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New Tico envoy goes to Washington: Luis Diego Escalante, Costa Rica's incoming ambassador to the United States, speaks to The Tico Times this week in an exclusive interview in advance of taking his post. |
Ronald Reyes | Tico Times |
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Let me see: Students zoom in on organic matter Wednesday at one of the exhibits set up by the Tropical Agronomy Research Center for the Earth Day fair at Plaza Mayor in Cartago, east of San José. |
| Nick Coté | Tico Times |
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| Separatist group declares independence from Nicaragua |
| A movement by indigenous territories to secede from Nicaragua needs to be taken seriously by the central government to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control, according to indigenous leaders. |
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| Positive trade winds from another Asian power |
| Singapore and Costa Rica have agreed to eliminate tariffs to access each other's markets during the first round of free-trade negotiations this week between the two nations. |
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| Fire damages five buildings in Alajuela |
| A fire broke out early Wednesday morning in Alajuela, northwest of the capital, damaging five buildings, including three houses, a bar, a furniture and a paint factory. |
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World Bank millions one step closer
to Costa Rica’s impoverished Caribbean |
| A bill that would inject a $72.5 million World Bank loan into a major revamp of Costa Rica's Caribbean port and city of Limón won the Legislative Assembly's approval Tuesday evening in the first of two votes needed to pass the bill. |
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| New Costa Rica envoy Escalante takes his seat in Washington |
| The administration of U.S President Barack Obama has brought the mantra of “change” to Washington, D.C., but Costa Rica has been bringing change to the U.S. capital as well, naming a new ambassador to the United States who assumes his charge Thursday. |
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| Our Unsung Hero: Tropical Marine Bioproductivity |
Costa Rica's bio diversity has reached world consciousness and achieved fame and fortune. But do you know about this country's unsung hero, bioproductivity? While our forests boast a renowned terrestrial biodiversity rivaling any similar-sized area in the world, our oceans' surface waters, coasts and islands are not particularly high in marine biodiversity. |
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Separatist group declares
independence from Nicaragua |
By Tim Rogers
Nica Times Staff | trogers@ticotimes.net |
| A movement by indigenous territories to secede from Nicaragua needs to be taken seriously by the central government to prevent the situation from spiraling out of control, according to indigenous leaders.
Brooklyn Rivera, head of the YATAMA Miskito group, told The Nica Times Wednesday the fate of the separatist movement in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN) will depend, in part, on how the central government responds to the situation. He said many of the indigenous ex-combatants are “very unsatisfied” with the Sandinista government and its unmet promises.
“If the government takes the situation seriously and addresses the demands of the people, it could control the situation,” Rivera said. If not, he warned, the movement could gain momentum.
The indigenous Council of Elders, made up of 250 mostly YATAMA members, declared independence from Nicaragua April 19 following a two-day meeting to pick new council leaders. The group announced the formation of its own Indigenous Army of the Moskitia and the creation of its own currency and national symbols. The group also ordered the cancelation of next year's elections in the RAAN, and ordered the Regional Council to hand over control of all government apparatuses, including tax collection.
Renaldo Francis, governor of the RAAN's Regional Council, told The Nica Times yesterday the regional government doesn't recognize the separatists' claims or demands. He dismissed the Council of Elders as “a small group of old men who are being manipulated.”
Rivera, however, said it would be a mistake to take the situation lightly.
As of press time, the central government had not commented on the situation. President Daniel Ortega is reportedly in Cuba for the second time this month.
Read the May 1 print or digital edition of The Nica Times for more on this story. |
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| Positive trade winds from another Asian power |
By Vanessa I. Garnica
Tico Times Staff | vgarnica@ticotimes.net |
Singapore and Costa Rica have agreed to eliminate tariffs to access each other's markets during the first round of free-trade negotiations this week between the two nations.
“Singapore is a great exporter,” said Costa Rican chief negotiator Fernando Ocampo Wednesday. “In 2008, Singapore exported about $7 billion (in goods).”
This first round of talks ended Wednesday after three days of exchanges between the countries on topics such as customs procedures, which focused on trade methods, and technical barriers to trade.
“The Singaporean consumer is willing to pay high prices for products of high quality,” Ocampo told reporters via a video conference at the Foreign Trade Ministry.
The small Asian nation's economy is one of the strongest in the world and depends heavily on exports, for the most part from the industrial and electronic sectors.
According to the World Competitiveness Yearbook 2008, published by the International Institute for Management Development, Singapore ranks as the second most competitive economy in the world.
Negotiators from both sides hope to conclude the talks in just four rounds. The next is slated to kick off at the end of June in Costa Rica, while the third will start in early September and the fourth in early November. |
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| Fire damages five buildings in Alajuela |
By Patrick Fitzgerald
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net |
A fire broke out early Wednesday morning in Alajuela, northwest of the capital, damaging five buildings, including three houses, a bar, a furniture and a paint factory.
According to Guillermo Chacón of the Firefighters Corps, the corps received a call at 1:54 a.m. reporting the fire, which began in the paint factory Fábrica de Pinturas Alfa and spread to the adjacent buildings. The Firefighters Corps is still working to determine the cause of the fire, Chacón said.
The fire affected an area of 3,380 square meters total, Chacón said, but a cost assessment of the damage has not been made. The daily La Nación estimated the fire caused ¢30 million (roughly $53,380) in damage. |
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World Bank millions one step closer
to Costa Rica’s impoverished Caribbean |
By Meagan Robertson
Tico Times Staff | letters@ticotimes.net |
A bill that would inject a $72.5 million World Bank loan into a major revamp of Costa Rica's Caribbean port and city of Limón won the Legislative Assembly's approval Tuesday evening in the first of two votes needed to pass the bill.
The World Bank approved the loan January 2008 to help Costa Rica finance the $80 million Port-City of Limón Integrated Infrastructure Project, while the Costa Rican government has agreed to cover the rest.
Forty-four of the 46 legislators were present for the first debate, leaving one more debate, slated for Thursday, before the government can sign the legislation into law.
José Luis Vásquez, a lawmaker from Limón, said if the bill is passed it will be the second most important development in his province, after the creation of the Atlantic Port Authority.
“I have no doubt tomorrow will be a day of celebration for all the people of Limón,” Vásquez said Wednesday of his historically neglected province. “We've been fighting for this for a long time.”
The project's four components include the revitalization of the urban area, local economic development, strengthening the municipality and supporting the development of the two ports.
This will include restoring historic buildings, building cultural and recreational parks, providing a sewage system for Limón residents and building structures to keep the Limoncito River from flooding, according to Institutional Coordination Minister Marco Vargas. The plan also includes creating easier access between Limón and the country's other Caribbean port, Moín, and reactivating the train system from San José to Limón to decrease traffic on Route 32.
The World Blank loan, however, stipulates no direct aid for improving the infrastructure of the port. |
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New Costa Rica envoy Escalante
takes his seat in Washington |
By Patrick Fitzgerald
Tico Times Staff | editorial@ticotimes.net |
The administration of U.S President Barack Obama has brought the mantra of “change” to Washington, D.C., but Costa Rica has been bringing change to the U.S. capital as well, naming a new ambassador to the United States who assumes his charge Thursday.
Luis Diego Escalante, Costa Rica's new ambassador to the United States, is a longtime friend of President Oscar Arias, who helped found and served as president of the CRUSA Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to sustainable development in Costa Rica and cooperation with the United States.
In an exclusive interview with The Tico Times, Escalante said he wishes to work on a number of issues, including working toward a regional approach to stemming the flow of drug trafficking, and is generally encouraged by what appears to be Washington's “desire to find consensus and to listen to countries.”
See the April 24 print or digital edition of The Tico Times for the exclusive interview with incoming Costa Rican Ambassador to the U.S. Luis Diego Escalante. |
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| Our Unsung Hero: Tropical Marine Bioproductivity |
Costa Rica's bio diversity has reached world consciousness and achieved fame and fortune. But do you know about this country's unsung hero, bioproductivity? While our forests boast a renowned terrestrial biodiversity rivaling any similar-sized area in the world, our oceans' surface waters, coasts and islands are not particularly high in marine biodiversity. The unexplored deep sea bottoms might hold world-class biodiversity, but we do not know yet. What we do have is perhaps the world's highest tropical marine bioproductivity. And bioproductivity is just as cool as biodiversity.
While other places boast tens of thousands more marine species than Costa Rica's ocean area, our high marine bioproductivity means that we have tens of thousands more animals in a given area, just of fewer species. Imagine 100 beautiful masked booby seabirds, then 1,000 frolicking spinner dolphins, with 10,000 rocketing yellowfin tuna below and 50,000 Audubon's shearwaters and brown boobies whirling and swooping above. Throw in 500,000 shimmering rainbow comb jelly plankton and a few million finger-sized lantern fish forming shape-changing bait balls. Not so many species, but a lot of animals. That's bioproductivity, and it's a unique quality of Costa Rica's Pacific.
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| Strength in Numbers: Spinner dolphins congregate by the thousands off the Osa Peninsula. High bioproductivity is a unique feature of these Pacific waters. |
Shawn Larkin | Tico Times |
This doesn't mean the nation's coral reefs are not wonderfully biodiverse ecosystems; they are, but they are nowhere near the most biodiverse in the world. The Indo-Pacific contains probably tens of thousands more marine species than Costa Rica's Pacific. Take our coral, for example: Our Pacific surface waters have just a few dominant species of corals, with about 30 or 40 species total, and most places covered with fewer than 10 species. Costa Rica's Caribbean grows perhaps 80 species of coral in coastal waters, more than twice as biodiverse as the west coast. But waters in Indonesia explode with hundreds or even thousands of coral species. The story is the same for shellfish, algae, starfish and urchins, sea cucumbers, sea grass, sponges, fish and others. Simply put, the Indo-Pacific has the world's greatest known marine biodiversity.
One indicator used by ocean hunters, naturalists and scientists to gauge marine bioproductivity is birds. The more birds you see, the greater the bioproductivity. Thousands of birds would not be flying over a slice of ocean without a reason, and the reason is food: small fish, crustaceans, plankton and other marine life that abound in and define productive waters.
Flying offshore of southwestern Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula, you can see congregations of more seabirds than seems possible to count, indicating that the marine bioproductivity must be off the scale. Large numbers of other top predators such as dolphins, tuna and commercial, sport and artisan fishers also act as flags to high bioproductivity and confirm a Costa Rican natural treasure: world-class tropical marine bioproductivity.
The Americas' equivalent in terrestrial bioproductivity may have once been the North American great plains, where roamed vast herds of buffalo, deer and antelope, with sky-darkening clouds of Carolina parakeets covering whole states, plenty of bears, wild cats, beavers, otters and mink mixed throughout. Birds of prey such as eagles and hawks were so common that many people made clothes out of their feathers. Of course, now these ecosystems are more the stuff of song and legend than reality.
Costa Rica is blessed with living, intact, astounding bioproductivity that you can see on a day trip in a boat. Vast pods of dolphins stretching out of sight, flocks of seabirds darkening the sky and fish clouding the sea. This ecosystem is as wonderful a natural attraction as anything in Costa Rica, a true world marvel, yet few besides fishermen know it. Though very underdeveloped here, pelagic or open-ocean tourism holds great potential, as an infrastructure of boats and facilities is already in place. The high bioproductivity could soon lead to greater human economic productivity, if the resource is managed well.
Luckily, there is still time to sing praises and perpetuate some of the world's greatest tropical marine bioproductivity.
Contact Shawn at 8835-6041 or shawndive@yahoo.com, or check out www.costacetacea.com, updated weekly.
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