According to the Efe, the leading Spanish language news agency, the project called “Casas de Botellas” (Houses of Bottles) is the brainchild of Ingrid Vaca Díaz from Bolivia. The ‘green’ houses which Ingrid has been promoting for the last seven years are believed to have natural temperature-control capabilities.

A cluster of glass and plastic bottles of 600ml, one and two litres interlaced with honey, sand, debris, linseed oil and milk have gone into the making of these low-cost homes. Ingrid told “Casas de Botellas is a group effort in which the poorest families, with a helping hand from their friends, relatives, neighbours and volunteer workers, learn to construct their own houses and give themselves and their families a decent place to live.”

The project began in Warnes, her hometown, when a little girl called Claudia told her that for a Christmas present she dreamt of a bedroom of her own, since in her 4-square-meter (43sq.ft.) dwelling she shared a bed with five other people.

Vaca said earlier she used to store the bottles for making handicrafts and chairs; and while her husband informed that he had plans of disposing them off she overheard Claudia’s dream, and conceived a home out of these bottles. The house that Ingrid built in collaboration with Claudia’s family, people of the community and volunteers went from 43 to 1,827sq.ft, and made use of 36,000 two-litre plastic bottles.

The standard is to use for each meter approximately 81 bottles stuffed with throwaway material like paper, plastic bags, batteries, sand and dirt to build the walls of the house. The bottles are stuck together with bricks, lime and cement, and are held with a kind of webbing to make completely sure the construction will be permanent.

Other materials such as rods, roofing tiles, bricks, gravel, window panes, ceramic tiles, wooden frames and accessories for bathrooms and kitchens are donated by companies, individuals and institutions. The finishing touch for the houses is a coat of paint in which the colours of the columns contrast with the walls, and the bottoms of the bottles remain subtly visible and are painted in the form of flowers.

Until now Casas de Botellas has built six homes in Bolivia, one in Argentina and two in Uruguay and Mexico. Twenty more houses are planned to be built in Argentina, and the project is expected to continue collaborating with other communities throughout Latin America.

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The release said Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International (FLO), the standards and certification wing of the Fairtrade movement has collaborated with the ARM for the successful completion of the certification program. Through the new standard, gold products including jewellery, coins and religious artefacts will be essentially certified and labelled with the FAIRTRADE and FAIRMINED (F&F) marks.

The F&F marked gold products are hoped to emancipate the A&S miners from the ugly grip of middlemen who deprive them of obtaining proper value for their merchandise. The brand is believed to provide an opportunity for consumers to indirectly involve in a social cause without shelling out anything extra. The proceeds of the organized and increased market access are also understood to radically change the mining methods.

Surprisingly, the A&S miners annually produce just 15 percent of global gold supplies, but their labour effort constitutes 90 percent of gold extraction. Harriet Lamb, Executive Director of the Fairtrade said many in the trade were exploited by the middle men who pay below market prices and cheated them on weight and purity of the gold content. He added the F&F standards were an important development tool, and would complement other development interventions such as access to basic amenities to the communities.

Similarly, Cristina Echavarria, the ARM´s Executive Director, said the F&F program was providing a win-win platform for both A&S miners through their workmanships and consumers with their jewellery purchases. The program also promotes ethical consumer habits by making them aware of what they buy and how the proceeds of the same are utilized.

The F&F gold will be initially launched in the UK and then rolled out to other countries with a long term vision of capturing 5 percent of the gold jewellery market over a 15-year period, totalling 15 tonnes of the F&F gold annually. The standard was piloted by the ARM with nine legally established mining producer organizations in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and now applications are open to all A&S gold mining organizations in Latin America. More producer organizations from Latin America are expected to join the system by 2011 and beyond, and from 2010 the ARM plans to establish a network of pilot projects in Africa, and subsequently in Asia.

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Chavez during a political rally on Saturday apprised that the leaders would meet on Monday in Caracas to further shape an extraordinary project” on a currency that will “break the dependency on the dollar, its economic and financial colonialism.

The currency called Sucre was named after Jose Antonio de Sucre who fought for independence from Spain alongside the Venezuelan hero Simon Bolivar in the early 19th century. The currency is expected to initially function as an electronic instrument before it is made to a paper format.

The Sucre is likely to be in circulation as the ECU, which was a forerunner to the euro. Then, the ECU was operational as an account unit managing the stable exchange rates between member states before the national currencies were assimilated to the euro.

Since the signing of MOU on the Latin American currency last year, Chavez has repeatedly urged his member states to cut down foreign reserves in the form of the US dollars. Most South American countries stored their reserves in the US dollars, and for the past several years the socialist states of the region wanted to detach them from the US domination in regional trade. The growing influence of China in the region has also compels the left countries seeking new ways to store cash.

The ALBA comprises of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominica, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda. The ALBA was founded in 2004 by Venezuela and Cuba as a counterweight to the Free Trade Area of the Americas that the US and some Latin American nations were proposing at the time.

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