Yasuni NP, Ecuador - Most Biodiverse Area In Entire Continent Target For Oil Companies As Pact Fails

[hatrack]

Hmm. I wonder what they'll do. Will they protect the park or drill for oil?

:silly:

QUITO, Ecuador - Yasuní National Park, located in the core of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is the most biodiverse area in all of South America, a team of Ecuadorean, American, and European scientists concludes in the first major peer-reviewed study of life forms in the park, published today. But the 13 scientists warn that proposed oil development in Yasuní threatens to destroy one of the world's last high-biodiversity wilderness areas.

An agreement between the Ecuadorian government and the United Nations for a $3 billion trust fund that would compensate Ecuador for protecting the most vulnerable area of Yasuní by leaving the oil underground has begun to unravel.

"Yasuní is at the center of a small zone where South America's amphibians, birds, mammals, and vascular plants all reach maximum diversity," said co-author Dr. Clinton Jenkins of the University of Maryland. "We dubbed this area the 'quadruple richness center.'" "This quadruple richness center has only one viable strict protected area - Yasuní. The park covers just 14 percent of the quadruple richness center's area, whereas active or proposed oil concessions cover 79 percent," the authors write in the open-access scientific journal PLoS ONE, where the study appears today.

"One of our most important findings about Yasuní is that small areas of forest harbor extremely high numbers of animals and plants," said lead author Margot Bass, president of Finding Species, a nonprofit with offices in Quito and Maryland. "Yasuní is probably unmatched by any other park in the world for total numbers of species." Yasuní contains 28 endangered vertebrates on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. These include large primates such as the white-bellied spider monkey and Poeppig's woolly monkey and aquatic mammals such as the giant otter and Amazonian manatee, as well as and hundreds of regional species found nowhere else on Earth.

EDIT

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/20-1

[Peace Patriot]

1. Here's the crucial political part (the end of the article)...

"The Ecuadorian government has been promoting an innovative plan, known as the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, which would leave the park's largest oil reserves in the ITT block permanently underground in exchange for international donations of US$3 billion over the next 10 years.

Under the Yasuní-ITT Initiative, 900 million barrels of oil, worth US$6 billion would not be extracted as a contribution to fighting climate change.

But this initiative has started to fall apart. Ecuadorian and UN Development Programme officials were expected to sign the trust fund documents at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December, but in the event nothing was signed.

President Rafael Correa revealed in his radio address to the nation on Saturday that he ordered his team in Copenhagen not to sign the detailed Terms of Reference for the UN Development Programme trust fund because of what he called the 'shameful' conditions set up by the trust fund.

Correa said Saturday some countries had attached many too conditions to their donations - conditions that were 'unacceptable,' because they harmed Ecuador's sovereignty and dignity.

In the days following President Correa's radio broadcast, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Fander Falconi and two other high level members of the Ecuadorian negotiating team resigned in protest of Correa's attacks, disputing his negative characterization of the trust fund terms.

The president said the committee negotiating the Yasuní-ITT Initiative has until June to close a deal or his government will begin to explore the oil reserves.

In his resignation statement, Falconi opposed the six-month time limit on the talks.

Dr. Finer said today, 'If the Yasuní-ITT Initiative does not succeed, the tragic reality will be drilling for oil in the core of the most biodiverse rainforest on Earth.'"

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/01/20-1

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We need to find out what those conditions were, and which countries insisted upon them as the price of donating money to preserve this vitally needed biodiverse forest.

Suspicion: The U.S., on behalf of Chevron-Texaco--to force Ecuador to give up its lawsuit on Chevron-Texaco's massive oil spill in another part of the rainforest? World Bank/IMF (US dominated) draconian requirements, for instance, privatization of the park and its concessions? Or unregulated, uncompensated multinational extraction of resources elsewhere in Ecuador?

This smells like the work of our own corporate rulers (with the US State Dept. as their shills), but could also be EU or UK. And possibly China? I'm thinking of entities that might have the money to donate.

Rafael Correa has to defend the long term, overall interests of his country and people. He would NOT reject this important deal for trivial reasons. So there are likely some real "poison pills" in the agreement that would seriously affect Ecuadorans' right to control their own resources, their economy and their lives.

And there is nobody better at putting "poison pills into financial agreements in the "third world" than the US and its instruments such as the World Bank and the IMF.

[izzybeans]

2. My aunt is from Guayaquil

Ecuador is one of the most beautiful places on earth. My cousin just moved back.

This is interesting. Thanks! Sustainability is a huge hot button issue there (as elsewhere), but its worn on the sleeve a bit more. It looks like the government is at least standing its ground. Previous administrations let big portions of the mountainous regions closer to Quito get ravaged by the oil companies.