Other sponsors of the initiative are the Programa Andes Tropicales (PAT) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF, an independent funder of global eco-friendly projects), and the Venezuelan Environment Ministry has also joined the effort.

Beginning in 2005 the programme is to provide credits and training to thousands of coffee-growing families to help them set up cooperatives and seek alternatives to their long-standing farming practices, which have meant deforestation and harm to the biodiversity of their surroundings.

In the mid-1900s, Venezuela underwent an intense process of urbanisation, and thousands of farming families abandoned their land, as did Elba Martínez, a 54-year-old seamstress from the village of Santa Cruz de Mora, in Mérida state.

''We made our living from coffee, but we had to come to Caracas to seek better opportunities, because we could no longer make ends meet,'' Martínez told Tierramérica.

More recently, there have been cases of small coffee growers who, faced with low prices for their crop, have bought cattle for ''high altitude ranching'', leading to more deforestation of mountains for pasture -- an unnecessary practice in times when coffee and other temperate crops fetched better prices.

''Productive landscape'', with a budget of four million dollars, is focused on areas at less than 3,000 metres above sea level, but there is another GEF initiative that will seek to involve potato growers in the colder, higher altitude areas.

In order to make these proposals attractive, ''we are talking with the farmers about better business practices with activities that are sustainable,'' Yves Lesenfants, executive director of PAT, explained to Tierramérica.

One of the initiatives is tourism, ''because there is always a need for someone to organise guided tours or to provide a mule for a ride,'' he said.

The programme also aims to prevent the extinction of species: animals like the spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus), and plants like the 'frailejón' (Espeletia schultzii), said Gil.

''The Red Book of Venezuelan Flora'', published by the Fundación Polar, says that Andean species, and particularly those of the highland plains, are among the most threatened on the list of 341 endangered species, out of around 2,000 that have been evaluated.

More than half of the species studied face ''destruction of habitat due to land transformed for agriculture or into urban or industrial centres,'' as is the case of deforestation in the upper mountains by small farmers in the Andes being targeted by the new programme.

According to the ''Red Book'', the highlands ecosystems are legally well protected by national parks legislation, ''but in reality they face disruption'' caused by the incursion of needy farmers.

The World Wildlife Fund says the eco-regional system of the northern Andes, along 2,000 km and covering 49 million hectares, is noted for its biological diversity and for being one of the greatest concentrations of endemic species, in other words, species found only in that region.

That system extends from the Colombian Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Venezuelan Mérida Range to the Abra de Porculla, in northern Peru.

Similar programmes to that of the Venezuelan Andes have begun to take place in Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, based on pilot projects in Costa Rica and Panama, said Lesenfants.

(* Yensi Rivero is a Tierramérica contributor. Originally published July 3 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)