A special grant by ICTP is helping Argentina's physicists overcome some of the difficulties they face due to their nation's economic crisis.

A Helping Hand

No sector of Argentina's society has escaped the brutal force of the nation's economic storm that began three years ago and shows no signs of abating. Argentina's scientific community, one of the largest and most advanced in Latin America, is no exception.
ICTP recently decided to lend a helping hand to Argentina's hard-pressed physics community when the Scientific Council agreed in May to provide a one-time 'special grant' to research centres and university departments. ICTP contributions will be assigned to existing research projects that would otherwise be interrupted without extra financial support.
This effort, intended to provide some shelter from the incessant economic storm, will be managed through the offices of the Latin American Centre of Physics (CLAF), whose headquarters are located in Rio de Janeiro.
CLAF and ICTP have enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship (see News from ICTP, Summer 1999, pp. 6-7) that dates back to the birth of both organisations in the early 1960s and has continued through this year when the organisations reconfirmed their close partnership at CLAF's 40th anniversary ceremony.
Luis Masperi, director of CLAF and a former ICTP Associate, recently spoke about the CLAF/ICTP collaborative effort in Argentina: "CLAF has been following with great concern the current economic crisis in Argentina, trying to gauge its impact on major ongoing physics research projects, especially in Argentina's universities where the situation has been particularly bleak."
"To ease the situation," Masperi says, "CLAF has launched a fellowship and scientific exchange programme in cooperation with the Brazilian government intended to help Argentinean scientists remain active in their fields through direct contact with their colleagues outside their country. At the same time, the government of Argentina, despite the economic difficulties it faces, has sought to create new positions for young scientists who would like to remain at home if given an opportunity to pursue their careers."
These initiatives have sought to address two critical fallouts of the economic crisis in Argentina: increasing isolation and the intensification of the brain drain problem.
A third issue, however, has been left largely unattended. The precipitous decline in the value of Argentina's currency has made the purchase of laboratory equipment from outside the country prohibitively expensive. For example, a computer that would have cost 1500 pesos before the crisis now costs almost 6000 pesos.
That's where the ICTP special one-time emergency grant will come into play. Under the terms of the grant established by the Scientific Council, each of the selected institutions will receive funds to help it overcome the budget shortfalls for equipment purchases caused by the loss in value of the nation's currency and the accompanying cuts in spending power.
Thirty-one applications have been approved for universities and research centres in, for example, Buenos Aires, La Plata, Bariloche and Córdoba, as well as laboratories in Santa Fe, San Luis, Rosario, and Tandil. The total allocation for the emergency fund has been set at US$100,000.
As Erio Tosatti, acting director of ICTP, observes: "Helping physicists in Argentina will likely have the added benefit of helping scientists throughout South America. A small investment now to keep worthwhile projects going could have a substantial payoff in research in the years ahead."
Gallieno Denardo, ICTP's acting director of administration who has worked closely with CLAF for many years in his capacity as head of the ICTP Office of External Activities, notes that this is not the first time the Centre has decided to intervene in an emergency situation.
"In 1989, for example, ICTP gave assistance to scientists in eastern Europe to help ease the shock caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Through extra funding provided by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the regional government of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, ICTP organised a series of training courses on the management of computer networks.
More recently, the Centre has provided funds for the training of scientists and engineers from the Middle East as the centrepiece of its contributions to the SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Application in the Middle East) project." (see "Two Steps Closer," p. 3.)
Such one-of-a-kind initiatives represent one more aspect of ICTP's continuous effort to lend a helping hand to scientists and scientific communities throughout the developing world.

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