|
 Brazil's first Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species will be housed in the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), in northern Brazil. The unit will be built and equipped with federal funds from the Studies and Projects Funding Body (Finep) and from the Bank of Northeastern Brazil (BNB).
The laboratory will be headed by Egyptian agronomist Magdi Ahmed Ibrahim Aloufa, Vegetable Physiology professor at the university.
Construction of the laboratory is at its final stages, with equipment about to be installed. According to Magdi Aloufa, when it is operating, the laboratory should be capable of accommodating in several 20-square-meter rooms, some 200,000 saplings of plants native to the caatinga (a dry shrub land in northeastern Brazil), the Atlantic Forest and other biomes of the Northeast of Brazil, as is the case with pau Brasil (Brazil wood), angico, jurema and umbu.
"Apart from preserving biodiversity of forests and other Brazilian ecosystems, the main objective of the laboratory is to operate as a germplasm bank, supplying cloned and genetically improved plants to reforestation projects," explains Aloufa, who graduated from the University of Cairo.
The professor says that currently this kind of laboratory is used when the plan is to keep plants for use in the field, i.e., in nature itself.
"To conserve the same quantity we have in our little rooms it is necessary to have hundreds of hectares. Apart from that, these plants would be exposed to fires, plagues and the action of man," says the Egyptian, who arrived in Natal 24 years ago, married to a Brazilian teacher, after having finished his doctorate at the Pierre & Marie Curie University, in Paris.
Even before the laboratory is ready, Aloufa and his students started the process of collecting plants and saplings from fragments of the existing Atlantic Forest in the state of Rio Grande do Norte and in the caatinga, vegetation that is predominant in the state.
Apart from that, the laboratory already has agreements with universities in several other states in Brazil and in the Arab world, mainly in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. It is through this exchange that the laboratory should also conserve species turned to reforestation of savannah areas in the Gulf.
One of the pioneers in biotechnology and cloning of plant species of the Northeast, Magdi Aloufa also coordinated a project that developed date saplings adapted to the climate and earth of the Brazilian semiarid.
Betting on the extreme capacity of the plant that is native to the Middle East of adapting to degraded areas with little water, the researcher invested in the development of saplings capable of assuring the quality and speed of fruit generation.
The Egyptian's bet was based on the economic potential of the product and on the fact that most of the dates consumed in Brazil are imported from Mexico, the only country in Latin America where acclimatized dates are produced.
In Petrolina, in the interior of Pernambuco state, there are some date producers who planted the seeds, which does not guarantee the quality of the fruit.
"Apart from economic arguments, dates offer environmental advantages, as they are palms that fertilize the soil, lowering the temperature and interrupting the desertification process."
The agronomist also developed, with funds from the BNB, genetic improvement of cashew, which started being produced with quality control stemming from UFRN biotechnology laboratory research. Small farmers from the city of Serra do Mel, located 320 kilometers (199 miles) away from Natal, capital of Rio Grande do Norte, were benefited by the initiative.
"The city currently lives off cashew trade, but the fruit produced there grows natively, without quality guarantee," pointed out the agronomist.
Anba
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.