The global financial shake-up could intensify oil and gas exploitation in biodiverse areas of the South American Andes, already a source of environmental and social conflicts.
BARCELONA, Oct 13 (Tierramérica).- The crisis affecting the banking and stock markets around the world could push the expansion of extractive industries in South America's Andean region, warn experts.
Investors from the industrialized world may feel pressure to seek alternative means for financial liquidity, forced by divestment from stocks in recent weeks, Stewart Maginnis, director of forest conservation for the World Conservation Union (IUCN), told Tierramérica.
Debate about the environmental repercussions of the financial crisis overtook much of the World Conservation Congress, which the IUCN has organized in the Spanish Mediterranean city of Barcelona, Oct. 5-14, with some 8,000 experts in attendance. But the uncertainty is such that others predict less pressure on natural resources as a result of the economic crisis.
Maginnis pointed to the current high prices of fuels, noting that investment in the expansion of extractive industries now is attractive -- and constitutes a threat to protection efforts in areas like the Amazon forests of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela.
The phenomenon could be intensified by the existing policies of the Andean Community of Nations (CAN: Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia) that favor extractive industries and clash with the interests and development ideas of local indigenous communities. That contradiction was evident in Barcelona during a debate among environmental experts, government delegates and representatives of indigenous groups from the four CAN countries.
"Our idea of development does not coincide with that of the white man. For us, the most sacred is to protect Mother Earth. For the corporations and the governments, drilling holes in her is part of development," Gerardo Macuna, an indigenous representative from Colombia, told Tierramérica.
In contrast, Francisco Dallmeier, a biologist with the Center for Conservation Education and Sustainability at the U.S.-based Smithsonian Institution, said that some oil production areas in South America satisfy high-level biological conservation standards.
The Bolivia-Brazil natural gas pipeline, inaugurated in 1999 by the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, "is one of those examples of excellent environmental management" of a hydrocarbon extraction project, according to Dallmeier.
Somewhat on the middle ground is César Ipenza, a researcher with the Peruvian Association for the Conservation of Nature, who said, "We need to develop tools for research and evaluation that allow us to reconcile exploitation of hydrocarbon resources as factors of development with the effective preservation of biodiversity in the protected areas of the Andean Community."
The Andean region is rich in petroleum and natural gas deposits. According to the most recent official data from CAN, which date to 2004, production of oil and derivatives in Colombia was 686,000 barrels per day -- three times the average national consumption. Colombia exported some 460,000 barrels per day.
Bolivia produces around 41 million cubic meters of natural gas per day, 35 million of which is exported to Brazil and Argentina.
This enormous sources of wealth is difficult to bring into line with environmental conservation and the standards for protected areas. It also challenges the effectiveness of international agreements ratified by the CAN nations, such as Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which protects the rights of indigenous peoples.
Governments and indigenous communities interpret the Convention text in different ways.
Article 6 of the Convention states that "governments must consult the peoples concerned, through appropriate procedures and in particular through their representative institutions, whenever consideration is being given to legislative or administrative measures which may affect them directly..."
According to the CAN governments, "this article only requires them to consult indigenous communities, but they interpret it to mean that they are free to decide on the policies for the extractive industries," María Amparo Albán, Ecuadorian attorney and environmental consultant, told Tierramérica.
The governments of the Andean bloc are not disposed towards preventing extractive industries from operating in protected areas -- and which are often also the lands of indigenous peoples -- "merely for reasons of biodiversity conservation."
The indigenous communities, meanwhile, interpret the ILO Convention "as giving them the power to make decisions on extractive policies that take place in their territories."
This interpretation is sustained by Article 7: "The peoples concerned shall have the right to decide their own priorities for the process of development as it affects their lives, beliefs, institutions and spiritual well-being and the lands they occupy or otherwise use, and to exercise control, to the extent possible, over their own economic, social and cultural development."
According to Oscar Castillo, Bolivian expert in hydrocarbons at the Wildlife Conservation Society, "the challenge for the Andean region is to conduct an integrated analysis, one that is supra-national, about the environmental impacts of the extractive industries, in order to draft policies for the entire region."
But Albán believes a region-wide policy is currently impossible for the bloc. "The internal conflicts of the CAN, derived from ideological differences separating Colombia and Peru on the one side, and Ecuador and Bolivia on the other, have paralyzed all progress on regional integration," she said.
There are more than 180 petroleum and natural gas fields across the western Amazon, which comprises the five Andean countries, and 72 percent of the jungle territory of Peru is affected by plans for fossil fuel exploitation, according to a study published in August by the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.
In times of uncertainty, many more interests could go in search of those treasures, says Maginnis.
"This expansion occurs to the detriment of our peoples and of Mother Earth," warned José Antúnez, leader of the Asháninka peoples of Peru.
Published with the authorization of Tierramerica, IPS.
