Ailing environment has backseat in Mexico election Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit MEXICO: April 20, 2000 MEXICO CITY - Mexico's forests are going up in smoke, its capital is one of the most polluted in the world and its northern grazing lands are turning into deserts studded with bone-dry cattle skulls. But in the race for the July 2 presidential election, the woes of the suffering environment have merited barely a peep. "It's barbarous, it's calamitous," said Homero Aridjis, a poet and head of the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100), an ecological pressure group made up of artists and thinkers. "Mexico City is one of the world's most polluted cities, there's overpopulation, there's no water, there's contamination, there's toxic waste. Deforestation is a crucial problem. And the environment hasn't been touched on in the electoral campaign," he said, his voice quivering with rage. Mexico's biodiversity is one of the richest on the planet. Its terrain ranges from snowcapped volcanoes to steaming jungle and palm-fringed beaches. Gray whales breed and feed on its Pacific coast and coral reefs along the Caribbean shore of the Yucatan peninsula offer some of the most breathtaking marine sightseeing on Earth. But the ecosystem is under relentless attack as economic growth gathers pace and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada propels Mexican industry into the First World. GOING, GOING, GONE Every year, an average of 1.48 million acres (600,000 ha) of forest - an area the size of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus - is hacked down to make way for fields or turned into cinders as fires rage in the dry season. Most of Mexico's original rain forest has been churned under tractor and bulldozer treads. Water shortages, often linked to deforestation, are so acute the government this month declared parched northwestern Sonora state a disaster zone. Yet none of the six candidates running to replace President Ernesto Zedillo has taken up the environment as an election issue, even though the leading opposition contender, Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), is running under a PAN and Green Party (PVEM) banner. The lack of environmental concerns in the election has begun to ring alarm bells. Worried about the pace of deforestation and apparent government disinterest in making the ecology a priority, an unprecedented coalition of businessmen, nongovernmental organisations, academics and eco-consultants have put aside their differences to pressure the candidates. The new "Grupo de los 25," or Group of 25, this month finished compiling a policy paper they hope to present in the coming weeks at least to the three main candidates: the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party's (PRI) Francisco Labastida, Fox of the PAN and Green Party, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who heads a five-party centre-left coalition. "We're concerned that Mexico's environmental problems have not been resolved and in fact are getting worse and worse," said Victor Lichtinger, an international environmental consultant who is a member of the Group of 25. "We're halfway through the election campaign and we are concerned that there has not been much talk about the environment. I think they (the candidates) haven't spoken about it because they don't know anything about it," he said. The campaign has focused on other crucial issues: crime, corruption, education and poverty. All are important to average Mexicans and to the country as a whole. But, as the Group of 25 points out, the environment cannot wait forever. "The environmental problems are fundamental," said Gabriel Quadri, head of the private CCE business chamber's Centre of Studies on Sustainable Development and a Group of 25 member. "But environmental issues have been put on the backseat." ENVIRONMENT IN DECISION MAKING Quadri said one of the main aims of the coalition was to pressure Mexico's next president into establishing a high-level council on sustainable development and an environment ministry with the clout and budget to play an influential role in all government decision making, especially economic policy. The current Ministry of Environment and Fisheries was trapped in a conflict of interest because, on one side, it had to protect the environment and, on the other, it had to promote activities such as fishing that hurt ecosystems. Professor Victor Urquidi of the prestigious Colegio de Mexico said the Group of 25's stance was nonpartisan. "We're not pointing the finger of blame at anybody," he said. "A lot has been done but not enough. Development cannot continue as it has, it cannot be unsustainable." The emergence of the group at election time is no surprise. Pressure groups pop up like mushrooms every six years when Mexico heads into presidential transitions. But this one is unusual because of the alliance between business interests such as the CCE, the assembly plant umbrella group Canacintra and environmental militants such as Union of Environmental Groups. Three years ago, big business and environmentalists could not have sat in the same room let alone drawn up a common policy document, Quadri and Lichtinger said. The changes were most noticeable on the business side because companies drawn into a competitive global economy were realising that poor environmental records cost money. Both inside and outside the Group of 25, ecologists want the next government to take more care of the environment than the Zedillo administration, which in the eyes of critics has sacrificed ecological considerations to economic progress. But Aridjis, long a champion of migratory Monarch butterflies and other creatures sidelined in the world of men, doubted a "semiofficial" body composed of corporate players and a sprinkling of environmentalists would pack much punch. He was also sceptical that Mexico could change if Labastida wins in July, as many opinion polls predict, giving the PRI its 12th consecutive presidential victory. After all, he said, PRI officials in Mexico and Michoacan states are doling out logging permits in butterfly sanctuaries in return for votes, continuing the corruption that has plagued Mexico for decades. "Contamination is a product of the moral contamination of the country. The PRI is the party of contamination. Talking to the PRI is like taking confession with the devil," he said with a sigh, adding that he would focus his lobbying effort on Fox. Story by Michael Christie REUTERS NEWS SERVICE ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-04.21.00-10:32:59-18748