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ARGENTINA: Provincial Gov’t Auctions Off Nature Reserve for Farming

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 24 2004 (IPS) - Despite criticisms from environmental organisations and legal complaints filed by indigenous groups, the government of the northwestern Argentine province of Salta broke up a 20,000-hectare nature reserve into plots and auctioned it off Thursday to farming and ranching companies.

Dozens of activists from the environmental watchdog Greenpeace dressed as vampires and staged a protest Thursday outside the Health Ministry in Buenos Aires and ”toast” in ironic celebration of the auction of the Pizarro reserve in the Salta town of Anta.

Living in the protected area created by the Salta government in 1995 are some 3,000 people who will now have to relocate. At least 100 are Wichi Indians.

In their farce, the Greenpeace vampires ”thanked” the national authorities for failing to take action on denunciations against the revocation of the nature reserve’s protected status.

The office of Governor Juan Carlos Romero sent a bill to the provincial legislature in March to change the legal status of the reserve and put it up for sale, arguing that revenues were urgently needed to repave the province’s roads. The provincial lawmakers passed the bill.

Since then, the indigenous communities and other residents of Pizarro, national lawmakers and environmental non-governmental organisations like Greenpeace, the Argentine Environment and Natural Resources Foundation and the Wildlife Foundation have demanded a halt to the process of selling off the nature reserve.

But their claims fell on deaf ears and the auction finally began. The government divided the reserve into seven plots and in less than 24 hours sold all of them to three different companies, which are dedicated to large-scale farming and ranching.

In a conversation with IPS, Emiliano Ezcurra, representative of Greenpeace-Argentina’s biodiversity campaign, said the reserve is one of the last remnants of the native ‘yunga’ forest, or cloud forest, that extends into the Andes. It will be cleared by the companies in order to expand the agricultural frontier, he said.

The environmental groups have been denouncing for two years the impacts that deforestation and expansion crops like soybeans are having on the land and on the indigenous communities in several provinces in northern Argentina.

”To justify the sale, the Salta government argues the Pizarro is a degraded reserve that has been plundered by the local population, but that is false. It is a forest that has been expanding. And if the degradation of the forest were true, where was the government that was supposed to preserve it?” asks Ezcurra.

The activist, who participated in Thursday’s protest, said the national government ”cannot ignore this problem, and must intervene to prevent ‘soybean fever’ from destroying the last one-third of native forest that remains in Argentina and stop the eviction of the local population from those lands.”

The communities that live within the reserve and the people who use the forest resources for their livelihood filed a petition with the courts invoking indigenous rights to land, participation in the management of natural resources and the rights of all to live in a healthy environment.

A court case had gotten under way to determine whether the sale of the reserve is legal, but the petition to halt the auction was denied. The environmental groups also filed legal claims, but they are still awaiting rulings.

These groups had staged protests in Salta and Buenos Aires, and met with provincial authorities, and finally gathered for a big demonstration at the Health Ministry, which oversees the Secretariat of Environment.

”The national government has known for three months that the Pizarro reserve was going to be sold and did nothing to stop it. It should have taken urgent action and tried to find a political resolution to the problem instead of hiding behind the argument that the provinces have the authority to manage their natural resources,” said Ezcurra.

The daily La Nación said in a Thursday editorial that Pizarro is ”the first case in which an Argentine province has decided to overlook the legal status associated with the natural wealth that belongs to all citizens” for a merely economic and short-term payoff.

”The legitimacy of this provincial decision is questionable from the legal point of view because it introduces a new way of violating the state of law in this country, in an arena that no government leader had dared violate until now,” Argentina’s protected natural areas, said the newspaper.