Italy cooperates with Ecuador in the fight against fires

(ANSA) - QUITO, 02 OTT - Cooperation between Italy and Ecuador on the environmental protection front and to combat deforestation and fires was the focus of a recent meeting held in Quito between a delegation of Carabinieri experts and the undersecretaries of the Ecuadorian Ministry of the Environment and Foreign Affairs.
    The meeting, reports a note, was attended on the Italian side by the Commander of the Carabinieri's Forestry, Environmental and Agri-food Units (Cufa), General Andrea Rispoli; the head of Cufa's Projects, Conventions and Amb. office, Colonel Giancarlo Papitto; and the Director General of the Central Inspectorate for the Protection of Quality and Fraud Repression of Agri-food Products, Stefano Vaccari. Also present were the Italian Ambassador, Giovanni Davoli, the main promoter of the meeting, as well as representatives of the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation based in Bogota.
    The delegations, reads the note, discussed 'potential and future collaborations between the Ecuadorean government and Italy on environmental and agricultural issues, with particular reference to the deforestation phenomena affecting the entire South American country, and even more specifically on the recent fires that have affected large areas of forest throughout Ecuador'.
    'These events,' the note continues, 'have opened up particularly worrying investigative hypotheses, also connected to the destabilisation of the country with well-founded suspicions of terrorist activity'. In this sense, it is reported, 'the presence of representatives of the Carabinieri speciality on the environmental front has been invaluable, especially for the request for collaboration on the investigative front'.