Ecuador
To Sell A Third Of Its Amazon Rainforest To Chinese Oil Companies
Ecuador
is planning to auction off three million of the country’s 8.1
million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil
companies, Jonathan Kaiman of The Guardian reports.
29
March, 2013
The
report comes as oil pollution forced neighbouring Peru to declare
an environmental state of emergency in its northern Amazon
rainforest.
Ecuador
owed China more than $7 billion — more than a tenth of its GDP —
as of last summer.
In
2009 China began loaning Ecuador billions of dollars in exchange for
oil shipments. It also helped fund two of the country’s biggest
hydroelectric infrastructure projects, and China National
Petroleum Corp may soon have a 30
per cent stake in
a $10 billion oil refinery in Ecuador.
“My
understanding is that this is more of a debt issue – it’s because
the Ecuadoreans are so dependent on the Chinese to finance their
development that they’re willing to compromise in other areas such
as social and environmental regulations,” Adam Zuckerman,
environmental and human rights campaigner at California-based NGO
Amazon Watch, told the Guardian.
The
seven indigenous groups who live on the land are not happy,
especially because last year a court ruled that
governments must obtain “free, prior, and informed consent” from
native groups before approving oil activities on their indigenous
land.
“They
have not consulted us, and we’re here to tell the big investors
that they don’t have our permission to exploit our land,” Narcisa
Mashienta, a leader of Ecuador’s Shuar people, said
in a report.
Dan
Collyns
of The Guardian reports that “indigenous people living in the
Pastaza river basin near Peru’s border with Ecuador have complained
for decades about … pollution,”
which has been caused by high levels of petroleum-related compounds
in the area. The Argentinian company Pluspetrol has operated oil
fields there since 2001.
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