QUITO – Environmental organizations from Ecuador and Germany launched an international campaign July 23 against the construction of a pipeline for transporting heavy crude from the Ecuadorian Amazon to the Pacific coast.

The pipeline could cause irreparable environmental damage due to the increased risk of landslides and pipeline leaks, according to the groups.

In Quito, the environmentalists presented a letter to the German ambassador requesting that the government-run West LB bank withhold a 900-million-dollar loan for the pipeline project. Meanwhile, activists in Bonn staged a protest outside one of the West LB banks during the Climate Change Conference that was under way in that city earlier this month.

MEXICO CITY – Theft has caused the loss of more than half the 120 varieties of cactus over the last decade on a biosphere reserve in the Mexican state of Hidalgo, neighboring the capital.

Drastic measures are needed to fight this plundering and to prevent the disappearance of the cacti from the 93,043-hectare reserve, warns Miguel de Jesús Cruz, chief of projects for the Secretariat (ministry) of Environment.

Cruz said Japanese visitors have extracted species from the area that they believe to hold medicinal value. Surveillance will be beefed up and certain varieties will be cultivated once again, he added.

The Hidalgo reserve is home to 215 bird, 60 mammal, 42 reptile and 17 amphibian species that are also at risk of extinction.

BOGOTA – Some 50 international experts are to meet Aug 16-19 in the southwest Colombian city of Cali for the First International Symposium on Biodiversity as a Source of New Medicines.

The symposium organizers seek to promote development based on the biodiversity found in the department of Valley del Cauca.

The participants will debate matters of intellectual property rights over living organisms, biopiracy, potential markets for medicinal plants and the pharmaceutical potential of certain insects.

BUENOS AIRES – South Korea boosted its Argentina maize purchase 18-fold this year after finding that the United States had been selling a genetically modified variety of the grain that is not approved for human consumption.

Argentina’s Agriculture Secretariat reported that South Korea’s imports of Argentine corn jumped from 50,000 tons in 2000 to orders for 900,000 tons this year.

Argentina is the world’s second leading corn producer, after the United States. Of the total area planted with the grain, just 10 percent comes from non-genetically modified seeds.