Copyright 1994 InterPress Service, all rights reserved.
Worldwide distribution via the APC networks.
*** 21-May-94 ***
Title: ENVIRONMENT: GEF 'Greenwashes' Ecuador Oil Loan
By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, May 20 (IPS) - Environmental activists assailed a new
Global Environmental Facility (GEF) grant to protect Ecuador's
forests as a ''greenwash'' for other destructive World Bank loans.
On Thursday the World Bank approved a 7.2 million dollar grant
which it said will help protect biodiversity by strengthening the
national park system in Ecuador, which includes much of its
Amazonian forests.
But the move hasn't pleased environmentalists.
''The World Bank has paid for the rewriting of Ecuador's laws
and the privatisation of its oil industry, which threatens the
entire Amazon. If they want to save Ecuador's biodiversity, that's
what they should be stopping,'' said Glenn Switkes, a campaigner
for Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco.
He explained that a recent World Bank loan to modernise the oil
sector in Ecuador is helping to open up two million hectares of
rainforest to foreign petroleum companies. This includes areas
such as the Antisana ecological reserve that is covered by the GEF
grant.
Yet when he came here last month with representatives of
Ecuadoran indigenous peoples, to visit the GEF task manager Cesar
Plaza, Switkes says that they were rebuffed.
''Plaza told us that the consultations with local groups were
over despite the fact that they had not met with some of the
biggest groups in Ecuador,'' charged Switkes.
''He told us that because it was an environmental loan, it had
nothing to do with Indians and that the groups should go back and
talk to their government,'' he told IPS.
Bidding for the oil licenses began in January and will close on
May 31. Forty companies have already expressed an interest in the
land which comprises 85 percent of the indigenous lands in the
Ecuadorian Amazon. Most of this has never been prospected for oil
before.
The Oil and Gas Journal estimates that Ecuador has 3.2 billion
barrels of oil that can be extracted from areas already under
production and another 600 million barrels in areas that have not
been touched. Most of this will be in the Amazon.
Oil prospecting brings a heavy toll to the people who live in
the area. Typically at intervals of 1.6 kilometres, three metre
trails are cut across the concession. Dynamite is detonated every
three hundred metres or so to produce seismic waves to analyse the
geological profiles under the forest floor.
Local people say that this scares away birds and animals and
that the undergrowth that grows back is not conducive to
fructivores -- toucans, monkeys, turkeys -- which help regenerate
the trees by distributing their seeds.
Worse still is the oil spilt from ruptured pipelines. The World
Bank has estimated that 4.4 million barrels of oil have been spilt
in Ecuador -- much of it into the delicate web of rivers, creeks
and lagoons in the Oriente, the local name for the Ecuadoran
Amazon.
The Oriente is considered one of the biggest treasure chests
of biological diversity in the world. One study found more tree
species in an area the size of two football fields than in all of
Europe.
Indigenous groups in the Oriente say that the new companies
will lay 6,400 kilometres of explosive charges in this area and
build roads and pipelines hundreds of kilometres long, that will
bring colonists and loggers in its wake.
This has already happened in part of the Oriente that have been
prospected for the past 20 years. Indigenous groups say that one
of the biggest culprits is the U.S. company Texaco.
The groups have taken Texaco to court in New York City over the
environmental toll of their prospecting. The case will be heard
later this year.
A report published in March by the New York-based Center for
Economic and Social Rights says that Ecuadoran waters had levels
of contamination ''10 to 1,000 times'' greater than those
considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Ecuadoran indigenous groups have roundly condemned the oil
licensing.
''For us these assaults on the rights of our people are acts
of war,'' said Luis Macas, president of the Confederation of the
Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), when he was in the
U.S. last month to receive the prestigious Goldman environmental
award.
Other issues that activists have raised include land tenure. A
copy of a March draft of the GEF project report, obtained by IPS,
shows that these oil companies will be invited to discuss
''landholding problems and find solutions.''
Joan Hecksher, of the Community Action International Alliance
here in Washington, who also assailed the GEF loan, says that oil
companies are the problem and they should not be part of these
discussions.
''It's like asking the fox to watch the hens,'' she said.
(ENDS/IPS/PC/DC/94)
Origin: LONANYC/ENVIRONMENT/
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