By Estrella Gutiérrez
CARACAS, Feb 26 1997 (IPS)

A broad range of groups concerned with the environment have banded together in Venezuela in the face of intensive oil exploitation planned by the State in conjunction with foreign firms.

The Oil Alert Network warns that the projected exploitation of unprecedented magnitude will cause “enormous” damage to fragile ecosystems and indigenous communities.

A spokesperson for the Network told IPS that “the benefits of the billions of dollars in investment will not reach the majority of the population, but the pernicious environmental and social effects of the opening up of the sector to transnationals definitely will.”

Venezuela has become a major pole of attraction for oil investment since the state-run ‘Petroleos de Venezuela’ (PDVSA) called on foreign firms to participate in a development plan requiring 60 billion dollars in capital over the next 10 years.

What the Network calls “the new oil age” is the culmination of a process of throwing the sector open to the very companies that left when Venezuela’s hydrocarbon industry was nationalised in 1976. Since then, the PDVSA has also become a transnational, with an active presence in the United States and Europe, where it controls several companies.

Made up of environmental, academic, cultural, indigenous and feminist groups as well as scientists and individual figures from the fields of oil, anthropology, law, agriculture and the arts, the group said it would take legal action and other measures to annul an agreement that in 1993 granted British Petroleum (BP) the running of a marginal oilfield in the Orinoco delta, one of the world’s largest wetland areas.

The Network received a boost when it became the Venezuelan branch of Oilwatch International, under the name Orinoco Oilwatch – a move some criticise as another version of the transnationalisation the group is fighting against in the oil industry.

Oilwatch International is a U.S.- based non-governmental organisation dedicated to defending the environment and indigenous populations from the “pillaging” of oil companies. In South America, it has supported activity against transnationals in Ecuador, Colombia and, today, Venezuela.

The president of the PDVSA, Luis Giusti, told IPS that his consortium lives up to the terms of both international and national environmental laws and conventions, shored up by stiff penal legislation, in order to avoid problems in its markets, a practice he said has been carried to the extreme in agreements with foreign companies.

He added that the Pedernales oilfields conceded to BP were previously exploited by the affiliate Lagoven, and that the habitat of the Orinoco delta was preserved by the construction of special wooden boardwalks and platforms.

Giusti, who wondered whether the alternative was to renounce the exploitation of the country’s oil wealth, maintained that “development in a healthy balance with the environment is possible, thanks to today’s new technology. That is PDVSA’s continuous challenge.”

But the Oil Alert Network disagrees that such a thing is possible, given the magnitude of new prospecting and drilling schemes envisioned in the government’s plan, which would open up a number of new areas to a wide variety of companies.

The Network argues that regardless of supposed progress in environmental controls, oil exploitation “inherently preys on the environment.”

According to the activists, “the new uncontrolled ‘petrolisation’,” headed by PDVSA, will degrade the environment even more than past operations by transnationals, which caused irreversible damage in the Maracaibo lake and major difficulties for ethnic groups in the area, like the Wayuu, Bari and Yuckpas.

When the sector was nationalised, the foreign firms paid no compensation for the environmental degradation, the group points out, suggesting that the Supreme Court be asked to study the possibility of demanding indemnisation from those companies that left in 1976 and are now returning.

The Network plans to urge the Supreme Court to annul, on the basis of its incompatibility with environmental legislation, the concession to BP for exploiting the delta in the extreme eastern region of Venezuela, which comprises the state of Delta Amacuro.

BP won the concession for operating the Pedernales oilfields, where some 20,000 barrels a day of crude oil are produced today, a figure the firm plans to raise to 100,000 barrels by late 1998.

Operations in the delta have already begun to have a negative impact on the health of the Warao indigenous people, says the Network, which warns that oil spills, deadly for the area’s mangroves and unique ecosystem, are “inevitable.” The group considers BP’s offer to finance a state wildlife reserve for manatees and giant nutria in a river north of the delta a paltry attempt at mitigating the damage it is causing.

The underlying problem, according to the group’s spokespersons, is that rather than fuelling sustainable development in Venezuela, the intensive exploitation of hydrocarbons threatens to give rise to new problems, without providing solutions to the rampant poverty which grips 80 percent of the population.

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