statistics, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has found fertile ground in the village for fighting hunger and promoting food security through a project aimed at strengthening community organisations, reviving consumption of traditional foods, and connecting farm production with markets, to boost the incomes of local farmers.

COPENHAGEN, Nov 20 (IPS/IFEJ) - Whether a new internationally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gases and forestall climate change will be signed next month remains to be seen. What is clear though, is that if there is a place in the world that deserves to be the stage where this treaty ought to be signed, it is the Danish capital of Copenhagen.

Thanks to an extraordinary effort by both government and civil society to improve efficiency in the generation and consumption of energy, and massive investments in renewable energy sources, Denmark is today the only country in the world that has been able to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gases emissions (GHGE).

According to official statistics, the Danish economy has grown, as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), since 1980 by 78 percent, at prices of the year 2000. During the same period, the country's energy consumption remained practically the same.

This means that the Danish economy's energy intensity - the ratio of energy consumption to GDP - has fallen by 40 percent. Danish GHGE, especially carbon dioxide (CO2), has also decreased substantially, by some 20 percent. According to the International Energy Agency, the Danish CO2 intensity of GDP is the third lowest among European Union (EU) members, only after Sweden and France.

Both Sweden and especially France, rely heavily on allegedly CO2-free nuclear energy generation.

HARBIN, Nov. 21 (Xinhua) -- A gas explosion in a coal mine in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province has killed 42 miners and left 66 missing, said Zhang Jinguang, a spokesman with the rescue headquarters.

    He said the gas outburst in Xinxing Coal Mine, owned by the Heilongjiang Longmei Mining Holding Group, in Hegang City, happened 400 meters underground. Rescuers were still searching for the missing.

New Delhi (UPI) Nov 19, 2009
Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh Thursday said his country would never agree to legally binding emissions and downplayed expectations for the climate-change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, next month.

"Internationally we reject legally binding emissions. We will never agree to that, and we are prepared to be alone in our stand, but domestically we have to be proactive in reducing carbon emissions," Ramesh said in New Delhi while releasing a U.N. population report.

In resisting pressure to set limits on carbon output, India has long contended that doing so would slow its economic growth and that the responsibility for reducing greenhouse gases lies with longtime polluters.

Rather than committing to legally binding cuts internationally, Ramesh said, India needs to be "proactive, aggressive and ruthless" domestically to tackle climate change.

India currently emits about 3 billion tons of greenhouse gases each year, making it the world's fourth-largest polluter.

CHICAGO -- Asian carp, the big, hungry fish that the authorities here have for years been desperately trying to keep away from the Great Lakes, appear to have moved closer than ever to Lake Michigan. The carp, a non-native species that some fear could destroy the ecosystem of Lake Michigan by consuming what the lake's native fish eat, have long been making their way up the Mississippi River, and since at least 2002 have been the focus of an enormous effort to prevent them from reaching the lake here.

But on Friday, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers reported that genetic material from the carp had been found for the first time in a nearby river beyond an elaborate barrier system, which has cost millions of dollars and was meant to block their passage. That, officials said, means that the fish could be within several miles of Lake Michigan -- and with only one lock, regularly opened for boats, between them and the Great Lakes. No one seems certain how the carp could have found their way through the complicated barrier, which is not unlike a really powerful underwater electric fence.

And in truth, federal and state officials said, no actual carp have been spotted. But most authorities said the genetic material was a likely sign that at least a few are present.

"This is absolutely an emergency," said Joel Brammeier, acting president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, who said that recreational boating on the lakes could also be severely damaged if the carp arrived. (Elsewhere, Mr. Brammeier said, the silvery fish, which can grow to 100 pounds, sometimes leap, hitting boaters.)

"If Asian carp get into Lake Michigan, there is no stopping them," he said, "and the volumes of water and geography make containment impossible in terms of the other Great Lakes. Control is impossible."