Amazon River Dolphins Being Slaughtered for Bait

Amazon river dolphins being slaughtered for bait
AP –

By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer – Sat Jul 10, 4:01 pm ET

RIO DE JANEIRO – The bright pink color gives them a striking appearance in the muddy jungle waters. That Amazon river dolphins are also gentle and curious makes them easy targets for nets and harpoons as they swim fearlessly up to fishing boats.

Now, their carcasses are showing up in record numbers on riverbanks, their flesh torn away for fishing bait, causing researchers to warn of a growing threat to a species that has already disappeared in other parts of the world.

"The population of the river dolphins will collapse if these fishermen are not stopped from killing them," said Vera da Silva, the top aquatic mammals expert at the government's Institute of Amazonian Research. "We've been studying an area of 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) for 17 years, and of late the population is dropping 7 percent each year."

That translates to about 1,500 dolphins killed annually in the part of the Mamiraua Reserve of the western Amazon where da Silva studies the mammals.

Da Silva said researchers first began finding dolphin carcasses along riverbanks around the year 2000. They were obviously killed by human hands: sliced open and quartered, with their flesh cut away.

The killings are becoming more common, researchers and environmental agents say. Even the government acknowledges that there is a problem. It's already illegal to kill the dolphins without government permission — as with all wild animals in the Amazon. But little is being done to stop it.

Less than five agents are tasked with protecting wildlife in a jungle region covering the western two-thirds of Amazonas state, which is more than twice the size of Texas, according to the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), the enforcement arm of the Environment Ministry.

"It's a matter of priority, and right now the government is focusing on deforestation," said Ibama's Andrey Silva. "The killings of these dolphins exists — it's a fact."

The dolphins are attractive to anglers for their fatty flesh that is a highly effective bait for catching a type of catfish called piracatinga.

Consumption in neighboring Colombia is driving the slaughter. Some 884 tons of the fish came from Brazil in 2007, according to the Colombian Institute for Rural Development. That jumped to 1,430 tons in 2008 and spiked to 2,153 tons in 2009.

Simple economics exacerbates the problem: Killing dolphins is free, and their meat is valuable. Using the flesh from one carcass, fishermen can catch up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of piracatinga. According to da Silva and other researchers, they can sell the catfish for 50 cents per kilogram, translating into $550 for just a few nights' work — about double Brazil's monthly minimum wage.

"It's attracting a lot of poor people to this region to kill the dolphins and make easy money," said Antonio Miguel Migueis, a dolphin researcher with the Federal University of Western Para since 2005.

So far it's impossible to quantify the exact impact fisherman are having on the river dolphins — little research has been done to study the killings or even the overall population of the dolphins in the Amazon.

But activists warn that waiting for exhaustive studies could mean the dolphin population would be irreversibly devastated by the time the work is complete.

"This is most definitely a threat to the future of this river dolphin species," said Alison Wood, with the England-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. "This is a relatively new threat, but clearly an extremely serious one."

Migueis said he warned Ibama and other authorities numerous times about the dolphin slaughter, but his reports fell on deaf ears.

Growing up to 8 feet (2.5 meters) long and weighing as much as 400 pounds (180 kilograms), Amazon river dolphins are the largest of four species known to exist in South America and Asia.

Their genetic siblings have already died off elsewhere: The Yangzte river dolphin in China was declared functionally extinct in 2006, the victim of pollution, overfishing and increased boat traffic.

Meanwhile, the International Union of Conservation of Nature lists the Ganges river dolphin in India as endangered, and the Irrawaddy river dolphin in Bangladesh as vulnerable.

Scientists believe river dolphins likely arrived in the Amazon during the Middle Miocene era 16 million years ago, when ocean levels were high around the world, and the sea inundated what is now lush rain forest.

For centuries they have been revered by locals and protected by myth. According to one tale, the dolphins transform into handsome men and leave the water at night, seducing and impregnating local women before returning to the river. Many simply consider it bad luck to kill them, given their supposed magical attributes.

But today, the quick payoff is trumping legend and superstition.

"Killing the dolphins is a fast and easy way for the fisherman to make money. It costs nothing but time," Vera da Silva said. "It's ugly because these dolphins have a folkloric value in the Amazon, and all that is disappearing for the sake of using them as bait."

___

Associated Press Writers Jessica Lleras in Bogota, Colombia, and Stan Lehman in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.

(CNN) Social Media Can Help Save the Planet

May 24th

Greenpeace is well-known for taking direct action in the name of saving the environment, but key to its campaigning now is the collective power of the Internet and social media, says Greenpeace's executive director, Kumi Naidoo.

Naidoo was talking to CNN about a recent campaign to stop Nestlé using palm oil sourced from plantations that it says are responsible for deforestation, primarily in Indonesia.

Palm oil is used in a variety of consumer products, from chocolate to washing powder, and is used by numerous companies across the world, not just Nestlé.

According to Greenpeace and other activist groups, rising demand for it has led to virgin rainforests being cleared to make way for new plantations.

Central to the Greenpeace campaign was an online video posted in March -- a mock Kit Kat chocolate bar advert that shows an office worker biting into a bloody orangutan's finger instead of a piece of chocolate.

The video got more than a million hits, drawing attention to the issue and public scrutiny of Nestlé policy. Naidoo says the attention was in part because the company at first tried to ban the video for copyright infringement.

The Swiss multi-national subsequently received numerous complaints about its palm oil policy on its Facebook and Twitter pages.

Less than a month after the video was first shown, Nestlé stopped all purchase of palm oil from Sinar Mas, one company Greenpeace claimed was causing deforestation in Indonesia.

Nestlé made the announcement in an April letter addressed to Greenpeace, and also reiterated its existing green credentials: a commitment to a moratorium on the deforestation of rainforests, its commitment to use only certified sustainably sourced palm oil by 2015 and a pledge not to use suppliers that provide blends of palm oil from non-sustainable sources.

Naidoo says in future Greenpeace will continue to work with companies, not just chastise and shame them through public campaigns.

"We've got lots of dialogue going on with a range of companies. Even with Nestlé we had been talking with them, but if talk does not deliver the results, we have to create the possibility for millions of people who care about the environment to send a clear message," said Naidoo.

"Those [companies] that don't have products that are sold to the public, the challenge there is slightly different, but when you have a company that sells a product directly to the global public you have a greater ability to leverage things more quickly."

Rainforest Clash in Panama signals larger debate

By David Ariosto

CNN

KUNA YALA, Panama (CNN) -- Hunched over a campfire in eastern Panama, Embera tribesman Raul Mezua chanted a song his grandfather taught him when he was a boy. The words are memorized, passed down from an aging generation to a new group of tribal youths. "The song means a lot to me," Mezua told CNN, the fire's dying embers splashing a red glow across his face. "But I don't know what it means." It's not just the song but their language and culture that Mezua and his tribe fear losing as deforestation from logging and cattle ranching threatens the rainforest that is part of their identity.

But recent trends could usher in a welcome reversal for Mezua and his tribe. Rural workers are migrating toward cities in search of jobs, and forests are re-emerging where now abandoned farms and cattle ranches once flourished, according to a 2009 report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. Such "secondary" forests in the tropics can rapidly grow in areas once cleared for logging and cattle ranching if left alone, said Joseph Wright, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "After about 20 years (of being left alone) the forest will be about 60 feet tall," he said.

Deforestation and re-growth in Panama may reflect a snapshot of a bigger picture involving rainforests throughout Central America. With more than three-quarters of people across the region now living in urban centers, the United Nations expects rural farming and population growth -- the usual culprits behind deforestation -- to dwindle.

Some call forest re-growth a victory in the climate crisis. Trees consume carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat within the Earth's atmosphere. "Biology is the only way we can remove carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," Wright said. "There's no way to do it faster than to let tropical forests re-grow on abandoned land."

Others say threats to primary forest, or original jungle, is the real issue and that its loss can cause irreparable damage to the surrounding ecosystem.
"Places in Colombia, places in Central America, places in Mexico, places in many of the Andean countries are the last bunkers, the last bastions of hundreds of unique species in each place," Lider Sucre, director of Panama's Museum of Biodiversity, told CNN. "If you replant 10 times as much forest but you lose these last large pockets, you lose a huge amount of biodiversity forever and ever."

The value of primary and secondary forests is a debate heating up within the environmental community as new woodlands begin to wrap themselves around barbed-wire fences that still dot cattle-driven landscapes across Panama.

"We have to make that distinction, that fundamental difference, between re-growth and the original forest," Sucre said. "Re-growth is only a shadow in terms of the diversity of life within it." In places like Panama's Kuna Yala, a semi-autonomous tribal region and the country's largest tract of rainforest, new growth can bridge gaps between the remaining pockets of pristine old growth forest.

"Because of its size, because of the health of the entire ecosystem, it has an extraordinary potential to serve as a kind of a Noah's Ark -- a place that can safeguard biodiversity and the full complement of species," Sucre said.
Recently, a scientific expedition unearthed 10 new amphibious species on both sides of Panama's mountainous border with Colombia, according to Conservation International, an environmental advocacy group based in Washington.

At least 25 percent of the area is being deforested, putting the rich biodiversity in jeopardy, the group said. Across the region, the United Nations says tropical rainforest land is still being lost at an alarming pace.
More than 7 million hectares of forests were destroyed globally each year between 2000 and 2005, the U.N. says. Slightly less than one-fifth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions stems from the effects of deforestation in poor countries, the U.N. said -- a figure comparable to the total output of the United States and China.

For indigenous tribes -- who rely on the rainforest for everything from medicine and food to homes and artwork -- the reality behind the figures is staggering. "The rainforest is something we depend on," Kuna tribesman Toniel Edman said, standing beside a thatched hut made from rainforest wood.

"The problem is actually with the farmers and ranchers," Edman said. "They invade our land and deforest it for their own gain." But here, cattle is king. "We don't have another way to support ourselves," rancher Oriel Gonzalez said, overlooking cow pastures where rainforest once dominated.

"We go looking for work elsewhere but there isn't any. We don't know how to do anything else." He added that loans for raising cows are just easier to come by than financing for crops or other livestock. "It's partly tradition. The banker is used to lending money for cattle -- that's what he's always done," said Wright, the Smithsonian scientist.

Wright noted that for lenders, there is inherently less risk with raising cattle. "We have droughts. We have plagues of microbes. Plagues of insects. You can have a 100 percent loss with a row crop," he said. "That just never happens with cattle. You can always get the cattle to market and sell them."
For lawmakers, striking a balance between preservation and the "need for people to grow the land" comes with "difficulties," Panama President Martin Torrijos told CNN.

Torrijos highlighted his country's recent successes in combating deforestation; Panama recorded drops in rainforest loss during the 2000 to 2005 period, the U.N. reported. But he also recognized a brewing conflict between indigenous tribes and the ranchers, farmers and loggers who encroach on tribal land. "Every now and then, issues occur and we deal with it," Torrijos said.

Part of the problem is "unclear ownership of the land," said U.N. Forestry Officer Merilio Morell. "By law, the indigenous own the comarca (tribal district). But exercising ownership is not easy," he said. "They cannot patrol ever single meter of land ... and the borders aren't marked."
Scientists say efforts to promote carbon trading -- a process intended to get companies that exceed their allowed CO2 emissions to buy credits from groups that pollute less -- could provide the mechanism needed to slow deforestation.

Earlier this month, delegates from donor and developing countries around the world met outside Panama City to address carbon trading amid the fallout from a global recession. Environmental consequences from the economic crunch are still uncertain.

But U.N. projections show a growing global demand for rainforest products like fuel and timber. That demand could thwart the resurgence of the rainforest.

Rare Uncontacted Tribe Photographed in Amazon

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Amazon Indians from one of the world's last uncontacted tribes have been photographed from the air, with striking images released on Thursday showing them painted bright red and brandishing bows and arrows.

The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

"What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the 'civilized' ones, treat the world," Jose Carlos Meirelles was quoted as saying in a statement by the Survival International group.

One of the pictures, which can be seen on Survival International's Web site (http://www.survival-international.org), shows two Indian men covered in bright red pigment poised to fire arrows at the aircraft while another Indian looks on. Another photo shows about 15 Indians near thatched huts, some of them also preparing to fire arrows at the aircraft.

"The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct," said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.
Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

(Reporting by Stuart Grudgings; editing by Sandra Maler)

Oil Exploration in Amazon Threatens "Unseen" Tribes

Kelly Hearn in Jose Olaya, Peru
for National Geographic News
March 21, 2008

Driving along an oil company road in Peru's northern Amazon, Patricio Pinola Chuje looked out the window. He nodded beyond a green wall of rain forest. "I don't know if they are in this area, but I know they are farther south in other places," said Pinola, an Achuar Indian. "They come out by the rivers."

"They" refers to unseen Amazon Indian tribes said to live in voluntary isolation in the western headwaters of the Amazon in Peru and Ecuador. Global energy prices have fueled oil and gas booms across oil-laden Amazonian lands. But supporters of native groups say the boom is a bust for remote Amazon Indians, who suffer both physically and socially when exposed to the modern world. "Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any contact, because they have no immunity to outsiders' diseases," said David Hill, a spokesperson for Survival International, a London-based group that defends the rights of uncontacted tribes.

Other groups add that Indians' rights to their traditional lands are increasingly being violated by development-hungry governments. Now civic groups and native organizations are pushing governments and the courts to rein in oil development. In December, a coalition of groups announced it would petition the Organization of American States to protect the Cacataibo, said to be the last uncontacted tribe in the central Peruvian rain forest.

Meanwhile, complicating an otherwise typical development clash, Peruvian officials have publicly asked: Do unseen natives really exist? "It is like the Loch Ness monster," Cecilia Quiroz, lead counsel of Peru's oil and gas leasing agency, told The Washington Post in July. "Everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but there is no evidence."

How Many "Unseen" Tribes Are There?

Guevara Sandi Chimboras, an Achuar Indian environmental monitor, wipes sweat from his cheeks in the sweltering heat of an Amazon afternoon, not far from the Ecuadorian border. After traipsing through a grassy field, using donated satellite-positioning tools to help document oil spills, he doesn't hesitate when asked about unseen tribes. "Yes they exist," he said. "I know people who have seen them. They are seen when they go to river banks to find turtle eggs."

The elusiveness of some rain forest tribes, coupled with the threat of infection posed by outsiders, makes getting an accurate census near impossible, activists say. But Survival International estimates that some 15 uncontacted tribes live in the Peruvian Amazon alone.
Spotting them is rare. But in October, a plane searching for illegal loggers managed to photograph 21 natives standing near palm shelters on the banks of the Las Piedras River in Peru's southeastern Amazon.

Days after the photos ran on international news wires, Peruvian President Alan Garcia suggested in a newspaper editorial that unseen tribes were largely a ruse used by groups opposing development. "Against petroleum, they have created the figure of the 'unconnected' wild native, which is to say, something not known but presumed," Garcia wrote in an editorial in the newspaper El Commercio. Officials with Peru's leasing agency and its Ministry of Energy and Mines declined to comment for this story.

"Is There Something Bothering You?"

Despite official doubts that uncontacted tribes exist, oil companies apparently take threats of encounters seriously. Last summer, U.S. oil firm Barrett Resources and Spain's Repsol-YPF submitted plans to Peruvian officials describing how their workers would respond during encounters with isolated tribes. (Barrett Resources was recently acquired by the international oil company Perenco). The two documents, obtained by National Geographic News, advise workers to be on the lookout for footprints, spears, arrows, and other signs of humans.

The Barrett manual advises workers that uncontacted natives might become curious about noises, helicopters, and lights, causing them to leave items that signal a desire to make contact with workers. Such items may include "vessels containing valuable seeds or plantain drinks, necklaces, baskets, snails, gourds, feathers or other objects used for exchange," the document says. Both plans prohibit workers from having any contact with natives or giving them food or other objects.

The documents order workers to treat Indians peacefully, making efforts to protect them from illnesses. If unintended contact is made, the manuals instruct guides to initiate communication with natives in local tongues. If peaceful dialogue cannot be established, according to the Repsol document, workers should attempt to make loud noises with whistles, shouts, and megaphones.
A section of the Barrett manual entitled "sequence of messages of introduction, health and peace," tells guides to say: "We are people like you; We are workers passing through; We aren't going to stay, We have women and children far from here; We have houses and farms far from here."

The document also provides a list of questions field managers should ask Indians through their guides: "Where do you come from? How many moons and suns have you traveled? … Have you seen people like us? … Is there something bothering you?"

Self-Imposed Seclusion?

Padre Ricardo Álvarez Lobo, a Dominican priest who has worked with remote tribes for five decades, said that few if any Amazonian tribes have had no contact with outsiders. More likely, he said, their ancestors had contact with rubber barons who killed or enslaved them in the early 20th century. "The ancestors came into contact with evangelicals or rubber barons and had bad experiences," he said. "So they have built up myths within the group that makes them fear outsiders."

In recent years, extremely isolated tribes in Brazil and Colombia have emerged from the jungle, as developers and armed insurgents came closer to their traditional territories.
In one case, the Nukak, a tribe in southern Colombia, was driven from its extreme isolation by the insurgent group FARC. (Read related story: "Drug Wars Threaten to Wipe Out Amazon Nomads" [April 27, 2007].)

Last June, uncontacted natives made contact with Kayapo natives in central Brazil.
And in recent weeks, across the Peruvian border in Ecuador's Yasuní National Park, Taromenane tribesmen were blamed for spearing an illegal tree logger to death.

Can They Be Protected?

As development continues to encroach on tribal territories, activists are buckling down.
Native-rights groups like Peru's Racimos de Ungurahui note that in recent years fatal illnesses have beset tribes like the Nahua, Nanti, and Kirineri after they came into contact with oil workers. Racimos has threatened to sue oil companies for genocide if they enter areas where isolated groups are said to live.

Meanwhile, a native rights group based in Lima called AIDESEP is calling for the establishment and protection of government-protected parks for uncontacted natives. Last August, AIDESEP petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to intervene to protect two tribal reserves in northern Peru. The commission is an organ of the Organization of American States that monitors and investigates human rights violations and can litigate cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The cases are still pending before the commission.

Pressures Build on Amazon Jungle

Pressures build on Amazon jungle
By Gary Duffy BBC News, Brazil

Inspections are being stepped up to try to stem deforestation. The Amazon is not just a precious resource for Brazil but for the entire world, and the year ahead seems likely to produce important indications of what the future holds for this vast rainforest.
The scale of the challenge is widely acknowledged.

In the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon has been cut down.
Land cleared for cattle is the leading cause of deforestation, while the growth in soya bean production is becoming increasingly significant. Illegal logging is also a factor.
Deforestation and forest fires are now responsible for nearly 75% of Brazil's greenhouse gas emissions.


In the past three years the Brazilian government has celebrated a 59% cut in the rate of deforestation, but there are now signs of problems ahead. In December, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said there had been a 10% increase in deforestation between August and November 2007 and announced a range of measures to try to stem this.


"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here." John Carter, director, Alianca da Terra. The president signed a decree imposing fines for buying or trading goods such as beef or soya planted illegally on deforested properties.

Several hundred federal police are to be sent to the area to help combat environmental destruction, joining more than 1,600 inspectors already there.
In recent years the government says it has carried out numerous inspections, seized more than one million cubic metres of wood, cancelled thousands of land registrations and arrested hundreds of people, as well as creating large conservation areas.
At the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Bali, Indonesia, last month, Brazil also announced the creation of a voluntary fund to protect the Amazon, due to be launched in 2008.

On a broader international front, it was also agreed at Bali that forest conservation would be included in discussions about a future agreement on global warming. The new measures may be a sign of growing government concern, and it will only become clear in the months ahead just how effective they will prove to be in the struggle to protect the Amazon.

Greenpeace says more needs to be done to protect the rainforest.
Environmental groups, while welcoming the government's efforts, say the response is simply not good enough. Critics had already warned that recent falls in deforestation could be explained by a drop in market prices for products such as soya and meat, and that once these rose again land clearance would start to increase.

"We have a national plan to fight deforestation that, historically, was a good plan on paper but lacked implementation both due to political will and due to resources," said Marcelo Furtado, campaigns director for Greenpeace in Brazil. "Although the government could celebrate in recent years a decrease in deforestation, the fact is that structurally this didn't change.

"The environment ministry still lacks funding. You still have situations where the police don't have a helicopter to fly over a certain area or there is no fuel in the truck to go to verify if an area is being deforested or not. You still have a problem with availability of maps," Mr Furtado said.

"The tools to decrease deforestation and monitor implementation of the law are still not good enough."

That concern is reflected by John Carter, director of Alianca da Terra, a group that promotes environmental awareness in land management.


"What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation ."
Andre Lima, Brazilian environment ministry

Mr. Carter says, "Most of the environmental groups are concentrating on the law and why the law is not being upheld and they mysteriously forget this is a frontier and no-one ever upheld the law in any frontier in Europe or the United States, anywhere," he says.
He believes giving producers incentives to reduce the impact on the forest will prove more effective than traditional conservation methods. The results of failure can be seen in the thick smoke of forest fires being used to clear land.

"I would easily say [2007] was one of the worst years I have seen in 11 years living here," said Mr Carter, who was born in the US but moved here with his Brazilian wife. "I flew with several different people at several different times in September and October and I couldn't see the end of my wings, I couldn't see the ground. "I tried to land in the Xingu park [in Mato Grosso]... I couldn't... I couldn't see the runway. I was flying 300 ft (91m) above the forest and couldn't even see it."


Andre Lima, a senior official at the environment ministry with responsibility for the Amazon says it will be difficult to keep deforestation in 2008 down to the level achieved in 2007, especially given the growing market pressures.

The rainforest is susceptible to market pressures, but he believes the presidential decree will force a wider range of people to address these concerns. "What is important to do is to share out responsibility for illegal deforestation," he says. "The responsibility is not only with the farmers involved at the forefront, but it is the chain of production that buys from them as well. The big soya companies, the meat storage plants that have set up there and know there is no authorisation for deforestation in the area. "They have to assume a share of the responsibility."
The next few months will be a test of that resolve, but there seems to be a growing recognition on all sides that the Amazon faces another testing period.

One Laptop Per Child Project in Peru

ARAHUAY, Peru (AP) -- Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops -- people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books -- can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.


At breakfast, they're already powering up the combination library/videocam/audio recorder/music maker/drawing kits. At night, they're dozing off in front of them -- if they've managed to keep older siblings from waylaying the coveted machines. "It's really the kind of conditions that we designed for," Walter Bender, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff, said of this agrarian backwater up a precarious dirt road.


Founded in 2005 by former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, the One Laptop program has retreated from early boasts that developing-world governments would snap up millions of the pint-sized laptops at $100 each.

In a backhanded tribute, One Laptop now faces homegrown competitors everywhere from Brazil to India -- and a full-court press from Intel Corp.'s more power-hungry Classmate.

But no competitor approaches the XO in innovation. It is hard drive-free, runs on the Linux operating system and stretches wireless networks with "mesh" technology that lets each computer in a village relay data to the others.

Mass production began last month and Negroponte, brother of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, says he expects at least 1.5 million machines to be sold by next November. Even that would be far less than Negroponte originally envisioned. The higher-than-initially-advertised price and a lack of the Windows operating system, still being tested for the XO, have dissuaded many potential government buyers.

Peru made the single biggest order to date -- more than 272,000 machines -- in its quest to turn around a primary education system that the World Economic Forum recently ranked last among 131 countries surveyed. Uruguay was the No. 2 buyers of the laptops, inking a contract for 100,000.

Negroponte said 150,000 more laptops will get shipped to countries including Rwanda, Mongolia, Haiti, and Afghanistan in early 2008 through "Give One, Get One," a U.S.-based promotion ending December 31 in which you buy a pair of laptops for $399 and donate one or both.

The children of Arahuay prove One Laptop's transformative conceit: that you can revolutionize education and democratize the Internet by giving a simple, durable, power-stingy but feature-packed laptop to the worlds' poorest kids.

"Some tell me that they don't want to be like their parents, working in the fields," first-grade teacher Erica Velasco says of her pupils. She had just sent them to the Internet to seek out photos of invertebrates -- animals without backbones.
Antony, 12, wants to become an accountant.

Alex, 7, aspires to be a lawyer.

Kevin, 9, wants to play trumpet.


Saida, 10, is already a promising videographer, judging from her artful recording of the town's recent Fiesta de la Virgen.



"What they work with most is the (built-in) camera. They love to record," says Maria Antonieta Mendoza, an Education Ministry psychologist studying the Arahuay pilot to devise strategies for the big rollout when the new school year begins in March.

Before the laptops, the only cameras the kids at Santiago Apostol school saw in this population-800 hamlet arrived with tourists who visit for festivals or to see local Inca ruins. Arahuay's lone industry is agriculture. Surrounding fields yield avocados, mangoes, potatoes, corn, alfalfa and cherimoya.

Many adults share only weekends with their children, spending the work week in fields many hours' walk from town and relying on charities to help keep their families nourished.
When they finish school, young people tend to abandon the village.

Peru's head of educational technology, Oscar Becerra, is betting the One Laptop program can reverse this rural exodus to the squalor of Lima's shantytowns four hours away.

It's the best answer yet to "a global crisis of education" in which curricula have no relevance, he said. "If we make education pertinent, something the student enjoys, then it won't matter if the classroom's walls are straw or the students are sitting on fruit boxes."

Indeed, Arahuay's elementary school population rose by 10 when families learned the laptop pilot was coming, said Guillermo Lazo, the school's director. The XOs that Peru is buying will be distributed to pupils in 9,000 elementary schools from the Pacific to the Amazon basin where a single teacher serves all grades, Becerra said. Although Peru boasts thousands of rural satellite downlinks that provide Internet access, only about 4,000 of the schools getting XOs will be connected, said Becerra.

Negroponte says One Laptop is committed to helping Peru overcome that hurdle. Without Internet access, he believes, the program is incomplete. Teachers will get 2½ days of training on the laptops, Becerra said. Each machine will initially be loaded with about 100 copyright-free books. Where applicable, texts in native languages will be included, he added. The machines will also have a chat function that will let kids make faraway friends over the Internet.
Critics of the rollout have two key concerns.

The first is the ability of teachers -- poorly trained and equipped to begin with -- to cope with profoundly disruptive technology. Eduardo Villanueva, a communications professor at Lima's Catholic University, fears "a general disruption of the educational system that will manifest itself in the students overwhelming the teachers."

To counter that fear, Becerra said the government is offering $150 grants to qualifying teachers toward the purchase of conventional laptops, for which it is also arranging low-interest loans.
The second big concern is maintenance.

For every 100 units it will distribute to students, Peru is buying one extra for parts. But there is no tech support program. Students and teachers will have to do it. "What you want is for the kids to do the repairs," said Negroponte, who believes such tinkering is itself a valuable lesson. "I think the kids can repair 95 percent of the laptops."

Tech support is nevertheless a serious issue in many countries, Negroponte acknowledged in a phone interview. One Laptop is currently bidding on a contract with Brazil's government that Negroponte says demanded unrealistically onerous support requirements.

The XO machines are water resistant, rugged and designed to last five years. They have no fan so they won't suck up dust, are built to withstand drops from a meter and a half and can absorb power spikes typical of places with irregular electricity. Mendoza, the psychologist, is overjoyed that the program stipulates that kids get ownership of the laptops. Take Kevin, the aspiring trumpet player.

Sitting in his dirt-floor kitchen as his mother cooks lunch, he draws a soccer field on his XO, then erases it. Kevin plays a song by "Caliente," his favorite combo, that he recorded off Arahuay's single TV channel. He shows a reporter photos he took of him with his 3-year-old brother.
A bare light bulb hangs by a wire from the ceiling. A hen bobs around the floor. There are no books in this two-room house. Kevin's parents didn't get past the sixth grade.
Indeed, the laptop project also has adults in its sights.

Parents in Arahuay are asking Mendoza, the visiting psychologist, what the Internet can do for them. Among them is Charito Arrendondo, 39, who sheds brief tears of joy when a reporter asks what the laptop belonging to ruddy-cheeked Miluska -- the youngest of her six children -- has meant to her. Miluska's father, it turns out, abandoned the family when she was 1.

"We never imagined having a computer," said Arrendondo, a cook. Is she afraid to use the laptop, as is typical of many Arahuay parents, about half of whom are illiterate? "No, I like it. Sometimes when I'm alone and the kids are not around I turn it on and poke around." Arrendondo likes to play checkers on the laptop. "It's also got chess, which I sort of know," she said, pausing briefly. "I'm going to learn."