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The article summarizes the conference papers presented at the ninth biennial conference of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). The IASFM conference was held January 9-13, 2005 in São Paulo, Brazil and was hosted by the Pontifical Catholic University and the Latin American Parliament. The conference featured 168 papers, primarily of applied research, presented by 200 academics, policymakers, practitioners, and government representatives. This was the first time that IASFM met in Latin America; the conference was simultaneously translated in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. The conference focused on the number of cases and causes of forced migration as well as possible repatriation of migrants. Smuggling and human trafficking was also addressed.

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Despite its argued theoretical benefits, forestry decentralization in practice can have detrimental effects on forest-dependent peoples, but little is understood about the specific paths by which decentralization affects livelihoods. This article, based on data from research in 2005 in Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, presents a working conceptual model for analyzing these interactions. The research found that vulnerability increased when decentralization was not combined with policies addressing structural inequities—that is, increased municipal government control over land and forests must be accompanied by policies increasing poor local people's access rights and security. At the same time, increased municipal government authority over forest management and monitoring can facilitate access to these and other assets needed for forest livelihoods, but this new responsibility must also be accompanied by improved controls over local authorities. The needed changes rarely come about without specific organized demands of local actors' associations and movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Attributes that caregivers assign to complementary foods have been primarily described in the context of illness, but attributes assigned to foods in everyday circumstances must be understood to effectively promote good complementary feeding.Objective: This study aimed to understand how mothers judge complementary foods to be appropriate by cross-cultural examination of food perceptions in four different Latin American and Caribbean countries.Methods: We used semistructured interviews to assess attributes that mothers ascribed to a list of key foods, both home-made and manufactured, and reasons for feeding or not feeding them. We elicited attributes from 79 caregivers with children 6 to 24 months of age from two urban and perirban sites each in Brazil, Jamaica, Mexico, and Panama.Results: Textual analysis based on six home foods common to the four countries and manufactured foods resulted in six attribute categories, five of which could be positive or negative (Nutrient Content, Effects on Child, Child's Response, Availability and Accessibility, and Other Food Attributes); one (Food Quality and Safety) was only negative. Analysis of attributes of home foods (chicken, eggs, beans, carrots, bananas or plantains, and oranges) revealed many beliefs that were common within and across countries, whereas analysis of the attributes of manufactured foods revealed that these foods were less known.Conclusions: The consistency of the attribute categories across countries and across home and manufactured foods suggests their relevance to planning programs to improve complementary feeding in Latin America and the Caribbean and possibly other developing countries. These results can be used programmatically to assess the need for and the focus of food education programs, and to indicate which countries will be more receptive to certain foods as a means of improving complementary feeding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an account of the traveling experience of the 2006 American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine (AOSSM) Latin American Traveling Fellows. The group met in Houston, Texas for their international flight to Mexico City, Mexico where they met their hosts and had academic sessions from May 7 to 10, 2005. On May 11 to 15, they flew to Santiago, Chile where they tour a private hospital, a physical therapy and rehabilitation center and had lunched in Santa Rita Vineyards. On the 16th to 20, they went to Buenos Aires, Argentina where they visited different surgical centers and universities. The group also visited Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and other places in Brazil.