WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY: Glimmers of Light in the Latin American Darkness

By Diana Cariboni Reprint | | Print |

Diana Cariboni

MONTEVIDEO, Jun 5 2004 (IPS) - The trial against oil giant ChevronTexaco for environmental damages in Ecuador and an initiative to create a network of protected areas in the Amazon jungle provide glimpses of hope in the grim environmental panorama in Latin America, according to the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES).

The trial against oil giant ChevronTexaco for environmental damages in Ecuador and an initiative to create a network of protected areas in the Amazon jungle provide glimpses of hope in the grim environmental panorama in Latin America, according to the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES).

But both developments contrast sharply with a regional tendency marked by scant respect for environmental norms, aggravated by ”pressure from the economic crisis,” states the report ‘Environment in Latin America’ released on the occasion of World Environment Day by CLAES, which is based in Montevideo, Uruguay.

”In all of the countries of Latin America, the legal framework providing protection for natural resources and ensuring quality of life has expanded,” says the document.

However, implementation and enforcement of legislation on the environment is weak, and ”the situation has recently worsened” due to the contraction of the regional economy and rise in poverty, while ”there is increasing evidence of growing degrees of incompliance, difficulties in identifying transgressors” and ”problems in punishing them,” says CLAES.

Against that backdrop, the trial against ChevronTexaco stands out as ”the first of its kind” in the region, says the organisation.

In the suit, Texaco is accused of pouring wastewater into some 350 unlined open pits while drilling for oil in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. (Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001).

In August, 2002, after nearly 10 years of legal battles in the United States, an appeals court in New York transferred jurisdiction to Ecuador.

The plaintiffs representing 30,000 indigenous people seeking reparations have documented an increased incidence of cancer in the communities affected by the toxic waste and are suing the oil company in a court in Nueva Loja, the capital of the northern Ecuadorian province of Sucumbíos.

Another stride forward in the region is an agreement to establish an interconnected network of protected areas in the Amazon jungle which will be cooperatively managed, ”representing a change of approach towards the conservation of tropical jungles,” moving away from ”creating isolated national parks,” says the CLAES report.

Nature reserves in the northern Brazilian state of Amazonas will be connected to others in the state of Acre, which in turn will be linked to protected areas in Peru and Bolivia, through programmes sponsored by partnerships between national and local governments and international bodies.

The reserves include ”a broad range of ecosystems marked by rich biodiversity, as well as a number of endangered species,” adds the report.

But CLAES also points to negative developments in the region: the expansion of the agricultural frontier at the expense of woodland and other natural areas; the approval of a law under which natural gas will be exported by Peru; the limited number of countries that have ratified the international treaty on persistent organic pollutants; and the melting of the glaciers.

Agriculture’s voracity for new land is one of the main causes of the shrinking of tropical forests in South America. Between August 2002 and August 2003, deforestation ”swallowed up” 23,780 km in the Amazon jungle, and ”the impact on forests in Paraguay and Bolivia is just as severe,” according to CLAES.

The clearing of forests to create pastureland or fields on which to grow transgenic soy is at the forefront of that trend. South America’s Mercosur trade bloc, whose biggest member is Brazil, ”is the world’s leading producer and exporter of soy. The area planted in soy in Brazil grew from 11.4 million hectares in 1990 to 20 million in 2004,” says the report.

Argentina, the second-largest Mercosur partner, is also experiencing a boom in soy, which is displacing stockbreeding and a number of crops.

The expansion of soy, also seen in the smaller Mercosur partners, Paraguay and Uruguay, ”is an emergency throughout the entire region,” CLAES researcher Gerardo Evia told IPS. But ”We are especially alarmed at the impact in eastern and northeastern Argentina,” he added.

”Soy has displaced sustainable ranching, which had created a balanced system in Argentina’s (central) pampas, while simultaneously making stockbreeding unsustainable” by pushing it into areas which were not originally grasslands and are now being cleared of forests to create pastureland, said Evia.

And in Brazil, the temporary authorisation granted by the central government in September 2003 allowing farmers to harvest and sell their illegally planted genetically modified soy ”implies that the state is admitting that it has been unable” to enforce the ban on transgenic crops.

CLAES also pointed to the passage of a law under which Peru will export natural gas from Camisea, in the Urubamba river basin in the country’s Amazon jungle region, through a Pacific ocean port where a liquefaction plant is to be built, near the Paracas nature reserve, the country’s only protected coastal-marine system.

”The bill represents a new pattern of energy exploitation in the region,” entailing the export of ”natural gas by sea to meet the demand of industrialised countries,” says the report.

In addition, CLAES mentions the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), which went into effect in May. The environmental organisation says the treaty will have little effect on this region, because although it has been signed by all of the countries of Latin America, it has only been ratified by four – Mexico, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay.

POPs, which cause enormous biological damages and accumulate in the fatty tissues of living beings, include industrial chemicals such as PCBs, pesticides like DDT, and by-products of human activities like dioxins.

Meanwhile, reports from at least five countries in the region – Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru – ”document the retreat of the glaciers, and the melting of glacial snow in the Andes and ice in the extreme southern region of Patagonia”, due to global warming.

Studies on the effects of climate change in the southern Andes mountains ”conclude that the rise in temperatures in the 20th century was the main cause of the retreat” of glacial ice, says the document.