News stories by Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Apr 30 (IPS) - Ana Chipana, from Bolivia, did not like eating quinoa when she was a girl. But this grain-like crop native to the Andes was her ticket to becoming a successful entrepreneur who has visited NASA and the United Nations.

EL ALTO, Bolivia, Dic 07 (IPS) - Every morning from 6:00 to 8:00 AM, native people in this sprawling working-class suburb of La Paz, Bolivia listen to the programme broadcast by former education minister Donato Ayma in the Aymara language.

Women make up a majority of migrants from South America's Andean region and they send more money home to their families than men, according to a study carried out in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

With victory cheers and predictions of future campaigns in defence of their ancestral territory, indigenous protesters from Bolivia's Amazon jungle region celebrated the new law that banned the construction of the road through their rainforest reserve.

Bolivia's main trade union declared a 24-hour general strike Wednesday to protest Sunday's police crackdown on indigenous demonstrators who were protesting the construction of a road through a pristine rainforest preserve.

The lack of regulations for consulting indigenous communities in Bolivia on initiatives that affect their territories is at the heart of a dispute over a road to facilitate traffic from Brazil, which would run through an enormous tropical national park self-governed by indigenous communities.

Indigenous people in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia are again preparing to make the long march to La Paz, 21 years after their first such protest. They have vowed to make the trek in defence of their lands, which they say are threatened by plans for a highway to be built with the backing of the Brazilian government.

In the midst of heated debate with agribusiness, the Bolivian government has launched an agricultural production model aimed at boosting food sovereignty by supporting small farmers, in order to generate surpluses to cushion the swings in international food prices.

A non-governmental organisation set up by five women 25 years ago in Bolivia gave birth to what is now the largest microcredit bank in the country, catering to those otherwise marginalised from the financial system.

Hundreds of women belonging to mining cooperatives in Bolivia are striving for the right to mine seams of tin and silver in the country's western highlands, where an age old superstition maintains that the presence of women 'scares away' the minerals.