ARGENTINA: Kirchner, Progressive on Rights, Flunks Ecology

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Aug 30 2004 (IPS) - Argentine President Néstor Kirchner has earned the respect of human rights groups and other civil society organisations in his 15 months in office. But ecologists criticise what they describe as his inconsistent and ineffective environmental policy.

Do you see this as a progressive government that puts top priority on fighting hunger, unemployment and corruption, in the belief that ecology can wait? IPS asked activists.

“The government’s generic responses are in line with our points of view, but there are no clear signals nor concrete steps towards translating those gestures and statements into action,” Silvana Buján, with the local environmental organisation Bios, told IPS.

Buján, who is also the coordinator of the National Network of Ecological Action (Renace), which links more than 70 NGOs, said there are functionaries within the national government as well as provincial and local officials who are doing a good job.

For example, the Dirección de Bosques (the national forestry agency) published an atlas showing, in detail, where forested areas are disappearing due to the advance of the agricultural frontier – a phenomenon that has picked up speed in the past few years because of the boom in transgenic soy.

“But at the same time, we have a governor (in the northern province of Salta) who sells off a nature reserve,” said Buján.

She was referring to Governor Juan Carlos Romero, who obtained the backing of the provincial legislature for dividing into lots and auctioning off a protected area that is not only home to many endangered species of flora and fauna, but also to 3,000 people who live in harmony with the surrounding bush.

Raúl Montenegro with the Environmental Defence Foundation said the centre-left Kirchner administration “has slid backwards in all areas” involving the environment.

“It is retrograde on environmental questions, and ‘progressive’ only to a certain extent, because it has made progress in terms of respect for the human rights of white people, but does little or nothing for the country’s indigenous people,” he argued.

Argentina, whose population of 37 million is largely of European (mainly Spanish and Italian) origin, also has a sizeable mestizo (mixed-race) minority, as well as an indigenous minority numbering as many as two million, according to unofficial estimates.

The activist also mentioned what he considered “a chronic problem” in Argentina: many national officials in the area of the environment “know more about costly international meetings than about deforestation, depredation by the mining industry, and the suffering of indigenous people.”

In the view of Jorge Rulli, with the Rural Reflection Group, “Kirchner has a limited vision” of the country’s environmental problems, and the worst consequences of what he termed the government’s “indifference” are seen in the massive loss of native forests and biodiversity caused by the spread of monoculture soybean crops.

“We have heard that incredible, untruthful assertion: that ecology is a luxury of those who are not hungry. But it is actually they who cause hunger with their ignorance about our ecosystems,” Rulli told IPS.

“Argentina was the world’s bread basket, but now it is just a ‘soybean republic’,” which produces soy for export (a reference to the concept of “banana republic”.)

Among the most controversial questions to which the government seems to have no response is the incessant expansion of highly profitable soybean crops, at the expense of native forests, nature reserves and areas traditionally used for subsistence stockbreeding or the cultivation of vegetables and farm products for local and national consumption.

The intensive cultivation of soybeans is causing an imbalance in Argentina’s biodiversity, environmentalists and scientists have warned in local and international conferences.

But it appears unlikely that the heavily indebted state in Argentina, which is just starting to pull out of a severe economic crisis, will take measures to discourage a flow of exports that is bringing the state coffers significant tax revenues.

“The Kirchner administration has promoted a concept of development adorned with the world ‘sustainability’, but it is just pure and traditional economic development policy, where the majority of decisions focus on short-term goals,” Montenegro told IPS.

“Monoculture of transgenic soybeans and corn is encouraged, because the taxes on those exports bring the state foreign exchange,” he added.

The government’s critics on the environment also point to the numerous mining industry projects on the books, most of which are open-cast and are opposed by local inhabitants; statements by the government promoting nuclear energy; the green light it has given to imports of radioactive waste; and the lack of measures against the trafficking of native fauna or harmful practices like the continued dependence on landfills for the disposal of unclassified solid waste.

Environmentalists already began to be disillusioned with the very first steps taken by the Kirchner administration after it took office in May 2003.

The government’s first secretary of the environment and sustainable development, an agronomist who was unfamiliar with environmental issues, remained in the post for only a few months, and was succeeded by Atilio Savino, who has a controversial past with respect to the environment.

Savino was a high-level director of the Cinturón Ecológico del Area Metropolitana Sociedad del Estado (CEAMSE) – the state-run company created during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship by the governments of the city and province of Buenos Aires to dispose of the solid waste produced by the greater Buenos Aires, after it is collected by the garbage companies.

The waste is buried by CEAMSE in landfills, which according to environmentalists fail to meet safety standards and pollute the soil, air and groundwater, and create a breeding-ground for the spread of disease, because the waste is neither classified nor treated, and simply buried, often very close to populated areas.

“Savino’s appointment was a setback of many years in terms of environmental protection policies,” said Montenegro. “Kirchner was undoubtedly poorly advised and named a person who was at the head of one of Argentina’s biggest pollution-factories.”

In response to the criticism, Savino has stated that the handling of solid waste is “only one of the issues” that his secretariat is in charge of.

Although IPS made repeated attempts to interview Savino, his secretaries said he was too busy to answer questions, even by telephone.

Savino has stated several times that nuclear energy can be used “with the proper controls.” And in response to demands for national land zoning, to demarcate areas according to which uses can be made of them or which crops can be grown, he said natural resources and their preservation “are the responsibility of each province.”

In a document titled “Manifesto 2004”, Renace complained about the government’s “lack of interest and indifference” with regards to “anything to do with the environment…an extremely serious shortcoming of the president and the progressive sector that supports him.”

“In the 21st century, a political proposal that ignores the environmental context and basic concepts like sustainable management, preservation etc. is an anachronism,” the document adds.

However, it also points to the government’s achievements in the field of human rights, and stresses its “courage” in confronting high-level military officers suspected of corruption.

The government has taken a proactive stance on human rights issues, by carrying out a purge of past human rights violators in the armed forces, for example, not long after taking office.

But “The incomprehension and ignorance regarding any environmental question inexorably lead to a close-minded stance and to a bias towards economic aspects and a focus that responds only to specific, circumstantial problems,” said Renace.

Buján said it is “shameful” that it was the local residents, rather than the environmental authorities, who had to oppose the sale of the nature reserve in Salta.

The activist also criticised the fact that the authorities are toying with the possibility of promoting the use of nuclear energy to compensate for the fall in production of natural gas, which has caused energy shortages.

“Under previous governments we knew there were plans, even if we didn’t like the direction they were heading in. But with this government what we see is a wishy-washy and contradictory policy” on the environment, said Buján.