Today's Stories: More Transit Officials Required Bambuzal Farmers Still Occupying the Cathedral Scientist Calls Decaf Coffee Row Tempest in Teacup News Briefs

Back to school. Summer vacation came to a close yesterday. Transit police say the ride home last night went smooth, as they were out in full force> Children of all ages head back to the classrooms today.

Air Traffic Controllers Strike Continues into Day 22!

The Transit police has 850 officers, however only 450 are on the roads daily in three shifts: 190 in the morning, an equal number in the afternoon and only 70 on the night shift.

Of the remaining 400, according to the newspaper, 250 are off in some form incapacity, vacation, and/or suspension. The other 150 work the offices, attending to 911 calls, coordination events, attending to confiscated vehicles, etc.

The rapid growth of vehicles on the streets of Costa Rica means one Transit official for every 1.622 vehicles. In San José, only 60 Transit officials work the streets on the morning shit, who on an average weekday morning attend to some 50 traffic accidents.

Numbers further show that each morning each Transit officials is responsible for 188km of the 35.880 km of roads in Costa Rica; that relates to one Transit official for every 42.2km of road.

In neighbouring countries there are more traffic officials on the roads at all times. El Salvador counts with 1.051 transit officials or one for every 11.4km of road. In Panama there is one Transit officer for every 5km of road.

Transit Police director, Ignacio Sánchez, explains that the ideal ratio in Costa Rica would be one Transit officer for every 10km of road and that his department is working to obtain the necessary resources to put more officers roads.

Sánchez has made a request to the government for some 300 additional officers, however, the decision is subject to the approval of the tax reform that is before the Legislative Assembly.

Bambuzal Farmers Still Occupying the Cathedral
About 80 families are still camped at the Metropolitan Cathedral, in downtown San José, living among the daily murmur of prayers.

The families have been staying at the cathedral since April, when police removed them from the Bambuzal plantation, owned by Standard Fruit Co. in Rio Frio de Sarapiqui, about 30 miles north of the Costa Rican capital.

They have been awaiting action from the government on their demands. And they are still waiting.

"We're under the protection of God. Let the law be applied. That farm doesn't belong to Standard. We need it to live and work," said Ileana Murillo, president of the Farmers Association of Bambuzal.

The families say that the land should be divided among the landless under laws that require companies to work large tracts of land in order to keep it.

Standard, which has held the property since 1967, says it is, in fact, working the land, producing bamboo that is used to support banana shoots at other plantations in Costa Rica.

So far, the government and the courts have agreed. Police have now ousted the farmers from the property five times since the start of 2001. Most, but apparently not all, originally had been living near the Bambuzal plantation.

Earlier this month, a court canceled an order which would have allowed them to live on the property while the issue is settled.

The government attorney who obtained the order to remove the farmers from the land, Fernando Vargas, complained that some people "have tried to make usurpation of lands into a business. They occupy lands, they are removed, they recover them and they sell them." He said that some of those in the group have been involved in other land invasions.

President Abel Pacheco has said that some of the group camped at the Cathedral are not eligible for state land grants because they already have land registered in their name.

While the government has offered to move the protesters to land in the northern part of the country, they refused. Murillo called it "a swamp."

"We wanted to return after two months, but they took away the authorization to remain on the lands," Murillo said. "So we will be in the Cathedral indefinitely."

Scientist Calls Decaf Coffee Row Tempest in Teacup
The Brazilian scientist who recently discovered naturally decaffeinated coffee plants from a collection of wild Ethiopian beans said last week,  reports that he had taken coffee plants illegally from the African country were “nonsense.”

The spat has underscored the potential money at stake over the rights to genetic material of the coffee plants, even though the commercial potential of the wild plants is unknown and a product could take at least five years to get to market.

Decaf drinkers account for 10 percent of total coffee sales in the world, a multibillion-dollar industry. Naturally decaffeinated brews could dominate over the current chemically caffeine-reduced options in today’s health-conscious market. “This has been absurdly blown out of proportion,” Paulo Mazzafera, a PhD in plant physiology at Brazil’s UNICAMP university, told Reuters in an interview. “I’ve never even been to Ethiopia. I’m hoping to visit there some day.”

Commercial coffee grown throughout the world today originated in the high forests of southwestern Ethiopia in a region known as Kaffa, which is the eponym of the modern drink in many languages.

“The area was undergoing heavy deforestation and there was concern over the survival of these native plants,” said Mazzafera. “The best genetic collection of a species is always in the place where it originates.” The mission managed to collect a few hundred arabica beans from wild coffee plants in the region. “I doubt these plants exist any longer in the wild.”

“Copies of this collection were made — one went to Ethiopia, one to India, also to Portugal and Costa Rica,” explained Mazzafera. “It was from Costa Rica’s collection that Brazil eventually got its seeds in 1973.”

Brazil planted the beans soon after and a few thousand trees have been maintained. Mazzafera said his discovery of three trees that contained virtually no caffeine was based on the Ethiopian beans acquired from Costa Rica.

The ownership of the collection’s genetic material is unclear. By generally accepted standards, it is not possible to copyright a living organism unless it has been genetically modified, like Monsanto Co.’s Roundup Ready Soybeans.

“If these beans turn out to be commercially productive and we were to sell them, we would then have no control or right to them once they left our hands,” Mazzafera said, adding that his project has received no funding from the producing sector. The collection of the beans also predates international conventions regulating the ownership of indigenous plants, which are often poached by rich countries from poor countries via smugglers.

Brazil’s rubber industry, once a world leader, faded into oblivion after the British smuggled Brazilian rubber plants into their colonies in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia.

News Briefs

• The Coordinadora Unitaria Sindical y Magisterial (CUSIMA), which groups some 70% of all the unions in the country, have announced that they will stage a protest strike next Thursday, the 29th of July.