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SINAC Officials and Landowner Under Investigation for Illegal Land Use in Costa Rica

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Wednesday, August 7, 2024

The Criminal Court of the Second Judicial Circuit of San José rejected the precautionary measures filed by the Public Prosecutor’s Office against the owner of a farm and several officials for the apparent illegal use of land. Landowner Pacheco, as well as three officials from the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), a forestry manager, and the legal representative of Playa Manzanillo S.A., a firm managing the construction of a luxury condominium in the area, are being investigated for the alleged crimes of land use change, ideological falsehood, and use of false documents related to the apparent damages. Nonetheless, the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that an appeal would be filed against the resolution that rejected the precautionary measures. “The Environmental Agrarian Deputy Prosecutor’s Office and the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Probity, Transparency, and Anticorruption informed that, after reviewing the resolution of the Criminal Court of Finance and Public Service, which rejected the precautionary measures requested by the offices, it was determined that the appropriate course of action is to file an appeal,” they said. Meanwhile, Maylin Mora, director of the La Amistad Caribe Conservation Area, defended the institution’s decisions before the Legislative Assembly. “It was on the private property of the named person, and the trees were outside the boundaries of Gandoca Manzanillo,” she said. During Tuesday’s hearing before Congress, the Minister of Environment and Energy Franz Tattenbach and Maylin Mora stated that the permits granted for logging in the area were given in accordance with the law. “The corresponding audits were carried out, and what they indicate is that the permit granted is in accordance with the productive activity being carried out on the site,” mentioned Mora. On the other hand, Tattenbach was rather terse in his statements. “From our point of view, when the permits were issued, as far as I saw, they were in order. Then the case was brought to court, and I am not going to comment further,” added the Minister. On July 16, six raids were carried out at SINAC’s central offices in Heredia, as well as at the La Amistad Caribe Conservation Area in Limón. Raids were also conducted at several houses in Cahuita, Limón, Sarapiquí, and Curridabat. The post SINAC Officials and Landowner Under Investigation for Illegal Land Use in Costa Rica appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

Landowner Pacheco, as well as three officials from the National System of Conservation Areas (SINAC), a forestry manager, and the legal representative of Playa Manzanillo S.A., a firm managing the construction of a luxury condominium in the area, are being investigated for the alleged crimes of land use change, ideological falsehood, and use of false documents related to the apparent damages.

Nonetheless, the Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that an appeal would be filed against the resolution that rejected the precautionary measures.

“The Environmental Agrarian Deputy Prosecutor’s Office and the Deputy Prosecutor’s Office for Probity, Transparency, and Anticorruption informed that, after reviewing the resolution of the Criminal Court of Finance and Public Service, which rejected the precautionary measures requested by the offices, it was determined that the appropriate course of action is to file an appeal,” they said.

Meanwhile, Maylin Mora, director of the La Amistad Caribe Conservation Area, defended the institution’s decisions before the Legislative Assembly. “It was on the private property of the named person, and the trees were outside the boundaries of Gandoca Manzanillo,” she said.

During Tuesday’s hearing before Congress, the Minister of Environment and Energy Franz Tattenbach and Maylin Mora stated that the permits granted for logging in the area were given in accordance with the law.

“The corresponding audits were carried out, and what they indicate is that the permit granted is in accordance with the productive activity being carried out on the site,” mentioned Mora.

On the other hand, Tattenbach was rather terse in his statements. “From our point of view, when the permits were issued, as far as I saw, they were in order. Then the case was brought to court, and I am not going to comment further,” added the Minister.

On July 16, six raids were carried out at SINAC’s central offices in Heredia, as well as at the La Amistad Caribe Conservation Area in Limón. Raids were also conducted at several houses in Cahuita, Limón, Sarapiquí, and Curridabat.

The post SINAC Officials and Landowner Under Investigation for Illegal Land Use in Costa Rica appeared first on The Tico Times | Costa Rica News | Travel | Real Estate.

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When California housing regulators beef with voters, who wins?

What happens when voters take to the ballot to thumb their nose at state housing law? Courts haven’t offered a clear answer.

In summary What happens when voters take to the ballot to thumb their nose at state housing law? Courts haven’t offered a clear answer. In November, voters in Eureka will decide whether to scrap a housing development plan that was approved by California housing regulators in 2020 — and, in the process, risk thumbing their noses at Sacramento. City planners in the Humboldt County town have spent years figuring out how to lay the ground for nearly 1,000 new units by the end of the decade, a quota they’ve been assigned by California’s Housing and Community Development Department. A key pillar of the city’s plan is to convert a dozen of the city’s public parking lots into affordable housing projects. That big idea triggered a local political firestorm over the proposed housing, the loss of parking and the very future of Eureka. Hence the November ballot measure, which would slap costly new parking requirements on those proposed lot-to-home conversion projects and direct development to an abandoned middle school on the far end of town. The fight over Eureka’s parking lots is distinctly Eureka in many of its details, but the broad contours of the story are familiar. Over the last half decade, state lawmakers have passed dozens of new laws requiring local elected officials to approve more housing, whether they want to or not. Regulators and the state’s Department of Justice have grown increasingly unyielding. Lawsuits in Huntington Beach and La Cañada Flintridge and legal settlements in Fullerton and Coronado speak to the new regulatory reality. What makes the housing kerfuffle in Eureka unusual is that it’s not local elected leaders who are contesting state regulations. In November, it could be the voters themselves who give the state-sanctioned plan the boot. If they do, that could put the city in unsettled legal waters. As more state-imposed housing deadlines creep up, other California cities may soon find themselves similarly adrift. Mixed messaging from the courts For decades, California slow-growth advocates have used the citizen initiative process to hold back the tide of unwelcome development. An analysis published by a Bay Area think tank and development advocacy organization, SPUR, identified 208 successful local initiatives that restricted housing construction between 1973 and 2023. Eureka occupies a special place in that history. In 1949, city officials voted to use federal funding to build “low-rent” housing reserved for veterans. The local backlash spawned a statewide campaign that ultimately added Article 34 to the state constitution, a provision that gives local voters veto power over new public housing projects. Seventy five years later, housing advocates still haven’t managed to expunge that provision from state law. But the political sway of the anti-development voting bloc may have started to wane. Since 2022, majorities in Menlo Park, Laguna Beach, Santa Cruz, Costa Mesa and Nevada City have either rejected anti-development measures or passed initiatives to roll back prior ones. If Eureka voters buck that recent trend and turn out to preserve the parking lots, recent judicial precedent doesn’t offer a clear view of what might happen. Judges have ruled that when local restrictions — even those passed by popular vote — make it impossible to abide by state housing requirements, the state laws tend to win out. But in cases where local restrictions don’t make it impossible, but simply more costly or more complicated, for cities to follow state decrees, guidance from the courts has been inconsistent. Encinitas, in San Diego County, has been ground zero of this judicial confusion. The city has a law on the books requiring voter approval of any major change to housing and land use policy. When in 2016 the city put its state-mandated housing development plan up for the electorate’s approval, the voters rejected it. The city tried again in 2018 and again, voters refused to cooperate. Finally, a local judge stepped in, writing that “the Court is required to find a way out of the impasse” and let the plan go forward over the electorate’s objections. But when the city itself turned back to the court, asking it for permission to ignore the electorate for all future housing plans too, another judge refused. The first ruling, which suspended the voters’ referendum power, was evidently only a one-off — and only after the voters had given the “wrong” answer multiple times. The politics of saying no Such legal ambiguity has put some cities in the tough position of having to choose which law to follow and which to break. In 2021, the city of Alameda, caught between a state requirement to permit more housing and a local ballot initiative, reaffirmed by voters in 2020, that effectively banned the construction of any apartment buildings on the island, simply decided to ignore the will of the electorate. That conundrum is likely to crop up for cities across the state. Sausalito, across the bay from San Francisco, may have to reconsider a voter-enacted waterside development ordinance if it wants to permit construction in some of the places it told the state that it would. And in Orange County’s Yorba Linda, where voters rejected a measure to rezone many of the parcels identified by the city as suitable for development in its housing plan, city officials are trying again, while working toward and praying for a more amenable outcome. The parking lot at the corner of 5th and D Streets in Eureka on June 17, 2024. The lot is a proposed site for housing for the Wiyot Tribe. Photo by Mark McKenna for CalMatters “The City is in the process of presenting a revised Housing Element proposal to the voters in November 2024,” said Yorba Linda spokesperson, Geoff Spencer, in an email. “This revised proposal was developed with the help of a resident working group that included residents from across Yorba Linda to come together to create a plan that their neighbors could all get behind and support.” Elizabeth Hansburg, a pro-housing development advocate in Orange County, said Yorba Linda’s approach gives too much deference to local voters who don’t want added density in their neighborhoods. “The city council, the planning commission, the city manager, the planning department, their actions are all bound by the courts,” she said. “But you can just get one random dude or a collection of NIMBYs with enough money to create a ballot proposition that really wreaks havoc on the whole process.” A major change in the political dynamic over the last decade: Anti-development ballot measure writers aren’t just contending against local opponents anymore. “You can just get one random dude or a collection of NIMBYs with enough money to create a ballot proposition that really wreaks havoc on the whole process.”Elizabeth Hansburg, pro-housing development advocate in Orange County The administrations of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta have proven themselves more willing than their predecessors to penalize cities that don’t comply with the letter of state housing law. In February, Bonta’s office entered a brief with Humboldt County Superior Court to defend Eureka’s housing plan against one of a handful of lawsuits filed by many of the same proponents of the local ballot measure. “The City is actively fulfilling state policies to facilitate much-needed housing development in precisely the areas those policies encourage to reduce environmental harm and improve livability for all Californians,” the brief reads. With California’s top law enforcement officer on their side, opponents of the Eureka measure now have fearsome and newly credible consequences to wave before undecided voters: State litigation, funding cuts and the dreaded “builder’s remedy,” a state law that allows developers to essentially ignore local zoning restrictions in cities and counties that don’t have state-approved housing plans. So far this year, the Housing and Community Development Department has decertified housing plans in two cities, both in the San Francisco Bay Area: Portola Valley and Saint Helena. “The interesting question is whether the existence of the Builder’s Remedy and HCD’s willingness to decertify housing elements…changes the politics of voting for this thing,” said Chris Elmendorf, a UC Davis law professor.

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Scientists have found a use for cocoa pod scraps. It could change the future of chocolate

"Large-scale production of this chocolate could reduce land use and global warming potential"

When it comes to talking about chocolate, the words “healthy” and “sustainable” largely aren’t choice descriptors. But that may soon change, thanks to a group of Swiss scientists who reinvented the sweet treat as a more nutritious and eco-friendly product. In a May study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Food, researchers at ETH Zürich repurposed the cocoa pod, which contains cocoa beans, the dried and fully fermented seeds of the cacao tree. When cocoa beans are harvested, cocoa pod husks — the outermost shell that constitutes up to 75% of the cocoa pod — are often discarded. Instead of tossing the cocoa pods, researchers preserved them, specifically extracting the endocarp — the innermost layer of the husks that surround the cocoa beans and pulp — then drying and milling it to create a powder (ECP). That powder was subsequently mixed and heated with cocoa pulp juice concentrate (CPJC) to create a fibrous gel that could replace the sugar in chocolate. Because cocoa pod husks are rich in antioxidants, pectin, minerals, dietary fiber and proteins, the gel includes several health benefits, scientists explained. The gel touts more nutritional value than powdered crystalline sugar, which is what’s traditionally used in making chocolate. “It [chocolate made using the gel] also has comparable sweet taste as traditional chocolate while offering improved nutritional value with higher fibre and reduced saturated fatty acid content,” the study noted. In addition to being healthier, the chocolate produced with the fibrous gel comes with environmental benefits along with new revenue opportunities for farmers in cocoa-producing regions. The study found that in a lab, the new chocolate production method used six percent less land and water than conventional chocolate production. However, the former did increase planet-heating emissions by 12% because the process of making ECP required an extra drying step that used significant amounts of energy. The study suggested alternate drying methods, such as microwave drying or utilizing solar energy instead of diesel and grid energy, that lessened the environmental impacts observed in factory production. Researchers ultimately came to a promising conclusion: “A cradle-to-factory life cycle assessment shows that large-scale production of this chocolate could reduce land use and global warming potential compared with average European dark chocolate production. The process also provides opportunities for diversification of farmers’ income and technology transfer, offering potential socio-economic benefits for cocoa-producing regions.” In recent years, high demands for cocoa have spurred widespread environmental issues and poor labor practices. A 2017 report from Mighty Earth — a global advocacy organization centered on conserving at-risk regions — found that the world’s major chocolate companies (like Nestlé, Cadbury, and Mars) continue to purchase cocoa grown through the illegal deforestation of national parks and other protected forests. In the Ivory Coast and Ghana, the mass destruction of forests is primarily being fueled by growing demands within the chocolate industry. Collectively, both nations produce a combined 2.6 million tons of chocolate, which accounts for 60 percent of the world’s supply. Per Mighty Earth’s report, Ghana lost 7,000 square kilometers of forest, or about 10 percent of its entire tree cover, between the years 2001 and 2014. Approximately 25 percent of that deforestation was linked to the cocoa industry, the report specified. Similarly, the Ivory Coast — which at one point, was densely covered by forests — lost seven of its 23 protected areas to cocoa production. Less than 11 percent of the country remains forested, and less than four percent remains densely forested, according to Ivorian government statistics and maps. The report explained that producing conventional chocolate requires several steps: cocoa beans are first purchased by middlemen called “pisteurs,” who transport the beans to villages and towns across a specific cocoa-growing region. The beans are then sold to another group of middlemen called “cooperatives,” who sell them to cocoa traders, who ship the beans to major chocolate companies across Europe and North America. Although many chocolate corporations have implemented ethical chocolate standards in the past decade, deforestation rates remain high while cocoa farmers’ wages remain low. Some smaller cocoa businesses have found ways to sustainably produce cocoa and prioritize their workers. And even though major corporations claimed to follow suit in prioritizing sustainability, several big names were recently caught doing the contrary. Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite. Back in January, Rainforest Alliance and the Hershey Company were sued for “false and deceptive claims about child labor, labor practices, and deforestation,” according to a report in Sierra, the official magazine of the Sierra Club. The class action lawsuit, filed in the US District Court Northern District of Illinois, claimed that Rainforest Alliance’s certification standards are incapable of ensuring that Hershey’s chocolate products (both organic and inorganic) are ethically sourced or sustainable. The suit further accused Rainforest Alliance of misleading consumers via its ecolabels, which are placed on products that are made without child labor. In 2018, the Rainforest Alliance joined forces with UTZ, a company that has been found to supply cocoa using child labor. Even before the merge, cases of child labor at Rainforest Alliance-certified farms were documented. Hershey Company currently sources its cocoa from both the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where approximately 1.56 million children are working on cocoa farms, per the Department of Labor. The complaint added that “Rainforest Alliance is paying well below the necessary living income to farmers for its certified cocoa.” It also called out the organization for utilizing an “assess and address” model that fixes specific issues only after they’ve been made public. Sustainable chocolate standards and methods, like the one presented by researchers at ETH Zürich, hope to remedy the cocoa supply chain, ensuring ethical standards and the fair treatment of workers are commonplace within the greater industry. “As the world races towards a more circular and sustainable economy, innovative technologies in the food sector are required,” the study noted. “Food utilization needs to be maximized so that associated environmental burdens can be reduced.” Read more about the chocolate industry:

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SINAC Officials and Landowner Under Investigation for Illegal Land Use in Costa Rica

Related News

When California housing regulators beef with voters, who wins?

Scientists have found a use for cocoa pod scraps. It could change the future of chocolate

Suggested Viewing

Wildlife in Our Backyard

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Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

SINAC Officials and Landowner Under Investigation for Illegal Land Use in Costa Rica

Related News

When California housing regulators beef with voters, who wins?

Scientists have found a use for cocoa pod scraps. It could change the future of chocolate

Suggested Viewing

Wildlife in Our Backyard

Salted Earth

Bread For Tomorrow

Sustainable Living with Patrick Lang

Igniting Change: Maui Brush Fires

Join us to forgea sustainable future

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Join us to forge
a sustainable future