YASUNÍ NATIONAL PARK, Ecuador — In a swath of lush Amazon rainforest, near some of Earth’s last isolated indigenous peoples, workers recently finished building an oil rig.
Crews are drilling in one of the most environmentally important ecosystems in the world, one that stores vast amounts of planet-warming carbon. They are gradually approaching a no-go zone meant to protect indigenous groups. Some of Ecuador’s largest oil reserves are found here.
Ecuador has liquidity problems and struggles with debt. The Government sees drilling as its best way out. Yasuní National Park offers a case study of how global financial forces continue to trap developing countries into depleting some of the most biodiverse places on the planet.
Drilling in this part of the rainforest was not Ecuador’s first choice. In 2007, Rafael Correa, then President, proposed a novel alternative that would have kept the oil reserves in a parcel designated Block 43, then estimated at about a billion barrels, underground. The countries would have created a fund of 3.6 billion dollars, half the estimated value of oil, to compensate Ecuador for leaving its reserves intact.
But, after the initial fanfare, only a trifle in contributions came through. Ecuador turned to China for loans, around 8 billion dollars in the course of the Correa Administration, some to be repaid in oil.
The failure of the plan led to the expansion of drilling in Block 43. Most of Ecuador’s oil lies beneath the Amazon rainforest. More than a third of government revenue comes from oil.
Ecuadorian leaders say they simply cannot turn their backs on oil money in a country where one in four children suffers from malnutrition.
“Now that the global trend is to abandon fossil fuels, the time has come to extract every last drop of benefit from our oil, so that it serves the poorest while respecting the environment,” current President Guillermo said last year. Lasso.
Ecuador’s oil industry insists drilling can be done with little damage, but scientists say even the best cases so far have led to deforestation and other pressures.
The Yasuní overflows with life. The world’s smallest monkeys, pygmy marmosets, scamper through the branches, and the world’s largest rodents, capybaras, rest on the riverbanks. In a plot of just 25 hectares, scientists have documented some 1,000 endemic tree species, about the same number that exist in the entire United States.
No land region on Earth is richer in biodiversity, scientists claim.
The destruction of the Yasuní “is suicide,” said Carlos Larrea, a professor at the Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito, the capital, who helped design the failed fund.
Drilling also puts people at risk. In Yasuní, an unknown number of people live in voluntary isolation, refusing contact with the outside world: the Tagaeri and the Taromenane.
Its reserve and related belt have a ban on drilling, but government officials have talked of shrinking that area to access more oil.
“Nature placed it there,” Fernando Santos, Ecuador’s energy minister, said in November. “And that’s where we have to extract it from, albeit very carefully.
“Obviously we have a monstrous debt,” Santos said. But while he acknowledges that oil played a role in creating the problem, he also sees more drilling and mineral development as the way out of debt.
Last year, thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians staged an 18-day strike that halted much of the country’s oil production. But even as protesters demanded an end to the president’s plans to double oil production, they also insisted that the government cut fuel prices, something that generally generates more demand.
“The harsh reality is that in these 50 years our economies have become dependent on oil,” said Leonidas Iza, president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, which helped lead the protests.
After the failure of the Yasuní contribution fund, an oil parastatal began knocking on doors in the indigenous communities of Block 43, offering money, housing, and sanitary network projects. Today, 12 platforms dot the forest. From each one, workers drill dozens of wells.
Some people in the surrounding communities were concerned about oil contamination and wanted to better explore ecotourism. But many who live in Yasuní do not see comparable alternatives to oil.
“There is no source of income,” said Alexandra Avilés, president of Llanchama, one of the communities.
Many economic alternatives have been studied, such as carbon offset projects and developing markets for local products, such as nuts. Ecuador is considering asking banks to renegotiate a sizeable portion of its debt in exchange for investing in a new marine reserve off the Galapagos Islands.
And after years of legal hurdles, a ballot measure asking whether the government should keep Block 43 crude underground could finally be put to the vote.
“We will exhaust all the oil blocks, we will destroy all the ecosystems, but we will not solve the problem of the Ecuadorian economy,” said Iza, the indigenous leader. “We must think about another type of economy.”
By: Catrin Einhorn and Manuela Andreoni
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/14/climate/ecuador-drilling-oil-amazon.html, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-01-27 16:40:06
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