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ENVIRONMENT-PERU: Three Weeks to Create a Ministry

Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Feb 14 2008 (IPS) - A team of experts appointed by the government of Peruvian President Alan García was given three weeks to complete a proposal to create an Environment Ministry.

The Feb. 24 deadline “isn’t credible for planning a ministry,” said the former executive secretary of Chile’s National Commission on the Environment (CONAMA), Rafael Asenjo.

“Society must participate in the debate,” said Yolanda Kakabadse, a former Ecuadorian environment minister.

And Manuel Rodríguez, a former Colombian environment minister, said he trusts that Peru will think it over, so that it may become a leader in the resurgence of environmental issues in Latin America.

“A ministry of this kind should exercise leadership in the long-term environmental management of the country, and not just be a showcase to satisfy electoral promises,” said the former environment and energy minister of Costa Rica, Carlos Manuel Rodríguez.

The four experts took part in a debate on the subject in Lima, organised by a non-governmental Ad Hoc Group for Strengthening Environmental Institutions and attended by former ministers, experts, representatives of civil society organisations and mining company advisers.

President García announced the creation of the Environment Ministry on Dec. 20, 2007, and on Feb. 2 Prime Minister Jorge del Castillo gave environmentalist Antonio Brack the task of designing the institution in three weeks, as well as developing a national policy and carrying out an environmental assessment of the country.

The experts gathered early this month in Lima with the purpose of helping Brack and his team with their remit. They identified four key issues for discussion: the jurisdiction and functions of the new ministry; its relationship with other areas of the state; the scope of its regulatory roles; and its integration with local and regional governments.

They stressed that the official ultimately responsible for ensuring real environmental management is the president himself. It is not enough to create a ministry “to serve as a smokescreen that appears to fulfil international requirements,” Kakabadse told IPS.

This year Peru is to host the Fifth Summit of Heads of State and Government from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean (EU-LAC), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum, in May and November respectively.

The executive branch’s initial proposal for an Environment Ministry did not include the mining sector, although over 40 percent of local environmental conflicts have involved mining companies, according to the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office.

Environmentalist Iván Lanegra told IPS that the real motive behind the urgency is that the U.S. government requires Peru to have an environment ministry before an Inter-American Development Bank loan for the controversial Camisea gas pipeline is approved.

“Creating the ministry is an external obligation that the president now wants to use politically,” he added. That would explain why the decision to create a ministry was made overnight, when there have been no signs of intentions to improve environmental management in García’s one-and-a-half years in office. On the contrary, it has got worse, Lanegra said.

According to Asenjo, the environment is a “dimension,” not a sector, so related issues will not be solved by creating a ministry. The key thing, the expert said, is for environmental issues “to become a focus throughout public administration, because what we have to do is find ways of making development sustainable.”

He also said the challenge facing Latin America is to give the same weight to economic and social matters as environmental ones. “We must realise that to be competitive on the global scale, we need to manage the environment responsibly,” he told IPS. According to the experts, one way of making the García administration understand the importance of the environment, beyond the creation of a ministry, would be to quantify the environmental damage caused by the indiscriminate activities of different economic sectors and the impact of society’s bad environmental practices.

A 2006 World Bank report estimated that the losses due to environmental degradation in Peru were equivalent to 3.9 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).

The experts taking part in the conference in Peru considered that regional and local governments should participate in the planning of the ministry, because they are closer to the people.

“Central management of the environment is impossible,” said Rodríguez, who explained that in Colombia there are 32 autonomous regional institutions which participate actively in implementing national environmental policy.

There was a difference of opinion among the experts about the regulatory functions of the planned ministry.

Some of them said the ministry should only lead and regulate environmental management, while oversight should be in the hands of a Comptroller’s Office or Superintendency. Others, however, said that ideally the ministry should fulfil both these functions, as occurs in Colombia and Ecuador.

In Peru, oversight of the mining industry has been the responsibility since 2007 of the Energy and Mining Investments Supervisory Body, which has been criticised by environmentalists for what they see as inadequate control over companies. Previously, inspections were performed by the Ministry of Energy and Mines, which was also in charge of drawing foreign investment.