News stories by Fabíola Ortiz, page 2

With seven months to go until the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development, Brazil is uniting in support of proposals to be included in the summit's draft final document, which aim to transfer its successful national social and environmental sustainability programmes to the global scale.

Inspired by the movement for real democracy and people's power that has spread to hundreds of cities around the world, young Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro have created their own version of 'Occupy Wall Street', dubbed 'Occupy Rio'.

Economic status, education, access to clean water and sanitation, nutrition and the environment determine the level of health of persons, communities or countries, and so does the extent to which rights are enjoyed or denied.

Brazil is keen to take part in the international effort to expand access to medicines and to produce its own drugs, and will start by becoming the world supplier of medicines to treat Chagas disease.

The Bolsa Verde or Green Grant programme, which gives financial assistance to poor families that help preserve Brazil's Amazon jungle, may turn out to be only a drop in the ocean if legislation that undermines forest protection is adopted.

More than 20 percent of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean lacks basic sanitation and 15 percent has no access to drinking water because of poor management, said experts at a meeting that ended Thursday in Brazil.

The development of one part of Brazil's semiarid Northeast, the Agreste region in the state of Pernambuco, could begin with the construction of canals that will bring in water diverted from the São Francisco River.

At least 200 million people in the world are in danger of being left without water, because they depend for their supply on glaciers that are melting, although paradoxically the process creates the illusion of plentiful water resources.

Drug dealers in the favelas of this Brazilian city are doing the same brisk business as before the installation of the 'Police Pacification Units' (UPPs) in those poor neighbourhoods, authorities and experts admit, while they acknowledge the difficulties in combating the problem.

African countries are increasingly taking up Brazil's offer of training in the art of diplomacy, seeing it as a partner that could help them set up or improve their own foreign service institutes.