Speaking Dec. 10 at the conclusion of the 4-day Miami Conference on the Caribbean and Latin America, Vargo said the Internet explosion is such that "each second that I speak, three people somewhere in the world are logging onto the Internet for the first time." Vargo, who participated in a forum on electronic commerce in the Americas, said that for the three hours the forum lasted, 33,000 new Internet users had joined the global information superhighway.

Vargo noted that a Commerce Department study shows that the creation of new high-tech industries are accounting for one-third of the U.S. economic expansion, and that this explosion in Internet use is fundamentally changing the way business is being done in this country.

However, Vargo said the biggest challenge created by this new industry is how to make the new technology work for everyone -- "how do we get the most good for the greatest number" of people. Vargo suggested that the challenge facing the U.S. government in this regard is to ensure that its citizens have the "means, tools, skills and desire" to be part of the new high-tech economy.

Vargo said the government's role should be to help provide the education and training necessary to allow people to get high-tech jobs, because "you can't compete if you can't log on."

Her agency, Vargo added, recognizes that access to the Internet varies across a wide range of incomes, race, and geography, and in some cases those differences are profound. The administration's goal, she said, is to use the new technology to "bridge the gap between rich and poor" with a campaign that would make the Internet accessible to all citizens of this country, especially in poor and rural communities.

In addition, because of the administration's belief that the developing world should not be excluded from the information superhighway, the United States is working, with the help of the World Bank, to create Internet start-ups in 11 countries, with three of those countries in the Americas -- Guatemala, Jamaica and Haiti. In that last country, Peace Corps workers are helping Haitians to connect to the Internet.

Vargo said the administration rejects the notion that an overarching national or world body is needed to regulate the growth of the information technology field. For one thing, she said, it would be virtually impossible to regulate Internet growth, with thousands of new web sites being created around the world. With some exceptions, the government should let the private sector take the lead in allowing electronic commerce to fully reach its potential, she said.

Vargo said her boss, Commerce Secretary William Daley, has suggested that perhaps their department should be renamed to reflect the explosion in electronic commerce. The new name, she said, would be the "E-Commerce Department," whereby Internet users can log onto the agency's web site for up-to-the minute weather reports from Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. During this year's hurricane season in the United States, Vargo said, people who wanted to get the latest storm forecasts were logging onto the agency's National Hurricane Center web site.

As part of this move to go electronic, Vargo added, Commerce intends to have Internet users register patents on-line with the agency's Patent and Trademark Office, and to fill out data on the web site for the U.S. Census Bureau, another Commerce agency.

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Soon after a 1989 presidential decree established the 1.8 million-acre Calukmul Biosphere Reserve, in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, a local conservation group began working with communities outside the new protected area. The goal of Pronatura Peninsula de Yucatan is to find ways villagers can improve their standards of living so they do not depend on the reserve for resources such as firewood, food and farmland.

Conservation groups have long worked in rural and often impoverished towns outside protected areas in this way. But now some groups, like Pronatura, are adding another element to their conservation strategies: family planning services. According to Carlos Saavedra of the Summit Foundation, which provides funding to groups that link conservation with reproductive health issues, "easing human pressure on the natural environment and fulfilling reproductive health and other needs of the rural poor are equally important, and reinforcing goals."

In the Calukmul area, villagers are well aware that population pressures and their own activities have an impact on natural resources, reports Sayira Maas Rodriguez, a social anthropologist with Pronatura. Between 1980 and 1995, the population in the area quadrupled, from 6,858 to 24,295, due to immigration and a high birth rate. "People began to ask 'what lands are we going to leave to our children if more people come to the region?'" she says.

With the World Wildlife Fund and the University of Michigan Population-Environment Fellows Program, Pronatura researched the relationship between the area's demographics and environment and found that rapid growth and a lack of land-use planning are threatening the region's natural resources. Maas Rodriguez says the group is planning a follow-up project that will: encourage residents to consider family planning options; support local health and education institutions; monitor the population rate; and work with villagers to better plan how land in the region is used.

Robert Engelman, vice president for research at Population Action International in Washington, D.C., would like to see more conservation groups link biodiversity protection and reproductive health services, although he understands the reluctance of many groups to take in the sensitive issue of family planning. What conservation groups should recognize, he believes, is that "women who gain control over their reproduction and have only as many children as they want to have, also gain the time to learn how to diversify their incomes and sustainably use natural resources." Evidence suggests, he says, that when women have access to reproductive health care, they become better environmental stewards.

He warns that it can be a mistake for conservation groups to undertake demographics analysis in the same communities where they plan to work. "If you count heads, then return to help with reproductive health services, it suggests that the reason you want to help is because you counted these people, and there are too many of them," he points out.

Saavedra notes that in addition to Summit, other private foundations in the United States are looking for opportunities to support partnerships among "development, reproductive health, and conservation groups that come together to search for practical answers to the challenges posed by high social inequities, high population numbers, and environmental degradation." -- ECO-EXCHANGE

MIAMI, Fl. -- The gap between countries with access to the latest in technological advances and those without represents a potential threat to the political and social order of the Western Hemisphere and the world, say several technology experts.

Moderating a Dec. 10 forum at the Miami Conference on the Caribbean and Latin America, David Rothkopf, a former U.S. undersecretary of commerce, said access to technology effects everything from education and health care delivery to hemispheric integration, trade and commerce.

Rothkopf, now working in private industry with The Newmarket Company, said education is vital to modernization because technological advances cannot occur without a trained workforce.

Rothkopf said since World War II, the gap in income between the world's richest and poorest countries has grown exponentially, and the gap will keep growing because the richest countries keep applying new technological advances while the poorest countries, without access to such innovations as the Internet, keep falling farther and farther behind.

Rothkopf said the paradox is that "we live in a world of enormous progress" even as more people drop below the poverty line. He pointed to what is being called the "digital divide" between countries with access to the Internet and those without, such as Argentina, where Internet penetration is 30 times less than in the United States. In Argentina, he said, the matter is made worse by the fact that the upper income class is dwarfed in numbers by those in poverty.

Rothkopf warned that "we are at risk of creating a hemisphere in which the digital divide becomes a social and political divide" between rich and poor.

"Leaving the bottom four-fifths of the population behind," he said, "creates a kind of decapitation that leads to a ... backlash against globalization," such as the street demonstrations held during the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle at the end of November.

Rothkopf remarked that it would be easy to get into a "depressing discussion" on the fact that slum areas of Brazil are not connected to the Internet, and that there is no electronic commerce in the economically-depressed far northeastern part of that nation, while the same lack of Internet access exists for much of the Caribbean.

Another forum participant, Eric Pheiffer of Forbes ASAP, said access to technology and the disparity in income it represents is also a problem in the United States. He said young, newly rich entrepreneurs, who made their fortunes from Internet technology, are moving into neighborhoods of the Silicon Valley in California, raising property values and driving out those who no longer can afford to live there.

"People are outraged by these young, rich entrepreneurs coming in and displacing them," Pfeiffer said. "So that's in an area that's very wealthy and because you have such a large change going on, both in power and monetarily, there are going to be central places of that power and money, and if you're in one of those central places you're going to be doing very well and if you're not, you're not."

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The effort comes after an intense, Category 5 Hurricane Mitch devastated much of Central America, with 180 mph winds, heavy rains and flash flooding that claimed more than 10,000 lives. Much of the Central American severe weather warning capabilities and forecast services were severely damaged by Hurricane Mitch. NOAA's team from the National Weather Service will focus on developing an early warning system within and between the countries of Central America.

"In the long term, this multi-national collaboration on regional weather expertise and data will save lives and protect property. We are pleased to work together with our Central American partners who have asked that we share technology, weather observing equipment, and forecasting knowledge as they continue to improve their disaster preparedness and weather warning systems," said U.S. Commerce Secretary William M. Daley, who oversees NOAA.

On Friday (Dec. 10), the National Weather Service team, led by its director, John J. Kelly, Jr., concluded an eight-day visit with officials in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Prior to making the trip, Kelly said he hoped to tailor the approach to each country while creating a shared weather and flood warning system.

"Saving lives, protecting property and improving the regional economy depends on the meteorologists and hydrologists in each of the countries establishing a free flow of data and information," said Kelly. "Our goal is to foster agreements between these national agencies that define responsibilities and establish the best possible services before, during, and after severe weather events. NOAA's National Weather Service and other donors will continue to help with future improvements in forecasts and warnings."

This visit to the region kicked off a two-year program, expected to begin in January 2000. Congress provided funding for the project to NOAA through USAID. Several NOAA agencies will be providing the following assistance:

• replace damaged automatic meteorological and hydrological stations lost to Hurricane Mitch;
• reestablish upper air station in Honduras needed for hurricane
• forecasting;
• install river gauges needed for river flow forecasting (mainly in Honduras/joint with USGS);
• automate precipitation gauges for real-time data;
• provide capability for computerized river stage forecasts for the Escondido River in Nicaragua, the Choluteca and Aguan rivers inHonduras, and the Rio Lempa River, which flows through El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

• improve capabilities along coasts to cope with impacts of
• hurricanes;
• install tide gauge networks.

improve capabilities to receive and interpret satellite imagery for region

improve El Nino/La Nina long-range forecasts for Central America.

Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 hurricane, brought heavy rains, flash floods, rock and mud slides, and winds that registered near 180 mph, with gusts well over 200 mph. Mitch was the fourth most intense hurricane ever observed in the Atlantic basin this century, based on barometric pressure, and the strongest ever observed in the month of October. Central American officials documented that Mitch claimed at least 9,086 lives in the following countries: Honduras (5,677); Nicaragua (2,863); Guatemala (258); El Salvador (239); Mexico (9) and Costa Rica (7). 

MIAMI, Fl. -- The Clinton Administration is committed to forging deeper and wider integration within the Americas, says Peter Romero, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

In a luncheon speech Dec. 8 at the Miami Conference on the Caribbean and Latin America, Romero said that the people of the United States stand to "reap even greater benefits than is now the case" through initiatives such as open trade within a regional market of 800 million consumers and a gross domestic product of more than $10,000,000 million. Those initiatives will also "create enormous opportunities for hemispheric economies and the average citizen."

Conversely, he said, "relegating the region to a lower priority will only ensure that we bear the cost in transnational crime, instability, and illegal migration," while gaining "little of the benefits."

Romero urged candidates vying for the White House in 2000 to "heed this message." He said the Clinton Administration intends to work with Congress next year to develop a special package to support the anti-drug fight in Colombia and the Andean region, and to "take the final step" toward passage of the Caribbean Basin Trade Initiative. The trade package would give Caribbean products tariff advantages that are now enjoyed by Mexico as a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Romero, who has been involved in Western Hemisphere affairs for his entire professional career at the State Department (almost 25 years), said that at no time has he felt "more confident in the region's progress," despite still-unresolved problems and the fact that crises may loom on the horizon.

"Our relationships with hemispheric countries, while more complicated than [with] any other region, have a direct impact on domestic issues in the United States. They transcend any single issue or partisan view. Our policies work when derived from a strong bipartisan consensus. We face challenges, but also rich opportunities," he said.

Romero observed that such countries as Mexico, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic have shown economic progress, but remarked: "On the flip side, the fruits of economic growth in the 1990s have been unevenly distributed both within the hemisphere and among the populations of each country. Broad sections of the population of Latin America and the Caribbean still suffer from abject poverty. While many people enjoy dramatically improved living standards, countless others have not seen any appreciable benefit yet." Romero added that about a third of Latin America's people live on less than $2 a day and that income inequality in the region is worse than in any other part of the world.

Romero cited polls showing that most Latin Americans endorse democracy as the correct system of government, yet warned that overall living standards must improve. "It doesn't take a clairvoyant to predict that democracy will wane in the face of economic deprivation. Just as corruption, unresponsive legal systems and weak civil institutions give democracy a bad name, so too do they limit potential economic advancement," he said. 

Long the standard-setter in nature travel, Costa Rica is again taking the lead by becoming the first country in the region to measure the level of "sustainability" attained by the country's hotels. The Costa Rican Tourism Institute (ICT in its Spanish acronym) now offers tourists a selection of hotels that it has evaluated with its "Sustainable Tourism Certification" program.

Rosaura Monge of ICT's natural resources division says that the philosophy behind the program is to "give the tourism industry a financial advantage, while at the same time benefiting local communities and having a minor impact on natural resources."

The program is voluntary, and response from the hotel industry has been enthusiastic. Forty-eight hotels have been evaluated; some 150 are on the waiting list. The evaluation, which is free to hotels that have already signed up, is not an easy process. ICT technicians assess each hotel based on 153 questions in four categories.

Each yes-or-no question is designed to evaluate the hotel's compliance with sustainability standards and is weighted on a scale of one to three. For example, in the category, "physical and biological environment," three-point questions include: "The hotel operates a wastewater treatment plant to avoid discharging it directly into the environment"; and "The hotel participates in or supports the maintenance or management of a natural protected area (private or public)." Total points are tallied and final scores place hotels on one of five levels, with five being the highest level of sustainability.

None of the 48 hotels evaluated reached level five, and only three reached level four: the Arena Volcano Observatory, the Hotel Herradura, and the Rosa Blanca Country Inn.

Scores of tourism business people were involved in designing the standards, which is one reason why most in the travel industry support the ICT scheme, according to Tamara Budowski, an owner of the local travel agency, Horizontes Nature Tours. Local travel executives are involved, she says, "whether because their heart is in it or because they know the certification is good business policy in accordance with the image Costa Rica has as a nature-based destination."

Detailed information about the certification project and score sheets of all the evaluated hotels can be found on a bilingual website <http://www.turismo-sostenible.co.cr>. According to Monge, the program's biggest impact has been to change attitudes among tourism business people. "They have more of a holistic vision now," she explains. "They are not thinking just about their business, but also about the environment in which it is immersed."

MIAMI, Fl. -- The world community is stepping up efforts to help reconstruct parts of the Caribbean Basin that were devastated by hurricanes and floods in 1998, says Walter Bastian, director of the Commerce Department's Office of Latin America and the Caribbean.

In a Dec. 7 interview at the Miami Conference on the Caribbean and Latin America, Bastian said that in the next two to three months the region will start seeing more of the $9,000 million that was pledged at a May donors conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

The United States is the largest individual country donor, having pledged $1,800 million, while the largest multilateral donor is the Inter-American Development Bank at $3,500 million. Another major donor is the World Bank, having pledged about $2,000 million, while more aid will come from such nations as Sweden and Japan.

The storms of the Caribbean Basin brought the economies of the affected countries to a virtual standstill; Nicaragua lost two-thirds of its gross national product because of Mitch, Bastian said.

He described as "phenomenal" the initial emergency relief effort carried out by non-governmental organizations, the private sector, the U.S. government and other nations to help victims of Hurricanes Georges and Mitch and subsequent floods resulting from the hurricanes.

But Bastian regretted that the second phase of the recovery effort -- reconstruction -- "was slow in coming." He attributed delays to the fact that donors insisted that "mechanisms needed to be put in place" to receive the financial assistance. Another major factor, he said, was the issue of transparency: donors wanted to assure the general public that the reconstruction money was going for its intended use, and not for other undisclosed and unrelated activities -- as had happened in previous relief efforts.

Bastian said lack of coordination between governments and donor agencies has also hindered the relief effort. For example, he said that during Mitch and Georges, most of the affected countries were getting their information about the storms from satellite television's "Weather Channel," which itself was getting information from the Commerce Department's own weather service. What occurred, he said, was that countries such as Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala were working in isolation on how to combat the storms, rather than coordinating their efforts, which might have kept losses down.

Clinton reaffirms U.S. support for transfer of Panama Canal

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Clinton says he believes the government of Panama is committed to keeping the Panama Canal open and will work with the United States to do so.

Speaking at a Nov. 30 White House briefing, Clinton said he had always been a supporter of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaties which authorized transfer of the Canal from the United States to Panama by the end of this year.

"I supported it at the time and I still support it," Clinton said. "I think it's the right thing to do. I think that the new government of Panama is committed to maintaining the canal in an appropriate way and keeping it open and working with us to do so, and having good relations. So no one in Panama or anywhere in Latin America should draw any adverse conclusion" that the United States is opposed to the transfer.

Clinton also dismissed suggestions that U.S. national security would be endangered by the fact that two Hong Kong firms will be managing the ports at both ends of the Canal.

Clinton told reporters that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Jimmy Carter, the former president who negotiated the 1977 treaties for the United States, will lead the U.S. delegation at the transfer ceremony for the Canal Dec. 14. Clinton said that while the ceremony is a "major event" in history, he has taken a dozen foreign trips in 1999 and may have to make another at about the time of the ceremony.

In addition, Clinton said, "we have a lot of things going on in the world now. I've been out of the country a lot; I need to get ready for the new (session of) Congress."

Clinton said Carter deserved to lead the U.S. delegation to the handover ceremony in Panama because "he did an historic and great thing in advocating the Panama Canal Treaty. But the people of Panama should know that this president and our government strongly support both the treaty and the event." 

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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Transparency International, the Berlin-based organization devoted to curbing world corruption, has released its fifth annual "Corruption Perceptions Index" (CPI) survey of corruption levels in 99 countries, based on the perceptions of business people, risk analysts and the general public.

The group, whose members include former presidents Jimmy Carter of the United States and Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, ranked nations on a scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 10 (essentially clean). The survey showed that this year, as in 1998, Denmark heads the CPI rankings with an essentially corrupt-free score of 10. Finishing second was Finland, followed by New Zealand, Sweden, and Canada. The United States ranked 18th, with a score of 7.5, followed by Chile at 6.9 and Israel at 6.8.

Transparency International chairman Peter Eigen cautioned that though many very poor countries finished in the lowest positions on the CPI, "it would be wrong to call these countries the most corrupt in the world." He added, however, that governments of countries with low CPI scores "need to do far more to publicly acknowledge the problems, to confront the issues, to subject the corrupt companies and the corrupt officials to prosecution and to earn public confidence by their anti-bribery policies. Some countries have begun to take such action, but have initiated reforms so recently that these are not reflected in the polls on which the CPI is based."

Among countries in the Americas, Costa Rica finished at 32, Peru was 40, Uruguay 42, Brazil 45, El Salvador 49, Jamaica 50, Mexico 61, Guatemala 68, Nicaragua 70, Argentina 71, Colombia 72, Venezuela 78, Bolivia 81, Ecuador 82, Paraguay 91, and Honduras 94.

The group, which has received funding from the former U.S. Information Agency, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, various foundations (including the Ford and MacArthur Foundations), 70 multinational corporations, and governments from around the world, said in a statement that it did not have sufficient credible data on more than 80 countries that were excluded from the survey.

The survey's author, Johann Graf Lambsdorff, said the data in the CPI "may disappoint some governments, especially in countries where distinct efforts to curb corruption have been initiated. To be sure, the CPI may not capture very recent anti-corruption actions in countries. We encourage policy-makers, the media and researchers to seek additional information to complement the CPI rankings before drawing final conclusions about the economic environment in individual countries."

In a mission statement, the organization called corruption "one of the greatest challenges facing the contemporary world. It undermines good government, distorts public policy, leads to the misallocation of resources and harms ... private sector development. But most of all, corruption hurts those who can afford it least. Stamping out corruption is about improving the lives of men and women everywhere."

This approach, as detailed in a new World Bank report, will benefit the world's poorest people, and allows local industrial pollution to be held within acceptable bounds without hindering economic growth, Bank officials said in releasing the 150-page report at a Nov. 22 briefing.

The report, called "Greening Industry: New Roles for Communities, Markets, and Governments," evaluated the community-based approach to tackling pollution in seven developing nations -- Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Mexico, and the Philippines. These countries represent two-thirds of the developing world's industrial output and industrial pollution.

The report's conclusion was that traditional pollution measures are inappropriate for many developing countries. National regulatory institutions are often unable to enforce conventional discharge standards at the factory level and many regulators also recognize that such standards are not cost-effective because they require all polluting factories "to toe the same line, regardless of abatement costs and local environmental conditions."

To break out of "this one-size-fits-all approach," the report says developing country regulators are opting for more flexible and efficient systems that provide strong incentives for polluters to clean up. The report recommends that market-based incentives be combined with a public information campaign to encourage factory managers to improve their environmental performance while they are pursuing profits.

"With the new model, government, communities, and markets all have important roles to play in reducing pollution," the Bank said. As an example of how media accounts of good or bad environmental performance can affect profits, the report pointed to the Philippines, where share prices for the beer-maker San Miguel shot up nearly 60 percent when environmental regulators highlighted the firm's "green" (meaning clean) record and the installation of new pollution-control equipment. Colombia and the Philippines recently achieved success in cleaning up rivers and lakes with publicity that charges were imposed on factories that pollute. Meanwhile, in Mexico, share prices on a paper manufacturer fell nearly 50 percent after word spread that the government levied substantial fines on the company for violating water pollution regulations.

The report's author, Bank senior economist David Wheeler, said factory managers don't pollute "because they enjoy it. They pollute because cleaning up pollution costs money and they're usually constrained by market pressure or the stockholders to try to minimize costs." Factory managers, he said, "are not really villains in this drama. They're simply people trying to make a living in a context where there may be many difficulties in operating a plant. So one must be sensitive to that."

Wheeler said the Bank has not "abandoned" the idea that government has an important role to play in fighting pollution, because "it certainly" does. "But we have realized that two other components -- community participation and markets -- are equally important," he added.

If citizens "are in the game," he said, they will support regulations and environmental objectives. Their participation is especially important in developing countries, he noted, because in the developing world poor people are forced to live near highly polluting facilities. Therefore, their participation in environmental issues and the release of public information serves as a "countervailing force" against the polluters.

National government policies should be focused, Wheeler said, on trying to make it cheaper for factories to clean up pollution: by such measures as providing them with direct technical assistance and by enacting economic reforms.

"Greening America" describes how environmental regulators in developing countries pioneered new approaches after what is called the "command and control" model of pollution control failed to cut poisonous discharges. Where enforcement agencies are weak -- as they are in many developing countries -- companies run little risk of being caught and punished. Therefore, polluting firms that violate regulatory standards have little incentive to clean up their operations, and firms that do respect legal limits have even less incentive to cut their pollution.

New approaches to attacking pollution work, the Bank said, "because they have a solid economic foundation. Cost-conscious factory managers will generally tolerate pollution up to the point where the expected penalty for pollution becomes greater than the cost of controlling emissions."

The report said greater openness to trade on the part of a nation's government can spur commercial access to cleaner technology, while cutting subsidies for raw materials can encourage companies to reduce waste. State-owned enterprises are often heavy polluters, the Bank concluded, so privatization might serve as the stimulus for cleaner production.

An Internet version of the report can be accessed at <http//www.worldbank.org/nipr/>.

To that end, the Labor Department has provided over $6 million in a grant to fund projects in Central America to help eliminate illegal child labor practices in the coffee industry, the Department announced in a Nov. 23 news release.

Herman said that National Coffee Association leaders have pledged their support for the project, which will provide "educational opportunities, including vocational training for older children and health and nutrition services" and will give their parents "income alternatives."

The educational and other support services are designed to give underage workers "a chance at a meaningful future," says Secretary Herman.

The Labor Department provided the grant to the International Labor Organization's International Program on the Elimination Of Child Labor (IPEC). In addition to funding projects in Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, there will also be an overall regional coordinating program to share best practices and to mobilize the support of coffee producers, communities, non-government organizations and governments throughout the region.

Children as young as 5 are involved in various phases of coffee production. These children are unable to attend school regularly and often face health risks from exposure to the elements, working in treacherous terrain and injury from snake and insect bites.

The projects will withdraw children from work or prevent them from entering work. These children will be provided with educational opportunities, including vocational training for older children and health and nutrition services. In addition, parents of these children will be provided with income alternatives.

A monitoring system will be established in each country to verify that children are being removed from work and are benefiting from the social services provided by the program, and that no new children are entering work in the coffee sector. The project will also launch awareness-raising campaigns to change attitudes and perceptions regarding child labor in the region. Subsequent phases of the project will seek to encompass all coffee-growing regions in these countries.

The "AIDS Epidemic Update," a report published by the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS and the U.N. World Health Organization, says the prevention challenge for HIV remains "acute" in the region, against a backdrop of evidence that infections are on the rise. The report said the Caribbean Basin ranks second behind the sub-Saharan region of Africa with the worst HIV epidemic.

In Latin America and the Caribbean combined, some 1.7 million people will enter the 21st century with the HIV infection -- almost 30,000 of them children, according to estimates cited in the report. This number, the U.N. said, is somewhat less than the total given in 1998 because estimates for two populous countries, Brazil and Mexico, were revised downwards on the basis of new data.

In Guatemala in 1999, some 2 to 4 percent of pregnant women tested at prenatal clinics in major urban areas were found to have HIV. In Guyana, HIV prevalence was recorded at 3.2 percent among blood donors, who are generally thought to represent a population at low risk of infection.

The U.N. said the last time Haiti performed HIV surveillance among pregnant women, in 1996, close to 6 percent tested positive for the virus. Infection rates approaching 8 percent had already been registered in some Haitian prenatal clinics as early as 1993.

Some countries in Latin America have joined the ranks of those providing antiretroviral treatment for people infected with HIV, 

Sponsors expect more than 1,200 business and political leaders from all parts of the Americas to gather in Miami to discuss ways to improve the region's business performance and competitiveness in the 21st century.

Other scheduled participants include the White House Special Envoy to the Americas, Kenneth "Buddy" MacKay, Commerce Secretary William Daley, Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency James Witt, and Gen. Charles Wilhelm, commander-in-chief of the U.S. Southern Command. Presidents Francisco Flores of El Salvador, Leonel Fernandez of the Dominican Republic, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Rene Preval of Haiti, Bharrat Jagdeo of Guyana, and Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur are all expected to attend as well.

The timing for the Miami visit of Secretary Richardson and Romero, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs, is "perfect," said Donald Planty, executive director of Caribbean/Latin American Action (C/LAA), the non-profit organization that has sponsored the conference since 1976. Planty, a former diplomat, said both officials will address how the Nov. 30-Dec. 4 World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle may affect regional trade issues, especially the prospects for creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005.

Planty said that a productive WTO Millennium Round "will only reinforce the efforts carried out in the Americas, leading to the future elimination of trade barriers and the creation" of the FTAA. WTO activities and the FTAA talks are two "parallel processes that complement each other," Planty said.

He added that Richardson played a pivotal role in developing a regional agenda for the energy sector, especially by chairing the first Hemispheric Ministerial Energy Conference held in New Orleans in July.

Highlights of this year's Miami conference will include a day-long forum sponsored by the Commerce Department on Central America's vulnerability to hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters. Sponsors say the forum will explore ways to make the Caribbean Basin less vulnerable to such disasters, through the creation of public- and private-sector partnerships.

Hurricane Mitch, which struck the region in 1998, caused more than $6,000 million in damages, C/LAA said, citing a study from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Also on the conference agenda are sessions on dollarization (the pegging of Latin American currencies to the U.S. dollar); the regulatory challenges facing the region's telecommunications industry; how to better promote the region's tourism industry; and a session on how businesses can take advantage of the Internet in the 21st century.

On that last issue, C/LAA said research shows that electronic commerce in Latin America and the Caribbean will grow from $250 million in 1995 to more than $2,000 million by 2004. C/LAA says the region represents the fastest-growing electronic business market in the world.

The conference will also feature the signing of a cooperative agreement between the United States and Venezuela that sponsors say will open the doors to increased business opportunities in tourism, infrastructure and support services, telecommunications and financial services.

Under the auspices of the IDB and Women's World Banking (WWB), over 60 bankers and microfinance leaders shared their strategies for providing financial access to low-income women in the Western Hemisphere, with the twin objectives of reducing poverty and building a larger clientele base.

"The IDB and Women's World Banking have both been path-breaking pioneers in microfinance and microenterprise development," explained K. Burke Dillon, executive vice president of the IDB. "We have also been partners ... [in] building non-traditional financial institutions and systems that serve the poor."

Dillon estimated that "over 7 million poor women" around the world are involved with WWB affiliates, "and the leaders of these organizations are committed to increasing women's decision-making roles at all levels." As an example, she pointed to the expansion of savings programs, recently introduced by many microenterprise lenders in response to the stated needs of their more disadvantaged clients. After acquiring the start-up funds for a modest business enterprise, microentrepreneurs are usually eager to put aside as much of their earnings as possible, officials noted. "Poor people want to save more than they want to borrow," observed Nancy Barry, president of WWB.

The impressive growth of microenterprise lending, a direct corollary of the entrepreneurs' strong work ethic and drive to succeed, has fueled the financial sector in ways bankers could not have predicted, said Beatriz Harretche of the IDB and WWB. She pointed out that the WWBs Small Projects Program, established in 1978, "didn't have the intention" of serving women primarily, "but the result was high participation of women" -- 34 percent initially, and now over 50 percent. The WWB's "philosophy began to change" after 1989, she recalled, when "an explosion of women participating" in microenterprise initiatives shifted the emphasis toward credit services for women.

Marguerite S. Berger, chief of the IDB's microenterprise unit, described the phenomenal track record of microentrepreneur loan repayment: lending institutions report that over 95 percent of their low-income clients repay their small-business loans on time, and "in over 45 countries where WWB operates, WWB affiliates have better repayment rates than commercial banks to their large corporate customers." She attributed the reliability of these clients to their determination to capitalize on any opportunities that come their way -- because, unlike more affluent borrowers, they are unlikely to take good fortune for granted, or to have a sense of entitlement. Also, she said, the disadvantaged are keenly aware that those opportunities may be withdrawn if they are not handled responsibly. "Poor women consistently repay their loans at a higher rate than poor men -- and poor people, in general, have a higher repayment rate" than the well-off, she remarked.

The leaders of banking institutions represented at the IDB conferences "are already committed to microfinance as a profitable enterprise," Berger added. To better serve the populations of developing countries, and particularly those in rural areas, banks are now exploring ways to change their "office culture" -- sending loan officers "out to the streets" and in the countryside, she asserted, where they can forge personal bonds with prospective clients. The need to "eliminate a lot of paperwork" is another priority, she pointed out: banks are often able to grant loans within five days, streamlining and simplifying the application process for people who might otherwise be discouraged from participating in microenterprise programs.

As their patrons prosper, the financial institutions expand their services accordingly, Berger continued. These banks "cultivate repeat customers, providing automatic repeat loans" once clients have demonstrated their dependability, she said. A classic illustration of the old adage "doing well by doing good," microenterprise lending offers some surprising lessons: "You can establish a profitable enterprise with loans that average very small amounts, as little as $50," Berger informed the assembly.

This theme was echoed by Alvaro Ramirez, chief of operations of the microenterprise unit of the IDB's sustainable development department. The IDB has "a range of instruments" to support these lending programs, he said, voicing his expectation that banks in the Western Hemisphere will flourish as they reach out to low-income clients whose hard work and diligence will ultimately be the linchpin of their countries' economic health. He cited the case of Banco Ademi, in the Dominican Republic, which "has become very big and profitable, and is now focusing on somewhat larger loans" as its customers gain a larger foothold in the marketplace.

In her address to the financial sector, Dillon acknowledged the challenges ahead while reflecting on the heartening benefits that microenterprise is already producing. "In Latin America and the Caribbean, over 150 million people make their living from microenterprise, and half of these are women," she declared. "I hope all of you -- bankers, microfinance non-government organizations, network leaders, funders -- are here for the long haul. ... Although microfinance is a powerful tool for reducing poverty, it has to be part of broader approaches to development, and it is most likely to succeed in reducing poverty when it is designed to meet the needs and conditions of its clients."

according to the United Nations. Brazil, for example, spent $300 million in 1999 providing such drugs for about 75,000 people. Antiretrovirals are also being used in Argentina, where the rate of new AIDS cases reported each year fell about 40 percent, from a peak of 71.6 cases per million people in 1996 to 41.3 cases per million people in 1998.

While the antiretroviral treatment is expensive, the savings in hospitalization and medical care for patients go "a long way towards justifying the costs of drugs which stave off the progression of HIV/AIDS," the U.N. said. "There are also considerable savings of the indirect costs of illness. Without antiretroviral therapy, many more people with HIV would develop opportunistic infections associated with a damaged immune system." The U.N. said estimates show that over a one-year period between 1997 and 1998, Brazil averted about $136 million in hospital admission and treatment costs alone for people with HIV.

The report said that in Central America and the Caribbean island states, access to antiretroviral therapy is far more limited than it is in South America. Guatemala, for instance, which spends $64 per person per year on health, estimates that just 185 people have access to antiretrovirals out of an estimated 50,000 or more people living with HIV and AIDS.

Worldwide, the report said, the HIV-positive population is still expanding and the number of AIDS deaths can be expected to increase for many years before peaking. The report said about 33 million adults and 1.2 million children will be living with HIV by the end of 1999. This year, some 2.6 million deaths resulted from HIV/AIDS -- a higher global total than in any year since the beginning of the epidemic.

The report said the overwhelming majority of people with HIV -- some 95 percent of the global total -- live in the developing world. That proportion is set to grow even further as infection rates continue to rise in countries where poverty, poor health systems and limited resources for prevention and care fuel the spread of the virus.

The U.N. said this is especially true in Africa -- notably sub-Saharan Africa -- where social and economic safety nets that might help families cope with the impact of HIV are badly frayed, in part because of the epidemic itself.

Following behind sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean Basin with the worse percentages of the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate were South Asia and Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America.

The report concluded that the huge gap in HIV infection rates and AIDS deaths between rich and poor countries is likely to grow even larger in the next century. However, on a positive note, the report said "massive national and international efforts may yet help to end the stifling silence that continues to surround HIV in many countries, and to explode myths and misconceptions that translate into dangerous sexual practices."

A trail of successful responses to fighting HIV/AIDS has already been "blazed by a small number of dedicated communities and governments," the U.N. said. The "challenge for the leaders of Africa and their partners in development is to adapt and massively expand successful approaches that make it harder for the (HIV) virus to spread, and that make it easier for those affected to live full and rewarding lives."

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