ACT UPDATE   August 19, 2004

Dear Friends,

The Amazon Conservation Team is pleased to announce the release of the 2003 Annual Report, now available for download on our website, www.amazonteam.org.

The Northwest Amazon Program has recently released two publications in support of the process of establishing Predio UMIYAC as a protected area for healing plants, a new category of protected area! The second survey of the area, chronicled in December of 2003, resulted in the discovery of the endangered plant Paullinia yoco, first described from a botanical perspective by the late great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes.

Northwest Amazon Program Director German Zuluaga has published a new book on this plant, entitled "El Yoco (Paullinia yoco): La savia de la selva," or "Yoco, the life-blood of the forest." This text was published by the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, as part of their Health Sciences texts collection.

German and fellow ACT legal expert Elsa Cadena have just collaborated on a new book on legal aspects of medicinal plants. Entitled "Conservación In Situ Del Plasma Germinal Medicinal," or "On-Site Conservation of the Medicinal Germinal Plasm," it covers both the conceptual and legal aspects of on-site conservation.

Two new initiatives are now underway in Suriname. ACT field team members Beverly de Vries and Bruce Hoffman are working with the Trio Indians in Kwamalasamutu on the new Shamans and Novices Program. Fourteen novices between the ages of five and twenty spend several hours each week in organized programs, patient visits, plant collecting trips, and one-on-one sessions with senior level apprentices.

ACT Suriname has also begun working with the Wayana communities in the southeastern corner of the country to begin creating an ethnographic map of their lands. The Wayanaterritory covers 4.5 million acres of one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. The mapping process will follow the models ACT developed in the Trio lands of Suriname and in the Xingu and Tumucumaque areas of Brazil.