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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 12th, 2009 Close to the departure of President Obama on his all-important trip to Asia with stops in Tokyo November 12th, Singapore November 13-15, Shanghai November 15th, Beijing November 16-18, and Seoul November 18-19, the Japan Society has planned co-incidentally the event we are reporting about here. Japan is the only original OECD member in Asia, as such Japan clearly feels justifiably it is a US prime partner in Asia. It also was clearly instrumental in nailing down the 1987 Kyoto Protocol to The Framework Convention on Climate Change, and hopes that this material will continue to be the base for future climate negotiations. That was the basis for having co-organized and hosted the following meeting – November 10th. ————- Copenhagen & Beyond: A Multilateral Debate about Climate Change Policy. The positions and participation of Japan, China and the United States in any successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol will help determine its success or failure. In a Tuesday November 10, 2009 panel, at the Japan Society, New York, Masayoshi Arai, Director, JETRO New York, Special Advisor, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI); The Honorable Zhenmin Liu, Ambassador Extraordinary and Deputy Permanent Representative of China to the United Nations; Elliot Diringer, Vice President, International Strategies, Pew Center on Global Climate Change; and Takao Shibata, chair of the working group that drafted the Kyoto Protocol, debated the direction of international climate change policy. It was Moderated by Jim Efstathiou, Correspondent, Bloomberg News, and co-organized by the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs ————– Takao Shibata, who is now a Chancellor Lecturer at the University of Kansas and Japan Consul General in Kansas City,mentioed that Japan is ready to commit to a 2020 reduction of 25% in emissions provided that there is FAIR and EFFECTIVE agreement with a VIGUROUS COMPLIANCE agreement as part of it. He stressed that the problem with Kyoto was that there was no compliance paragraph in the Protocol. All it said was that we postpone decision. The OBJECTIVE must be: THE STABILIZATION OF CO2 CONCENTRATION IN THE ATMOSPHERE rather then fighting over figures of temperature increase or concentrations in parts per milion numbers. We have already a Framework he said – the Copenhagen process should be about STABILIZATION. Later he added that we must at least agree to a 2050 position. Mr. Masayoshi Arai, who is in New York since June 2009, with The Japaese External Trade Organization (JETRO), after having held 16 positions within Japan Government, includingthe Prime Minister’s task force that created the Japan Consumer Protection Agency, and with The Fair Trade Commission and Agency for Natural Resouces and Energy and its Research Institute, Supervised manufacturing industries in their CO2 emissions reduction, and has also an MBA from Wharton, probably because of his present government trade position, was rather careful in what he said. He said that we ned something “meaningful” for global warming and left the Japanese point of view to Professor Shibata. ————- Eliot Diringer whose organization, the Washington based Pew Center, is a link between Environmentalism, industry and government made it clear that what is lacking is a legal architecture in place to deal with the problems created by climate change to which now Professor Shibata answered on the spot that the history is such that already in Berlin, later in Kyoto, the US was against a legal concept – that is a clear 15 year old problem. In Kyoto, the US Vice President came to seal the Protocol in full knowledge that it is unratifiable in Washington. Shibata does not want a repeat of this with a US that is in no position to ratify an agreement. Diringer came back with the suggestion that he can see that Developing countries will accept self prescribed domestic reductions and will request an agreement that makes this possible for them to do so. That means a new FRAMEWORK that is more flexible then the original. ————— Ambassador Zhenmin Liu, Deputy Permanent Representative of China to the UN in New York since 2006, in charge of China’s participation on the Second Committee at the UN, with prior experience at the UN in Geneva and as Director-General of the Treaty and Law Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been involved in Climate Change negotiations for China. He was actually the only member of the panel entitled to express a national negotiating position, and he did indeed come through. Ambassador Liu said that he cannot have now a document to replace Kyoto – this lines him up with what might be a Japanese interest, but clearly is no answer to the problems that were pointed out at why Kyoto was a failure. But then he also said that you need a GLOBAL CAP for the GHG emissions that must then take into account, when talking about individual nations, their level of industrialization. A certain raport evolved between him and Washingtonian Diringer. It was agreed that there is the need for Technology Innovation, Technology Cooperation, and Technology Transfer. Diringer said that China is very well positioning itself for the green technology economy. People in the US start to understand that the US will lose the competition for future technology and there must be a start for support in US Congress for energy action right now. These exchanges gave me an opening to ask mty question about what goes on right now – the days that President Obama plans for his trip to Asia with a long stopover in China. I started my question to ambassador Liu by saying that on the internet there is a lot of talk about a G-2 US-China agreement needed to jump start the Copenhagen negotiations, and I saw visually the Ambassador cringe. to this idea of a G-2. I continued by asking that what can we expect as an outcome from the meetings in Beijing if there is anything he could tell us as we believe that some concluding material was negotiated prior to the deision for this trip considering tha this is in effect the second meeting between the leaders? I was honored with a long answer that included several main points. The first point is that the US has accepted Kyoto and I guess China does not want to renegotiate Kyoto. Then, China has 20% of the world population the US only 5%, but China has only a fraction of the GDP per capita then the US, so there is no G-2 situation here. That must have been the reason for the cringing – China does not want to lose its place as leader of the underdeveloped nations. Secondly – this is not a US – China negotiation but a negotiation for all groups. Thirdly, there is place for clean energy cooperation, bilateral programs and projects – to jointly use clean technology. ——- Professor Shibata added that we talk of the atmosphere where there are no national boundaries. We talk of sovereign areas only on the surface of the earth – and we must realize that the effects turn up in the air and we have no national control of the air. Further, he said that in the west when something bad happens, the first thing we do is we sue the polluter – ask him to pay. He continued saying “I would encourage everyone to think about that.” Mr. Diringer added that the CDM was introduced to harness market forces to get reduction of CO2 emissions at lowes cost. ——- To summarize – it was nice for Japan to try to host a US-China debate before moves that will inevitably have to bring the US and China closer together. To follow up – let us look at President Obama’s itinerary to get further in depth to what a reorientation of the US towards Asia could mean. Japan, South Korea, and China are trying to form an East Asia Trilateral grouping with a Free Trade Agreement among the three countries. Obviously, this will open the Chinese market to Japan and Korea and there is no way for the US, with its own effective NAFTA agreement with Canada and Mexico. Japan wants thus perhaps more then just be a pivot in US – Chiba negotiations, it rather has also to make sure that it can hold on to its own agreements with both main countries. President Obama has thus quite a few non-climate topics to talk about in his Yokyo and Seoul stops. The second big stop is in Singapore where he will meet the 21 members of APEC: Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong (part of China), Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Peru, The Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), Thailand, The United States, and Viet Nam. This will be the reintroduction of the US to the Pacific region in general – an area that the locals contend was totally neglected by the US in the eight years of the Bush administration. A main point in this meeting will be to help redirect the participating economies from export to the US to supply to their local populations – this so that they help both areas – their own and the US economy as well. Will they also consult on whom to back for the job of UN Secretary-General in 2010? That is about the time to start this sort of negotiations, and Singapore seems to be the right place to look for the best viable candidate. Eventually, the Third leg of the trip – the stops in China – will have to be the clear main target of the trip – as said here by Ambassador Liu, the business deals in clean energy that can underpin both economies (US and China) so they become an example for cooperation on climate change that presents direct benefits to economies looking for sustainable growth, that is a match to the needs of the people and the climate as well - this is what we call Sustainable Development that is mutual – for the newly industrializing nation and for the phasing out of the old polluting industries of the past. —————— for information from President Obama’s Asian trip we recommend: www.ft.com/obamainasia www.ft.com/rachmanblog Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 13th, 2009
ENVIRONMENT-SOUTH AMERICA: Mapping the Riches of the Tropical Andes The tropical Andes, the stretch of the mountain range that includes the Central Andes (Bolivia and Peru) and Northern Andes (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela), were dubbed the “global epicentre of biodiversity” by British ecologist Norman Myers. The zone holds 45,000 types of plants (20,000 of which are endemic) and 3,400 vertebrate animal species (more than 1,500 of which are endemic) on just one percent of the planet’s land surface, according to figures from Conservation International. These riches “are distributed among 133 specific ecosystems that we have inventoried for our map of areas at more than 500 metres of altitude, of which 77 are in Peru, 69 in Bolivia, 31 in Ecuador, 22 in Colombia and 21 in Venezuela,” environmentalist Eulogio Chacón-Moreno, head of the project in Venezuela, told Tierramérica. The map, initially presented in April, was conceived as a tool to “identify gaps and priorities for conservation in the national agencies for protected areas, and to develop a set of indicators that allows us to assess the state of conservation of the Andean ecosystems,” said Chacón-Moreno. Such is the case of the “páramos”, treeless high plateaus “with a high percentage of endemic species, unique diversity for the way the species interrelate, and a highly important source of freshwater,” Vanessa Cartaya, of the regional Andean Páramo Project, sponsored by the Global Environment Facility, told Tierramérica. Cartaya underscored that the intensification of land use, expansion of the agricultural frontier, growing urbanisation and increased demand for potable water, as well as climate change, “affect the páramos to a great extent, making it essential to determine which areas are the priority for action.” The páramos are situated between 3,000 and 4,500 metres above sea level in the Northern and Central Andes, with temperature, humidity, sunshine, rain and wind factors that make them quite different from the lower altitude tropics that surround them. The high altitude flower known in Spanish as “frailejón” (Espeletia neriifolia) is emblematic of this ecosystem. “The páramo functions like a sponge, absorbing rainwater before filtering and releasing it” into other ecosystems, states the text that accompanies the map. The mountaintops hold remnants of glaciers and lakes that feed streams and springs. The project was based on studies and maps available from national institutes, standardising their data. Some of the maps used are: the Vegetation Map of Bolivia, Map of Ecosystems of the Colombian Andes, Map of Ecuador’s Continental Ecological Systems, Forest Map of Peru, and the Map of Ecological Units of Mérida, Venezuela. Plans are in the works to publish an atlas in 2010, with a preliminary version already available on the Internet. The mapping effort is a contribution to the Environmental Agenda of the Andean Community trade bloc (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru) as a guide to design and coordinate policies among the national environmental agencies, focusing on three themes: biodiversity, climate change and water resources. Backing the project are the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation, Spain’s Ministry of the Environment, and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. The work has been coordinated by NatureServe, a non-profit conservation organisation, and the Consortium for Sustainable Development of the Andean Eco-Region. Chacón-Moreno said the mapping will pave the way for studies “to identify ecosystems with more intense dynamics and patterns of fragmentation, which will serve as input to guide conservation policies.” Furthermore, experts will be able to “assess the vulnerability of Andean ecosystems through vegetation distribution models in scenarios of climate change and land-use change,” he added. For example, the Institute of Environmental and Ecological Sciences at the Venezuelan University of the Andes, led by Chacón-Moreno, has studied the spread of the mountainous cloud forest to the heights of the páramos in the highest sierras of southwest Venezuela, with records from 1952 to 1999 “showing how the páramo area has been reduced with the passing of the decades.” “The changes in vegetation cover demonstrate the effects of climate anomalies. In this respect, the map and the studies that support it allow the study across an entire region using a single standardised system of classification,” said the expert. A database will be a “planning tool that contains information about biodiversity,” communities and ecosystems, according to Chacón-Moreno. Of the 133 ecosystems identified, the most extensive is the High Andean Wet Scrubland (Puna Húmeda), covering nearly 10 million hectares in Peru and Bolivia, just 6.8 percent of which is officially protected. “Human use has greatly influenced the structure of these landscapes, subjected over the centuries to tree cutting and cyclical burns, so criteria need to be developed to better evaluate the natural landscapes,” which would lead to better understanding of the conservation of the Central Andes ecosystems, says the report that accompanies the map. The Tropical Andes run 4,000 km north-south. Few mountaintops are lower than 2,000 metres in altitude, and most of the landscape is steep inclines, deep gullies, vast valley floors, and sharp peaks. In the Central Andes, a vast “altiplano” or high plain is formed at more than 3,500 metres above sea level in southern Peru and western Bolivia. The altiplano’s towns and villages are home to more than 40 million people who rely heavily on the natural goods and services of the Andean ecosystems, including grains, fruit and vegetables produced in the area. “The map has also been proposed as an information and education tool for communities about the potential of their surroundings and the importance of preserving it, in order to obtain clean water and sustenance, as well as enjoying the beauty of the landscape,” said Cartaya. (*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.) Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 12th, 2009 from: sfmbam@sfmbam.com
Lima and Washington DC. The project has planted 919 ha to date, with a target of 18,900 ha. It uses a mix of native species within a 30-year cycle, with an initial validation of 101,982 credits for Emissions Reduction after the application of a 40% buffer. The project breaks the cycle of deforestation in the Amazon in which extraction of high-value timber is followed by changes in land use through conversion to cattle ranching and subsequent land abandonment. The project reverses this inexorable trend by recovering heavily degraded soil prior to plantation of a mix of native species of high commercial value, in a process that resembles natural forest succession. “We are very pleased to be the first native commercial reforestation project to be recognized for carbon sequestration. We want to expand this model of sustainable forestry to other areas in Peru and adjacent countries” said Jorge Cantuarias, SFM-BAM’s Chief Executive Officer and the pioneering Peruvian entrepreneur behind this major accomplishment. The project is also undergoing validation under the Carbon, Community, and Biodiversity Standard (CCB). “The ancillary biodiversity and social benefits generated represent a new promise for sustainable development, in which private capital can be a force of change in rural areas” said Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, a Washington-based businessman and ecologist responsible for the investments made by SFM in this project. From a financial perspective, “this is ideal – the long-term value SFM-BAM is a Peruvian company specialized in forestry and environmental services. It employs over 250 people, and is in the process of developing several large REDD projects in various regions of the Peruvian Amazon. The VCS standard is widely accepted as the most accurate and rigorous approach for carbon projects in the voluntary markets. For further information, please contact: Jorge Cantuarias Gonzalo Castro de la Mata Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 25th, 2009 Why the Amazon is important Page last updated: 14 May 2008 By BBC’s Latin America Analyst James Painter
As concerns grow about global warming and the future of the planet, much more international attention is being paid to the Amazon region. There are three fundamental reasons why the region is important to the rest of the world. The Amazon and the world’s climate It is not surprising that the Amazon region is often called the “lungs of the world,” as it plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle that helps to shape the world’s climate. About 200 billion tonnes of carbon are locked up in tropical vegetation around the world, of which about 70 billion tonnes are estimated to be in Amazon trees. Rapid rates of deforestation cause more carbon to be converted into carbon dioxide, either when the trees are burnt down or more slowly by the decomposition of unburned wood. And once the forests are gone, they cannot soak up the carbon from cars, power plants and factories. At the moment the Amazon is thought to absorb about 10 per cent of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions.
Burning is leading to a vicious circle of carbon release The build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is one of the key causes of global warming. About 20 per cent of annual global greenhouse emissions is estimated to come from the clearing of tropical forests around the world. According to the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, the loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector. Brazil, for example, is ranked in the top five of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, not because of its high emissions from fossil fuels but because of deforestation. Tipping Point A study released in February 2008 by a team of international scientists from Oxford University, the Potsdam Institute and others concluded that the Amazon rainforest was the second most vulnerable area in the world after the Arctic.
The loss of the Amazon is leading to the loss of the Arctic The essential idea is that the drying of the Amazon and/or increased deforestation could cause what is called “dieback” of the rain forest and a vicious cycle – a large reduction in the area of Amazon rainforest could cause a significant rise in CO2 emissions, which in turn would raise global temperatures – which in turn would cause more drying of the Amazon. Scientists and climate change modellers disagree how soon a tipping point might happen or how likely it is. But however low the probability, changes to the Amazon are likely to be a “high impact” event on the world’s climate. Biodiversity The Amazon is the world’s largest tract of tropical rainforest, containing the Earth’s greatest biological reservoir – around 30 percent of all terrestrial species are found there. The region is the main reason why Brazil is the most bio-diverse country in the world, with more than 50,000 described species of plants, 1,700 species of birds and between 500 and 700 different types each of amphibians, mammals and reptiles. All this rich biodiversity is now being threatened by the destructive combination of stress from climate change and deforestation. Even though there are many unknowns about the Amazon’s future and its effect on the world’s climate, scientists agree that because of its biodiversity and the crucial role the region plays in shaping the climate, it is a matter of great urgency to find the right policy mix to conserve enough of the forest.
Brazil is also the biggest exporter of soya beans in the world Who should decide the fate of the Amazon rainforest? The people who live there? The Brazilian government? The international community? Or individuals all over the world? A remote tribe in the Brazilian Amazon says illegal loggers have already cleared around 40 per cent of their land, while the government has ignored their pleas for help. The Tembe indians say that as the authorities failed to act, some of their community also became involved in selling wood illegally, but for now this has stopped. Now they say the authorities should recognise they too have the right to make some money from the wood that surrounds their reserve by providing a plan for sustainable development. The BBC’s Gary Duffy has been to the state of Para in northern Brazil to meet one of the leaders of the small Tembe indian community: Listen to Gary Duffy’s report (4 mins 13 secs)
The Amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, covering approximately seven million km² (40% of South America). Much of the global carbon cycle that is crucial to the world’s ecology and climate goes through the Amazon, earning it the label “the lungs of the Earth”. The Amazon is a rich store of biodiversity, containing around a quarter of all terrestrial species. At 6,400km, the Amazon river is the second longest in the world, and accounts for one fifth of all fresh water drained into the world’s oceans. The Amazon basin is also home to more than 30 million people of nine nations; Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Two-thirds of the Amazonian population are Brazilian, and more than half live in urban centres. The Brazil part of the Amazonas is a follows:
Brazilian Amazon surface area: 4,776,980 km² Brazil is South America’s most influential country, an economic giant and one of the world’s biggest democracies. Brazil also contains 65% of the Amazon, yet it is estimated that 700,000km² has been lost through deforestation since 1970. This is an area larger than Afghanistan, and accounts for 80% of recent deforestation in the whole of the Amazon basin. Despite the destruction, the Brazilian Amazon remains the largest continuous area of tropical forest in the world. Cattle ranching accounts for around 70% of all forest loss. Soya production and illegal logging are the other main culprits. The construction of new hydroelectric dams and the building of roads across the region are also blamed for deforestation as they open access to low-cost land and attract new migrants. Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of soya and beef, much of it driven by growing demand from the rapidly-expanding Asian economies, particularly China. ========================================================================================= Then please the following to the bottom of the piece —————— One Planet: best of the Amazon Paradox February saw 200 troops go into Para to crack down on logging The Amazon Paradox BBC World Service’s One Planet programme presents a special edition bringing you the very best of the Amazon Paradox. Listen Download (mp3) —————— BBC correspondents’ Amazon reports The Amazon Paradox
As concerns grow about global warming and the future of the planet, much more international attention is being paid to the Amazon region. There are three fundamental reasons why the region is important to the rest of the world. The Amazon and the world’s climate It is not surprising that the Amazon region is often called the “lungs of the world,” as it plays a critical role in the global carbon cycle that helps to shape the world’s climate. About 200 billion tonnes of carbon are locked up in tropical vegetation around the world, of which about 70 billion tonnes are estimated to be in Amazon trees. Rapid rates of deforestation cause more carbon to be converted into carbon dioxide, either when the trees are burnt down or more slowly by the decomposition of unburned wood. And once the forests are gone, they cannot soak up the carbon from cars, power plants and factories. At the moment the Amazon is thought to absorb about 10 per cent of global fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions.
Burning is leading to a vicious circle of carbon release The build-up of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is one of the key causes of global warming. About 20 per cent of annual global greenhouse emissions is estimated to come from the clearing of tropical forests around the world. According to the Stern Report on the economics of climate change, the loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector. Brazil, for example, is ranked in the top five of the world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, not because of its high emissions from fossil fuels but because of deforestation. Tipping Point A study released in February 2008 by a team of international scientists from Oxford University, the Potsdam Institute and others concluded that the Amazon rainforest was the second most vulnerable area in the world after the Arctic.
The loss of the Amazon is leading to the loss of the Arctic The essential idea is that the drying of the Amazon and/or increased deforestation could cause what is called “dieback” of the rain forest and a vicious cycle – a large reduction in the area of Amazon rainforest could cause a significant rise in CO2 emissions, which in turn would raise global temperatures – which in turn would cause more drying of the Amazon. Scientists and climate change modellers disagree how soon a tipping point might happen or how likely it is. But however low the probability, changes to the Amazon are likely to be a “high impact” event on the world’s climate. Biodiversity The Amazon is the world’s largest tract of tropical rainforest, containing the Earth’s greatest biological reservoir – around 30 percent of all terrestrial species are found there. The region is the main reason why Brazil is the most bio-diverse country in the world, with more than 50,000 described species of plants, 1,700 species of birds and between 500 and 700 different types each of amphibians, mammals and reptiles. All this rich biodiversity is now being threatened by the destructive combination of stress from climate change and deforestation. Even though there are many unknowns about the Amazon’s future and its effect on the world’s climate, scientists agree that because of its biodiversity and the crucial role the region plays in shaping the climate, it is a matter of great urgency to find the right policy mix to conserve enough of the forest.
Brazil is also the biggest exporter of soya beans in the world Who should decide the fate of the Amazon rainforest? The people who live there? The Brazilian government? The international community? Or individuals all over the world? A remote tribe in the Brazilian Amazon says illegal loggers have already cleared around 40 per cent of their land, while the government has ignored their pleas for help. The Tembe indians say that as the authorities failed to act, some of their community also became involved in selling wood illegally, but for now this has stopped. Now they say the authorities should recognise they too have the right to make some money from the wood that surrounds their reserve by providing a plan for sustainable development. The BBC’s Gary Duffy has been to the state of Para in northern Brazil to meet one of the leaders of the small Tembe indian community: Listen to Gary Duffy’s report (4 mins 13 secs)
The Amazon rainforest is the largest in the world, covering approximately seven million km² (40% of South America). Much of the global carbon cycle that is crucial to the world’s ecology and climate goes through the Amazon, earning it the label “the lungs of the Earth”. The Amazon is a rich store of biodiversity, containing around a quarter of all terrestrial species. At 6,400km, the Amazon river is the second longest in the world, and accounts for one fifth of all fresh water drained into the world’s oceans. The Amazon basin is also home to more than 30 million people of nine nations; Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Two-thirds of the Amazonian population are Brazilian, and more than half live in urban centres. The Brazil part of the Amazonas is a follows:
Brazilian Amazon surface area: 4,776,980 km² Brazil is South America’s most influential country, an economic giant and one of the world’s biggest democracies. Brazil also contains 65% of the Amazon, yet it is estimated that 700,000km² has been lost through deforestation since 1970. This is an area larger than Afghanistan, and accounts for 80% of recent deforestation in the whole of the Amazon basin. Despite the destruction, the Brazilian Amazon remains the largest continuous area of tropical forest in the world. Cattle ranching accounts for around 70% of all forest loss. Soya production and illegal logging are the other main culprits. The construction of new hydroelectric dams and the building of roads across the region are also blamed for deforestation as they open access to low-cost land and attract new migrants. Brazil is now the world’s largest exporter of soya and beef, much of it driven by growing demand from the rapidly-expanding Asian economies, particularly China. ========================================================================================= Then please the following to the bottom of the piece —————— One Planet: best of the Amazon Paradox February saw 200 troops go into Para to crack down on logging The Amazon Paradox BBC World Service’s One Planet programme presents a special edition bringing you the very best of the Amazon Paradox. Listen Download (mp3) —————— BBC correspondents’ Amazon reports http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2… Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 24th, 2009 From THE AMERICAS SOCIETY/Council of the Americas, New York City Headquarters – A discussion on – The Risks of Deforestation in the Amazon with Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and Andrew Revkin of The New York Times. Thursday, July 23, 2009. The moderator was Christopher Sabatini, Editor-in-Chief of the Americas Quarterly and Senior Director of Policy, of AS/COA. The IIRSA initiative was created in the year 2000, during a summit of South American presidents in Brazil. Its official goal is South American regional integration through infrastructure related to transportation, energy and telecommunications. This initiative is coordinated by 12 South American governments with the technical and financial support of the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and the Del Plata Basin Development Fund (FONPLATA), as well as other development banks, likely including the European Investment Bank (EIB). Environmental groups saw from the IIRSA inception that the proposed megaprojects will endanger the environment. The Friends of the Earth, International) (FOEI) wrote about IIRSA: Why is IIRSA a risk for communities and the environment? 1. Because its transport, waterways and agribusiness network projects crossing ecologically fragile areas, will have a negative effect on biodiversity. For example, the impact in the Andes, the Amazon Basin, the Mato Grosso, the Pantanal, and the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, will be significant, and in many cases irreversible. 2. Because these projects are likely to put the products of peasant communities at a great disadvantage. IIRSA roads and waterways aim to facilitate the transport of export products like soy, while doing little to strengthen food security and sustainable livelihoods for local citizens. 3. Because the mega- infrastructure projects have been drawn up with excessive focus on the needs of the private sector compared to the needs of the local economy and nearby communities. 4. Because of the failure to incorporate appropriate environmental, social and cultural considerations in IIRSA’s large infrastructure projects. 5. Because IIRSA projects are now set up to follow previous large infrastructure projects financed by international financial institutions. These projects continue to cause harm to indigenous communities (for example the Camisea gas pipeline) and the environment (Bolivia-Brazil gas pipeline), and can rack up devastating national debts (Yacyreta hydroelectric plant). 6. Because the role played by European transnational corporations in Latin America has already generated conflicts between consumers of public services, putting access to basic services (such as water, electricity, telecommunications) at risk, and promoting the privatization of public services. Giving these companies a greater role, as envisaged by IIRSA, is potentially very harmful. 7. Because IIRSA offers little public access to information about their projects and related policy reforms. 8. Because IIRSA does not have monitoring and evaluation programs in place to demonstrate that poverty will be reduced or that sustainable economies are being promoted. 9. Because IIRSA does not make concrete connections between its projects and the reduction of poverty or improvement of the environment. 10. Finally, and in summary, because IIRSA has a logic that is purely economic instead of a logic that is about sustainable integration and healthy local economies. http://www.iirsa.org/index.asp?CodIdioma… * * * Andrew Revkin, besides being the Science Editor of the New York Times, has also written: “The Burning Season: “The Murder of Chico Mendes and the Fight for the Amazon Rain Forest” (Paperback – Sep 30, 2004) that allowed him an added insight into the social and economic drivers that destroy the Amazonas. * * * The base material for the presentation by Bruce Babbitt – was published in: The Americas Quarterly SUMMER 2009. AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG BY BRUCE BABBITT who has served as Governor of Arizona and as U.S.secretary of the interior. He is currently researching IIRSA (?Iniciativa para la Integracion de la Infraestructura Regional Suramericana). as a fellow of the Blue Moon Fund. IN THE AMAZON BASIN THE PLANNED TRANS-SOUTH AMERICAN HIGHWAY WILL WREAK MASSIVE DAMAGE ON THE FRAGILE ECOSYSTEMS OF THE AMAZON AND THE ANDES. WORSE YET, IT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE. SO WHY IS IT BEING BUILT? Brazil is an Atlantic nation in search of its Pacific destiny. Although it has long nurtured the dream of becoming a two-ocean, continental power, much as a young and expanding America was drawn across the continent to the Pacific by the call of Manifest Destiny, South America’s largest country has for most of its history faced eastward to European and North American markets. But as global markets shift toward China and the emerging economies of Asia, the dream of westward expansion has been revived by one of the world’s biggest and most improbable construction projects. The Interoceanica, a highway stretching a thousand kilometers across the Amazon Basin, up the 15,000-foot-high face of the Andes and down to the Pacifi c in Peru, is as worrying as it is ambitious. With additional branches already planned, it has emerged as a serious threat to the human and natural ecology of the greatest expanse of rainforest on the planet. What makes it especially worrying is that construction of the highway, estimated to cost $4 billion, has received almost no attention and little debate. Its origins trace back to September 2000, when a meeting of South American presidents convened by Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso endorsed a plan called the Initiative of the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America, known as IIRSA. At the time, the topic of the day was regional economic integration. In the minds of many of its leaders South America was falling behind in the global economy as regional trade blocs, such as NAFTA and the expanding European Union (EU), seemed to grab the economic initiative. The U.S. proposal for a Free Trade Area of the Americas was perceived by Brazil as a threat to its claims of leadership. The presidents endorsed a sprawling plan, the centerpiece of which was the Interoceanica highway, reviving an earlier idea for a transborder corridor that would facilitate Brazilian trade with China. Then called Transoceanica, but quickly dubbed the “Road to China,” the idea languished for more than a decade until it was reconceived as part of the sprawling IIRSA project, which pulled together national wish lists of no less than 350 infrastructure projects, including highways, bridges, railways, ports, airports, and transmission corridors. Should the full plan be realized, the greatest remaining expanse of tropical forests on the planet will be transformed into the industrial heartland of South America. Highway corridors converging inward from the Atlantic coast and from the Andean countries will meet and cross in the Amazon, drawing and concentrating settlement and development into the green heart of the continent. Yet in the nine years since the South American presidents met, the IIRSA blueprints for transforming the Amazon have attracted surprisingly little attention. That may have been because the presidential directives setting the plan in motion bypassed normal procedures of public hearings and legislative debate in each of the affected countries. It may also be that IIRSA was dismissed by many as yet another dreamy Bolivarian scheme for continental unity, destined to fade away like so many other continental visions extending back in time to the Great Liberator himself. For better or worse, the dream is coming to life. Construction of the main road is expected to be completed as early as 2010, ensuring that the Interoceanica will play a key role in the ultimate goal of regional economic integration. The architects of the project are proud of their achievement, which may be one reason I was invited by Constructora Norberto Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company, to see how far they have come. That’s how I came to find myself last fall in Puerto Maldonado, a once-languid Peruvian frontier town on the Amazon, the jumping-off point for a trip deep into the heart of the continent to witness the final phase of construction. The trip proved a jarring contrast with a visit I made to the area in 1991, when I first became acquainted with the trans-Amazon corridor project. Puerto Maldonado itself was an introduction to the conflicting images of the future embodied by the new highway. Roadside billboards advertise the town as a gateway to an ecotourism paradise. One boasts: “Puerto Maldonado, Capital of Biodiversity;” another, more grandly, claims the town as the “Biological Capital of the World and Ecological Patrimony of Humanity.” But signs of another, darker vision are everywhere as the surrounding forests come under siege from forest clearing and burning, illegal logging and land speculation. On the first morning, accompanied by the two guides assigned to me by the company, Gabriel and Devey, we left Puerto Maldonado heading west. A passing logging truck made clear that commerce was already flourishing. The pavement soon gave way to a narrow red-dirt track baked hard by the intense tropical sun. African Zebu cattle grazed among blackened stumps in pastures where the forest has been cleared and burned back from the roadway. The tension between the vision of an ecological paradise and reality has already triggered violence. In Februar y2008, a local municipal official, Julio García Agapito, spotted a truckload of illegally harvested mahoganylogs. In the process of reporting the sighting to federal officials, he was accosted by gunmen and shot dead. Several months after García’s death, demonstrators converged in Puerto Maldonado to protest a presidential decree authorizing the sale of communal lands. In the ensuing violence the town hall was burned to the ground. Such violence has been an all-too familiar characteristic of Amazon commercial development in the recentpast. But the contrast between ecological aims and commerce is all the more intense here, because the headwaters region represents the last possibility for preserving the wild pre-settlement Amazon. The centerof this extraordinary ecological patrimony is nearby Manu National Park, world-renowned for its profusion of Amazon wildlife—a region where visitors encounter nearly 1,000 species of birds (10 percent of the world’s species), troops of monkeys clambering through the tree canopies, huge mixed flocks of green parrots and red and green macaws swarming to nearby salt licks, tapirs crashing through the forest toward mud wallows, giant otters surfacing in the oxbow lakes, and, if one is lucky, a jaguar or anaconda.Elsewhere in the Amazon, such scenes are a rarity. Wildlife has been heavily hunted or disrupted by generations of rubber tappers, gold miners and forest settlers in much of the rainforest. The exception is the western headwaters region, where long stretches of rapids and waterfalls pouring off the mountains have blocked access. The pristine qualityof the western Amazon, in effect, has been cradled and protected by the ramparts of the Andes. But for how much longer? Just beyond the ceja de montaña (the brow of the mountain), we reached the Peruvian village of Santa Rosa. Above this village, the construction zone looms into sight. Work crews here are widening and grading the road and laying a base course with gravel.The sheer scale of the construction effort becomes vividly clear. According to Gabriel, about 6,500 men and women are on the job during the dry season, mobilizing 1,500 trucks, bulldozers, earth movers, and other pieces of heavy machinery. As we pass through Masuko, a wildcat gold-mining camp set in a moonscape of rock and gravel, we encounter some older Amazon realities. Gold buyers occupy most of the storefronts. Masuko may be remote, but gold travels well from all locationsin all seasons. Looking across the wasteland, Gabriel shrugs and states the obvious: “the government does not have the capacity to control this gold mining.”The construction zone resumes beyond Masuko, where a narrow bridge takes us to a precarious track cut from near-vertical slopes that rise upward into the mist. On our left, far below, a river cascades downward, continuous whitewater thundering through the boulder-filled channel.Roadwork here has created a traffic jam, as local drivers jockey with heavy equipment and trucks for their turn to thread the maze. A Peruvian policeman stands by passively as workers unscramble the traffic. Gabriel explains that the policeman, who is on the Odebrecht payroll, is on duty simply to lend the color of authority to traffic management. Toward nightfall we are again heldup by workers and heavy machinerycontending with an ancient landslideof giant boulders and rock slabs thatseem about ready to resume their downward descent. Workmen are jackhammering boulders, preparing to blast a way through. Several yards up the track, a vehicle emblazoned with a red cross is parked alongside the road. Our driver radios the supervisor: the machines move, a grader pushes away a pile of rock and we weave our way through.Night descends quickly in the tropics. As the sky darkens, lights up the canyon to the left signal that we have reached the main construction camp. Checking in through a security gate, we pass a large maintenance yard,rows of prefab dormitories and the administrative center. At a meeting hall large enough for 100 participants, Sergio, the project manager, gives us a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation of the project, complete with a map showing IIRSA projects throughout the South American continent, statistics about the Interoceanica, a description of hiring and personnel policies and training programs, and even information on the medical clinic staffed by a physician, along with a summary of economic benefits accruing to local communities. Listening to this talk, I am beginning to realize that this is not just another construction company that managed to be the low bidder. Odebrecht is a powerful agent of Brazilian expansion. As long ago as 1991, when I first encountered the project, Odebrecht depicted its “Road to China” as a boost for trade: by eliminating the need to ship goods through the Panama Canal, the highway would speed the process of transforming Brazilian soybeans into Asian tofu. THE ECONOMICS OF TOFU TRANSPORT the road to China, however compelling as a vision of national destiny, has never been supported by economic reality. Trucking bulk commodities over land, never mind up and down the Andes, is expensive. Shipping by sea costs less than onetenthof land transport. Cutting out a few thousand kilometers of ocean distance would be nothing against the costs of trucking over the Andes. That’s not just my conclusion. Mato Grosso’s governor, Blairo Maggi , who is also Brazil’s largest soy farmer and a fervent advocate of Amazon development, observed that a road over the Andes would be “too expensive,” declaring that he would continue to ship through Atlantic ports. But the advocates of IIRSA make another claim for the project’s economic viability. They argue that the Interoceanica is needed to access the oil and gas fields now being developed in headwater regions of thewestern Amazon. Indeed, an oil and gas boom is underway along the easternface of the Andes, reaching from Bolivia into Peru and northward into Ecuador and Colombia, with profound consequences for the future of the Amazon. In Peru, a huge gasstrike at Camisea, close to Cuzco, is under development. Camisea, however, is not an argument for road building. In fact, it makes exactly the opposite case, that roads are not necessary for modern oil and gas development. After international outcry over the Camisea project’s potential impact on indigenous forest, the company has sought to use helicopters instead to lay the pipeline down to the coast. The airborne delivery was an alternative to building roads and opening the forests up to destruction. If neither soybeans nor oil and gas are likely to repay the huge investment in the Interoceanica, there is one export commodity that assuredly will. The export of timber products, mahogany, cedar, and other high-value tropical hardwoods will benefit from new roads. Even now, without roads, mahogany is being illegally harvested, with logs cut to dimension timber and flown outfrom small airstrips to Lima. The road to China, it turns out, will be a fine all-weather logging road, opening access to still more of the Amazon forest. Neither Odebrecht nor IIRSA any longer advances the “Road to China”argument for the Interoceanica. The billboards in Puerto Maldonado, inaddition to their biodiversity boasts,now proclaim simply “Progress and Development—Brazil and Peru.” Even the new name, Interoceanica, suggests a more limited use: travel and development across the Brazil-Peru region. The winding mountain road takes our group into the cloud forests, the tall canopy giving way to tangles of low trees and shrubs. Clouds drift down to the ground, leaving the land perpetually misty and wet. Far above us, earthmoving machines are perched on the slopes, so high up they look like tinker toys, as workers struggle to dig diversion channels to drain the incessant rains away from the exposed cuts. I wonder aloud how long it will be before this road goes the way of many Amazon roads that are pushed through the forests, then left to melt away in the rain, becoming nearly as impassable as the pioneer routes they were meant to improve. “That won’thappen here,” Gabriel insists. “We have a long-term concession contract that obligates Odebrecht to maintain the road for the next 25 years.” It is a public-private concession, he adds,what in the U.S. is called B.O.T.: build, operate, transfer. The Interoceanica will be operated by Odebrecht as aprivate toll road, with revenues going to repay construction costs and to finance ongoing maintenance. How much will the tolls be, and how does the construction financing work? Gabriel and Devey are vague. Highway finance is for the experts in Brasília and Lima, they say. Maintenance costs and profitability aside, the Interoceanica is an impressive example of Brazilian engineering, creative financing and international cooperation. Only time will tell whether the road is an optimal investment of public resources, for there was little economic analysis put forward by IIRSA, Odebrecht or the governments of Brazil and Peru. The financing scheme calls for construction costs to be paid through bonds sold into international markets. In theory, the bonds are to be paid down over time from tolls collected by Odebrecht as the concession operator. In fact, all parties concede there will not be sufficient traffic for tolls to repay the construction outlays. So to achieve a bondrating sufficient for the markets, the bonds are guaranteed by the Peruvian government. This means that, in the end, the road is being paid for by the Peruvian government. MORE TO COME? Why such an elaborate financing mechanism, when it is understood by all participants that the bonds are essentially drawing on the public purse of Peru? The likely answer is that by structuring the financing through an intermediary, IIRSA and its private sector partners have been able to circumvent the Peruvian planning process and the constraints of that country’s national budget.However lacking in transparency and national accountability, and whatever the human and environmental costs and lack of economic logic, the Interoceanica was probably inevitable. The Andes could not serve forever as a Great Wall holding back Brazilian expansion. What’s more surprising is that IIRSA plans on building more roads. According to public documents, IIRSA believes that one road is not nearly enough. The Interoceanica is just the beginning. IIRSA plans call for at least two more transportation corridors across the western Amazon: IIRSACentral and IIRSA Norte. IIRSA’s bold ambition raises a number of questions about the costs: economic and environmental. Is one highway corridor, whose economic rationale is still to be proven, across the western Amazon and over the Andes sufficient? Is there any reason for additional road corridors that put forests at risk and threaten the existenceof native forest communities? Rather than build new roads, what is sorely needed is an international plan to conserve and protect the remaining western Amazon headwaters. But that doesn’t seem to be in IIRSA’s plan. - The IIRSA Central will roughly parallelthe Interoceanica, much as the east-west interstate highways run inparallel corridors across the United States. It will branch off from the Interoceanica in Rio Branco, the capital of the Brazilian state of Acre. From RioBranco the road corridor will run west across the international border to thePeruvian city of Pucallpa, connecting from there to existing road corridors down to the Pacific. On the Brazilian side, the IIRSACentral corridor will cut a swath through the forests of Serra do Divisor National Park, renowned for its diversity of local species that have evolved along divergent paths in the isolated foothill elevations of the Andean region.The area is so isolated and so little known that bird species new to science are still being discovered and described. Ironically, even as IIRSA planners, with Brazilian leadership, are readying to invade the park, the Brazilian government has nominated Serra do Divisor Park for the UNESCO register of World Heritage Sites. Across the border in Peru, IIRSA Central will slice through and open up a reserve established to protect the largest remaining sanctuary of uncontacted indigenous groups on theplanet, who live in voluntary isolation from contemporary society. How such a redundant and destructive plan for a second transportationcorridor across the Amazon headwatersand over the Andes can take form with a minimum of discussion reveals much about the IIRSA process, or rather, lack of process. IIRSA projects have been designed and imposed from the top down, given aircover by presidential endorsementsand validation by the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) and other international agencies. The cross-border section of IIRSA Central, through the Serra do Divisor, has not yet gone out to bid, and there may yet be significant opposition within Brazil to the destruction of agreat national park, as well as protest from increasingly vocal indigenous rights groups within Peru. - The third transportation corridorin this Amazon-Pacifi c integrationplan, IIRSA Norte, embodies a novel concept, possibly refl ecting some latent IIRSA capacity for enlightened planning. It is a bimodal land-water transportation corridor extending up Amazon River tributaries from Iquitos to the Peruvian city of Yurimaguas where vessels would disembark passengers and payloads to continue via a modern highway over the Andes and down to the Pacific coast. A NOT-SO-MODESTPROPOSAL IIRSA has initiated a new era of infrastructure development inSouth America. It has built a political and economic structure that bypasses local and national governments, transcending them with a virtual organization shaped by the dark energy of Brazilian dynamism and held together with informal networks of public-private collaboration. The momentum of IIRSA projects wil lundoubtedly slow in the headwinds of a global recession. But, having demonstrated its capacity to deliver, IIRSA is not likely to disappear. Going forward, the issue is how best to bring transparency, accountability and a sense of geospatial integrity into a deeply flawed process. In past decades, human rights organizations, environmentalists, scientists, and sustainable development advocates, have typically taken their concerns to, and found a hearing at, the World Bank and the IDB. Recently, however, a new generation of regional development banks such as the CAF and the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) has taken the lead in financing the Interoceanica and other IIRSA projects. And these institutions have proven impervious to environmental and human rights concerns. If IIRSA is to be reformed, environmental, native rights and economicreform groups within theSouth American continent, will need to bulk up with technical expertise, funding and broader public support from within the national boundaries of their member countries, and from abroad. At the international level, pressure for IIRSA reform must be generated from a broader base of governmental, private-sector, and multilateral institutions, including aid and finance agencies within the U.S. government and the European Union. The World Trade34 Americas Quarterly SUMMER 2009 AMERICASQUARTERLY.ORG Organization must be drawn into an expanded role that supports trade insustainable goods and services and penalizes products that do not meet such standards. Consumers and corporations must be induced to adopt truly sustainable purchasing and procurement practices. The financial sector should raise its standards for project financing and underwriting, Even as IIRSA continues on a path likely to transform the Amazon into an ecological desert, a new economic alternative is emerging with the potential to change direction. Global warming is now the most urgent international threat of our time. Thedestruction of tropical forests contributes an astonishing 20 percentof the CO2 emissions causing globalwarming. And the emergence of an international carbon trading systemcould give economic value to tropical forests, compensating communities for the global ecosystem services provided by standing forests. Brazil is the world’s number-one source of atmospheric carbon dioxide emitted from forest clearing and burning. Recently, Carlos Minc, the newly appointed environmental minister, pledged that Brazil will reduce its rate of deforestation by 50 percentby the year 2017, widely seen as the first step toward qualifying Brazil to participate in world carbon markets, thereby providing an economic incentive for forest protection. But a better way to preserve the fragile natural treasures that would be affected by the three transcontinental highways would be the creation of an internationally protected area, straddling both sides of the borderbetween Brazil and Peru. If transborder road-projects such as the Interoceanica can be brought into being by international agreement, then it is time for international parks to be established by the same process. If highways can be fi nanced through the IDB and other international financial institutions, then it is past time for those institutions to negotiate provisions for transborder protected areas in their planning and financing. Andthe national presidents who have so casually given credibility to the IIRSA process should be called to account by their own people for the protection of their national patrimony.Brazil’s emerging national policy,which envisions an eventual end to deforestation, cannot exist alongside IIRSA plans for an Amazon Basin carved up by an internationa lnetwork of road corridors. Now thatBrazil has at last reached the Pacific, it is time for this great nation to lead, domestically and internationally, by creating a coalition of presidents and governments to confront these contradictions of regional development policies and to establish an international plan that can protect the unique natural resources that lie across its borders. It would be an effort that would match the economically questionable and environmentally disastrous ambitions of IIRSA but promises far greater long-term returns. Bruce Babbitt has served as Governor of Arizona and as U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton. He is currently researching IIRSA as a fellow of the Blue Moon Fund. —————- The above terrific article leads us to the point were we see clearly that trees standing will be much more of value to their host country then choped up and sold for timber – this in particular for the Amazonas that does not have land quality that will lend itself easiliy to agriculture once the trees are gone. It thus boggles my mind how National governments do not realize that being paid for leaving resources in place, is actually a much better guarantee for future income. Obviously – this requires also that outside governments understand that at meetings like the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen, they must make adequate offers to countries like Brazil and the Anden Countries, to make it possible for them to become part of the solution to the Global Warming requirements, rather then propelling themselves, and the rest of the world, on this down-hill treck they started with the construction of the trans-Andean highways, whose main purpose could only be the export of native hard-woods. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 17th, 2009 Peruvian Government, Amazonian Indigenous Groups Remain Deadlocked. By David Dudenhoefer During the past week, thousands of Amazonian Indians traveled from remote villages to new protest sites. Members of the Ashanika tribe have blockaded the Carretera Central – the central highway between Lima with the Amazon region – while other protesters have occupied a rural airport in Andahuaylas. Since the indigenous uprising began on April 9, between 15,000 and 20,000 protesters have blockaded highways and Amazon tributaries and shut down rural airports and an oil pipeline, among other actions. Alberto Pizango, is president of AIDESEP An oil pipeline leak is discovered near Wawas, Peru. June 13, 2009 Indio Washuru at the Bagua blockade one week before the police attack. Peruvian police break up the Bagua blockade with a helicopter and armored vehicles. June 5, 2009 Peruvian authorities have charged several other AIDESEP officials with crimes against the state, but have not issued warrants for their arrest. AIDESEP vice president Daysi Zapata, who has replaced Pizango as the protesters’ spokesperson, said in a press conference last week that they are willing to negotiate. “We want to initiate a transparent dialogue so that the demands of the indigenous people can be heard,” she said. The administration of Peruvian President Alan Garcia has asked representatives of the Catholic Church and Peru’s Ombudsman to mediate a dialogue with indigenous leaders, but has yet to set a date for the first meeting. On June 14, Garcia’s Chief of Staff, Yehude Simon, announced that he would ask the country’s Congress to repeal two of the decrees that AIDESEP objects to, which the legislators had voted to suspend the week before. AIDESEP’s leaders rejected the suspension, noting that legislators could lift it at any time, and the following day, an estimated 20,000 people marched in Lima and cities in the Amazon Basin to demand the repeal of all nine decrees. Simon’s announcement, which came on the eve of a visit by a United Nations special rapporteur for indigenous issues and amidst growing international pressure, was the first sign that the Garcia administration was willing to make concessions to AIDESEP. The decrees in question were signed by President Garcia last year as part of a legislative package designed to get Peru into compliance with its Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Garcia and various ministers have said that repealing the decrees would endanger the trade agreement, though some observers refute that claim. AIDESEP’s leaders say the decrees violate the International Labor Organization’s convention 169, which Peru has signed, since it requires the government to consult indigenous groups before passing laws that will impact them. Richard Smith, executive director of the local NGO Instituto del Bien Comun, who has worked with Peru’s Amazonian indigenous groups for 40 years, said the current protest is unprecedented in its scale and organization. He explained that indigenous communities have struggled for decades to get titles for their communal lands, yet much of their traditional territory still belongs to the government, which grants communities rights of use. Smith said the decrees AIDESEP opposes will facilitate the privatization and deforestation of those government lands. “There is a sense of desperation among indigenous people who, after decades of slow progress, feel that the Garcia administration is pushing them back,” he said. Smith said that indigenous groups also are concerned about Garcia’s promotion of oil and gas development in the Peruvian Amazon, noting that whereas oil concessions covered about 15 percent of the region in 2004, they now cover more than 75 percent. A week before a violent police operation that cleared an indigenous highway blockade in Bagua province, one of the protesters, an Awajun Indian named Indio Washuru, decried the government’s policy of granting concessions in indigenous territory without consulting the communities that live there. “We are fighting against laws by the Peruvian government that violate our rights to land and forests, our water and rivers. We are against laws that have been promulgated unconstitutionally by the government of Alan Garcia,” Washuru said. “But rather than a solution, the government sends us repression.” One week later, on June 5, Peruvian police attacked some 3,000 protesters at the Bagua blockade, using helicopters and armored vehicles. According to press reports, protesters wrested rifles from officers and began shooting the police. The Peruvian government reported that 14 police officers and 10 protesters were killed during clash, but indigenous leaders claim that more than 30 protesters died. Witnesses have said that police removed bodies from the scene and that some were dumped into a nearby river, but subsequent investigations by the Ombudsman’s Office and regional authorities have uncovered no proof of rumored mass graves, or bodies in rivers. In televised interviews following that clash, President Garcia said the country had been demanding that he restore order. He claimed that indigenous protesters were being manipulated by leftists as part of an international conspiracy to destabilize Peru, which he implied Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez is behind. “These people are not first class citizens, if 400,000 natives can say to 28 million Peruvians ‘you can’t come here,’” Garcia said. “That is a very grave error and anyone who thinks that way wants to take us on an irrational and primitive retreat into the past.” Among the more than 150 protesters wounded in Bagua was Santiago Manuin, an internationally recognized environmental activist. According to local media, police shot the 52-year-old Manuin eight times and left him for dead, but ambulance attendants later discovered that he was alive. Segundo Valera, a cousin of Manuin, told a reporter from the Peruvian newspaper “La Republica” that he saw police in helicopters fire indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters, accidentally shooting police officers. Peruvian officials have said that the police only shot tear gas canisters from the helicopters. In response to radio reports of the police repression, hundreds of Awajun Indians who had taken over a pumping station on the country’s main oil pipeline, several hours to the north, overpowered 34 police officers stationed nearby, and tied their hands and feet with vines. The next day, as police and army troops attempted to rescue the hostages, protesters murdered 10 police officers before fleeing into the nearby rainforest. Gil Inoach, an Awajun Indian and former president of AIDESEP who now works for WWF Peru, called the killings an act of revenge for what the protesters perceive as betrayal by the Peruvian government. Inoach complains that water pollution from oil operations has affected the health of indigenous people and explained that the offending decrees facilitate the privatization of land and natural resources that indigenous communities have relied on for centuries. “We indigenous people object to the way that the government is systematically taking our land away,” Inoach said. “Without their land, indigenous people will lose their culture because the identity of indigenous people is linked to the land.” Politicians from opposition parties, including former President Alejandro Toledo, the country’s first indigenous president, have blasted the Garcia administration’s handling of the crisis. However, legislators from the party of former President Alberto Fujimori and other conservative blocks have supported Garcia’s APRA party in resisting AIDESEP’s call to repeal the decrees. After seven legislators from the Peruvian Nationalist Party staged a protest last week on the floor of Congress to demand that the decrees be repealed, rather than suspended, legislators from the majority parties voted to suspend them from the Congress for 120 days. Another political casualty of the crisis was Minister Carmen Vildoso, who resigned as head of the Ministry of Women and Social Development, which oversees indigenous affairs, to protest Garcia’s handling of the conflict. In an interview published in the daily “La Republica,” Vildoso said that the administration’s approach to the protesters showed “a lack of any comprehension of the way the Amazonian people think and see the world.” ———————- Peru’s premier quits after protests end in bloodshed Peru’s Prime Minister Yehude Simon announces his surprise resignation. {does he want to become President?} {The Prime Minister of Peru has announced he will resign, following weeks of turmoil in which scores of police and protesters have been killed in clashes over threats to the land rights of Amazon Indians. Yehude Simon promised to leave office as soon as he can persuade the country’s parliament to repeal two controversial new laws that would open vast swaths of the homeland of indigenous tribes to exploitation by foreign-owned mining and energy companies. In a surprise announcement, made during an interview with Lima’s RPP radio, Mr Simon said he will formally resign from President Alan Garcia’s government “in the coming weeks, as soon as all is calm”. Related articles Earlier this month, 2,000 Aguaruna and Wampi Indians, many carrying spears and machetes, clashed with heavily-armed police who tried to clear them from a blockaded road near the rural town of Bagua Grande, 870 miles north of the capital. Although the official death toll is just 34, hundreds of protesters are still missing. It has been described as “the Amazon’s Tiananmen” and appears to have been sparked when police fired tear gas and automatic weapons into a crowd of aggressive protesters. Following nationwide outrage, and a one-day general strike, a curfew around the surrounding area was lifted on Monday. As a result, international agencies are now starting to arrive on the scene to investigate reports that bodies may have been burned and buried in mass graves. Mr Simon, a former left-wing activist who was made Prime Minister in October, becomes the second cabinet member, after the populist minister Carmen Vildoso, to resign over the incident. “This is a significant step. Yehude Simon is often seen as a potential presidential candidate” said Jonathan Mazower, an expert on Peruvian affairs for the London-based pressure group Survival International. “It’s doubtful, though, that in itself it will be enough to mollify the indigenous movement, which is extremely angry at what has happened, and absolutely determined not to let the protesters’ deaths be in vain.” Meanwhile Alberto Pizango, the leader of the country’s Amazon Indians remains at the Nicaraguan embassy in Lima, where he fled after being charged with “sedition, conspiracy and rebellion”. Though recently granted political asylum in the country, he has yet to be granted safe passage out of Peru. Mr Simon had earlier announced, during a visit to Amazon tribal chiefs, that a bill was to be submitted to parliament lifting the temporary suspension of laws barring the logging of trees in the rainforest. He said that other unpopular decrees could also be repealed. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on June 12th, 2009 Oil and Indians Don’t Mix. {actually oil and all indigenous people that love their land and live on their land – this is no match up} There’s an easy way to find oil. Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them. If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo them away. Shooing methods include: bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales. But be aware. Lately, the natives are shooing back. Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them. This followed the government’s murder of more than a dozen rain forest residents, who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling. So – Indians in Yurimaguas, Peru, have blocked the road in an anti-government protest – power to them. But can they win? Again and again, I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud writes Greg Plast. Here are a few pit stops on the oily trail of tears: In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly’s oil tank in Oklahoma. Here’s the weird part. Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian. Stanlee Ann wasn’t Koch’s only victim. According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude. Koch, according to the tape, would “giggle” with joy over the records of the theft. Koch’s own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting, which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the native lands. The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators. Then there are the Chugach natives of Alaska. The Port of Valdez, Alaska, is arguably one of the most valuable pieces of real estate on earth, the only earthquake-safe, ice-free port in Alaska that could load oil from the giant North Slope field. In 1969, Exxon and British Petroleum companies took the land from the Chugach and paid them one dollar. I kid you not. Wally Hickel, the former governor of Alaska, dismissed my suggestion that the Chugach deserved a bit more respect (and cash) for their property. “Land ownership comes in two ways, Mr. Palast.” explained the governor and pipeline magnate, “Purchase or conquest. The fact that your granddaddy chased a caribou across the land doesn’t make it yours.” The Chugach had lived there for 3,000 years. No oil company would dream of digging on the Bush family properties in Midland, Texas, without paying a royalty. Or drilling near Malibu without the latest in environmental protections. But when natives are on top of Exxon’s or BP’s glory hole, suddenly, the great defenders of private property rights turn quite Bolshevik: Lands can be seized for The Public’s Need for Oil. Some natives are “re-located” through legal flim-flam, some at gunpoint. The less lucky are left to wallow, literally, in the gunk left by the drilling process. Chief Emergildo Criollo told me how oil company executives helicoptered into his remote village and, speaking in Spanish – which the Cofan didn’t understand – “purchased” drilling rights with trinkets and cheese. The natives had never seen cheese. (“The cheese smelled funny, so we threw it in the jungle.”) After drilling began, Criollo’s son went swimming in his usual watering hole, came up vomiting blood and died. I asked Chevron about the wave of poisonings and deaths. According to an independent report, 1,401 deaths, mostly of children, mostly from cancers, can be traced to Chevron’s toxic dumping. Chevron’s lawyer told me, “And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States? … They have to prove that it is our crude,” which, he noted with glee, “is absolutely impossible.”
Congratulations, Shell. $15 million: For a license to kill and drill, that’s a quite a bargain. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on April 30th, 2009 Latin America seems to have its own way of seeing things. President Obama may have a hard time making up for the 8 years of neglect during the Cheney/Bush Administration.
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Iran’s President to Visit Brazil, Venezuela
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran visits Brazil on May 5 and 6 and will likely stop in Venezuela as well. “Many Latin America watchers expect the Brazil visit to represent the first significant advancement of ties between the two countries in the areas of commerce and energy cooperation,” writes Samuel Logan for ISN Security Watch in an analysis of Tehran’s growing ties with Latin America.
The Two Sides of Brazil’s New Energy Policy
IPS News reports on an energy plan unveiled by Brazil’s Environment Minister Carlos Minc at a G8 meeting in Italy. The plan involves greater emphasis on renewable sources (such as hydroelectric power) while pursing expanded production of fossil fuels. The proposal reflects a Summit of the Americas plan for countries in the Western Hemisphere to move toward generating half their energy from renewable sources by 2050.
Peru, Brazil Consider Using Real for Bilateral Trade
Peruvian President Alan GarcÃa visited his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the two leaders announced their intentions to adopt Brazil’s real as the payment currency for bilateral trade, bypassing the dollar as “an intermediate currency.” During their meeting in Rio they also inaugurated a stretch of a road that will eventually connect Brazil’s Amazon region with Peruvian ports in the Pacific Ocean.
Venezuela-Peru Relations Strained
Caracas recalled its ambassador to Peru on Tuesday after Lima granted political asylum to the former Governor of the Venezuelan state of Zulia Manuel Rosales. Rosales faces corruption charges in Venezuela but he claims that he is victim of “political lynching” because of his opposition to the government of President Hugo Chávez and that attaining a fair trial in Venezuela is impossible. Venezuelan authorities claim that Peru’s decision violates international law and demanded Rosales’ arrest and return. Peruvian Foreign Minister José Antonio GarcÃa Belaúnde said that Rosales’ political asylum was based on “humanitarian” considerations.
China, Peru Sign Free Trade Agreement
Peruvian Vice President Luis Giamprieti traveled to Beijing to co-sign a bilateral free-trade pact. Trade between the two countries reached $7.5 billion in 2008, reports China Daily. The agreement with Peru is Beijing’s second in Latin America after Chile and will remove tariffs from 90 percent of goods.
COA’s report Building the Hemispheric Growth Agenda: A New Framework for Policy spelled out proposals for energy partnerships in the Americas.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on March 9th, 2009 The Moderator was Christopher Sabatini, Editor-in-Chief of Americas Quarterly, and his panel included Evan Hansen of Wired.com, Matt Keller of “One Laptop per Child, Tarkan Maner, of private sector Wyse Technologies, and Eduardo Saravia of Telefonica International USA. The question was: What does the IT Revolution mean for Latin America and the talk was of public-private coalition building. Hansen spoke of broadband that allows direct provider – consumer relations. With his laptop the consumer can go directly to networks without a provider. Up to now it was all a provider world. The idea is to have a National Wifi program. Maner pointed out that it is important it be for profit. In India – the gov’t connects rural areas via the internet. Mat Keller showed us his small computer that costs $180, an is ntended for the children in poor countries. You can buy one here by donating one to a developing country child! The child ends up teaching the parents how to use technology and they get this way the information to change their world. The project is helped by the UN. Saravia said that Telefonica is the largest investor in LA. More then the oil sector. Telefonica works in 25 countries of which 15 are in LA. The head corporate office is in Uruguay. 75% of the phone company is now wireless – everything based on a single line – a cable – he called wireless. The questions were mainly addressed to Mr. Keller. There was a lot of “leapfroging” notion.
Please see the technical website www.laptop.org – this is a tool of a real revolution – the uplifting of the underdeveloped world in cases the people are blessed with a moe or less benevolent government. ONE LAPTOP – PER CHILD The headquarters are at 1 Cambridge Center, 10th floor, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 02142 USA. Matt Keller himself is Director of Europe, Middle East & Africa of that effort. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on February 3rd, 2009 ¿Cambio? – “CHANGE?” – Latin America in the Era of Obama ― An Early Reading on the Administration: Obama now must address a hemisphere that has developed a substantially different profile than existed eight years before when Bush first assumed office. A highly regarded would-be superpower, an impressive collection of left-leaning governments, a concerted attempt at regional integration, and the formation of an entire array of new institutions have emerged in Latin America since Washington’s near abandonment of the region in favor of the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. Moreover, an intensifying security threat associated with drug trafficking and the demands of other, more clamorous issues have muscled their way to the forefront of the area’s concerns. If he is to revive any significant U.S. silhouette in the Latin American region, Obama must live up to his oft-repeated but as yet untested campaign rhetoric calling for ‘change.’ Each of the agenda items which his presidency is facing in the region can be addressed with reasonable ease if the Obama administration’s supposed pragmatism prevails over the status quo policies which were a feature of both Clinton’s and Bush’s approach to the region. What is needed is a sense of respect for all of the hemisphere’s players rather than ideological Sturm und Drang or the assumption that augmented trade will provide a universal elixir. War on drugs Early in 2009 the violent trend set in motion during the two previous years has shown no sign of slackening. Officials on both sides of the border only now have begun to give this issue the attention it deserves. Leaders from across the hemisphere have met on a number of occasions to initiate intelligence-sharing programs as well as attempt to jump start cooperative training, tracking and extradition procedures. Recently, President Calderón met with Guatemalan President Colom, Panamanian President Torrijos and Colombian President Uribe in Panama where the leaders underlined the indisputable importance of a coordinated response. Colombia remains the world’s leading cocaine producer despite the U.S.-backed multi-billion dollar anti-narcotics campaign, Plan Colombia. Meanwhile, Guatemala and Panama serve as major hubs in the smuggling chain that leads to the U.S. The Tactics of a Drug Strategy: Colombia and Mexico In an event that may have been more ceremonial that substantive, Mexico’s Calderón was the first foreign leader to meet with President Obama. The Mexican leader’s main mission in Washington, besides pushing for immigration reform, was the deadly threat of narcotrafficking and the perils posed to both countries. A harried Calderón strongly made the case for added U.S. cooperation in the anti-drug struggle, when he urged that “the more secure Mexico finds itself, the more secure [the] U.S. will be.” Obama certainly seems to understand the importance this threat represents for U.S.-Mexican security concerns. If this is so, it should be one of the Obama’s administration’s greatest priorities to address the responsibility of his country’s stake in the violence that Mexico is currently facing largely alone. Assisting the Mexican government with military aid and intelligence will have little effect if the DTOs continue to arm themselves with US-secured weaponry from cross-border sources. Obama and Calderon both understand the need to collaborate on this issue, which carries dire consequences, but a traditional approach, which is the one likely to take place here, will not do the job. Just like Plan Colombia is having only a very limited impact on the drug trade that originates from Colombia, the recently started Merida Initiative is on track to suffer a similar fate. The importance of acknowledging the price that the war on drugs has cost the region, which has been fueled by high levels of US consumption and eager DTOs doing the supplying, must be of more than cosmetic note to the Obama administration. Trade Whereas Bush resorted to negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with countries aligned with U.S. interests, Obama would be well advised to remove the blinkers of a specific model of free trade and attempt to engage with Latin America on terms more acceptable to the region as a whole. The newly emerging regional organisations have variously emphasised degrees of political integration and social considerations, like funding poor countries’ development programmes in order to temper the unadulterated free trade which both the Bush and Clinton White Houses envisaged. There is certainly a good deal of reason for Obama to address the issue of the growing isolation of the U.S. from the hemisphere’s main regional bodies. Those that exist form a patchwork meant to deal with specific issues concerned with distinct development models. No single model yet holds a monopoly on the region’s attention. However, any Latin American country keen to assert itself on the world stage as a political entity is now unlikely to submit to trade terms exclusively dictated by the United States. Obama must come to realise this in a way which Bush never did. Brazil Statements that Lula has made since Obama’s inauguration illustrate that his enthusiasm for the new U.S. president certainly remains undiminished, but it is also tempered by the realistic expectations he has for him. Brazil’s strong voice as South America’s regional hegemon has echoed the expectations that the area has of Obama; asking for mutual respect as the most important guidepost. “Obama should transform that gesture of the U.S. people into a gesture for Latin America … respecting our sovereignty and an equitable coexistence,” explained Lula, particularly regarding leftist countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. Nevertheless, after speaking on January 26 over the telephone, the two men spoke highly of the chances of cooperation, particularly on the issue of biofuels, with Lula telling Obama: “Your election transcends the United States.” Given the current positive standing of Brazil in Latin America, good relations between Washington and Brasilia are vital for the existence of solid U.S. links with the region as a whole. What was once exclusively the U.S.’ backyard is now one which Obama must learn to share with Lula, and later, others. Indeed, Obama may be well advised to invite Brazil to play a more important role on the world stage by supporting its long-held ambition to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and other symbols of tenure in the winner’s circle. Cuba Guantánamo and Cuba Unfortunately, even though significant progress may be in the making regarding U.S.-Cuban relations, Obama has resorted to Cold War-era rhetoric by using the 50 year-old embargo as leverage to promote democratic change. President Lula of Brazil advised Obama to abolish the inflexible blockade as it lacks “any scientific or political explanation.” If Obama were to cease the outdated strategic stalemate with Cuba that has locked U.S. bilateral policy toward the island in an obsolete time capsule, it would help herald a new dawn for U.S.-Latin American relations as well as improving badly frayed hemispheric ties. Chávez: Lightning Rod & Yolk Building New Links The new Obama administration has issued mixed reactions to this presence of foreign powers in the U.S.’ traditional sphere of influence. Speaking on January 27, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates, one of the few members of the Bush administration to retain his post under President Obama, said: “I’m more concerned about Iranian meddling in the region than I am the Russians.” Gates expressed concern at the “frankly subversive activity that the Iranians are carrying on in a number of places in Latin America,” but made it clear he doesn’t see Russian involvement, not even their recent naval maneuvers with Venezuela, as a threat, a view that Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere Tom Shannon has previously voiced. Obama must not place unquestioning faith in Gates’ recent comments about Iranian influence in Latin America, which have demonstrated that his roots lie firmly in the Bush administration. The White House under Obama already has begun drafting a letter, in a conciliatory gesture, to the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Gates’ view on Iran’s links with Chávez in particular seems not to tally with Obama’s readiness for a de-marche. Instead of firing hostile rhetorical shots, Obama would be prudent to continue on his diplomatic path and remember that Iran’s capabilities and development abilities in the Western hemisphere are limited (particularly now due to their straitened economy); certainly in military terms. Today Tehran poses a far lesser threat to the U.S. than Moscow. A Mixed Record on Bilateral Trade Many of these countries have experienced frosty relations with the U.S. during Bush’s eight years in power. Both Venezuela and Bolivia expelled their U.S. ambassadors in September 2008, and Chávez was famously the subject of a coup in 2002 to which the CIA was allegedly linked. Evo Morales demanded the removal of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) office from Bolivia in November 2008, and Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa elected in October 2007 not to renew the U.S.’ lease on the Manta airbase in the country, forcing U.S. military personnel to leave the area when it expires this year. The Obama administration’s approach again has been mixed in regard to these countries. State Department spokesman Robert Wood said after the January 25 constitutional referendum in Bolivia: “I don ´t think the results are final at this point, but we look forward to working with the Bolivian government in ways we can to further democracy and, you know, prosperity in the hemisphere,” a comment which drew a warm response from Evo Morales. “If that’s the message I feel it’s a message that is going to be respectful of the decisions of the Bolivian government, because before, with the government of Bush, we had many problems,” he told Mercopress, and Bolivia’s foreign minister David Choquehuanca has subsequently hinted that the countries’ respective ambassadors could soon be reestablished. With Venezuela, on the other hand, things are far muddier. Both Obama’s cabinet and Chávez have exchanged gestures alternating between confrontational and accommodating in recent weeks. In their initial exchanges of rhetorical salvos, Chávez welcomed Obama’s election as a historic occasion that could potentially lead to an amiable relationship. But while Obama at first may have been demonstrating a new generosity of spirit when it came to unconditional negotiations with Venezuela and Iran – an approach which drew attacks against him from then rival primary candidate Hillary Clinton – he too began to exchange barbs with Washington’s traditional pariahs, attacking Chávez for his alleged links to Colombia’s FARC in the week prior to his inauguration. “Chávez has been a force that has interrupted progress in the region,” Obama said, which prompted the Venezuelan to retort: “hopefully I am wrong, but I think Obama will be the same harmful influence as Bush.” Since Obama’s inauguration, Washington’s approach towards Venezuela has become even less clear. James Steinberg, the new U.S. Deputy Secretary of State said on January 23: “Our friends and partners in Latin America are looking to the United States to provide strong and sustained leadership in the region, as a counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region.” However, on the same day, Chávez appeared to soften his approach, saying of the new president: “He is a man with good intentions; he has immediately eliminated Guantanamo prison, and that should be applauded … I am very happy and the world is happy that this young president has arrived … [we] welcome the new government and we are filled with hope.” What is alarming when looking upon the whole exchange are the combative words of James Steinberg, who, as Deputy Secretary of State could play a substantial role in formulating a new Latin America policy, despite his professional history not revealing an indication of a weighty background in U.S.-Latin American relations. As of now, both President Obama and President Chávez appear to be carelessly lobbing condemnations at each other that may come back to bedevil prospects for them to engage in useful talks. Obama may be too hastily dispensing brimstone on Venezuela, a subject in which he is poorly versed, knowing well that Chávez’s sclerotic nature might win him a thunderous response at home while simultaneously alienating him from Washington. Equally, Chávez is now using a campaign rhetoric that has the dangerous potential of becoming a fixed public position. OAS secretary general José Miguel Insulza has expressed the conviction that Caracas should take the vagueness of Obama’s statements with a grain of salt; advice that both sides of this diplomatic spat might want to heed. There is no need or desire for Obama to reassert U.S. hegemony in Latin America – indeed, the U.S., given the new display of regional standing on the part of Brazil as much as the significant presence of Chávez, almost certainly lacks the ability to do so. Obama must come to recognise that the newly established presence of such non-traditional Latin American players as Iran, China and Russia has come about primarily as a reaction to the U.S.’ post-9/11 neglect of the hemisphere. If he is to halt the growing shadow cast by these countries, and act to secure the fuel and other vital resources and commodities which Washington traditionally has found in Latin America, he must begin to engage constructively with the region at a brisk gait rather than weighing in with Bush-style caudillismo. Obama’s Cabinet The position of Commerce Secretary in Obama’s cabinet is on the verge of being filled by Senator Judd Gregg, after the January 4, 2009 withdrawal of Bill Richardson, who is under investigation by the FBI and a federal grand jury for alleged campaign finance irregularities. Richardson, despite being a staunch advocate of free trade, particularly NAFTA himself, would have brought to the administration a wealth of knowledge and experience on Latin American issues. As COHA noted in its original response to his appointment in December, “Richardson is in touch with … hemispheric trends and could be of inestimable value to the new administration, in presenting a new face to the region and a definitive end to the fallow relations that Washington has had towards the region” (‘Is Richardson’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce good news for NAFTA’s revitalization? It certainly is good news for the region’s self-esteem’, December 15 2008). *** However, the signals that the Obama administration has sent during its few weeks in office have not been enough to evaluate either its innovative nature or its willingness to break with the past; it has not been seated long enough to establish whether it is prepared to embrace Latin America in all of its variegated forms. Since January 20, the administration has issued a series of remarks, both promising and troublesome. The statements made by Steinberg and Gates demonstrate that the old order’s dogma continues to permeate Washington, whereas the approach to date of Clinton, Wood and Shannon, as well as Obama himself, hints that a significant shift could be in the offing when it comes to hemispheric relations. Provided the more progressive wing of the administration prevails, there may still be hope for change in Washington’s stance on Latin America. This analysis was prepared by Research Associates Tomás Ayuso & Guy Hursthouse Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on January 28th, 2009 WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 28, 2009 World Social Forum: SOS from the Amazon BELEM, Brazil, Jan 27 (IPS) – A human banner made up of more than 1,000 people, seen and photographed from the air, sent the message “SOS Amazon” to the world, in the first action taken by indigenous people hours before the opening in northern Brazil on Tuesday of the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF). The mass message reflects “our concern about global warming, whose impact we will be the first to feel, although we, the peoples of the Amazon, have protected and cared for the forests,” Francisco Avelino Batista, an Apurinan Indian from the Purus river valley in the Brazilian Amazon, told IPS. Indigenous people have participated in the WSF in previous years, but this time a much larger presence was sought. The aim was for 2,000 to take part, but transport costs and financial difficulties prevented many participants from coming from other countries and from remote areas within Brazil itself. In addition to indigenous groups, original peoples at the WSF include Quilombolas (members of communities of Afro-Brazilian descendants of escaped slaves) and other native peoples. The key location chosen for the WSF, and the various global crises that are occurring, have created “a special moment” for original peoples to take a leading role, according to Roberto Espinoza, an adviser to the Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organisations (CAOI). “A crisis of civilisation” is under way, said Espinoza, who described the serious economic, energy and food problems, as well as climate change, as part of the same phenomenon. The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, approved by the United Nations General Assembly, is of paramount importance here, he said. It should not be seen as a “utopian” document; rather, its provisions should be binding, like those of the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples. This time around, the goal would be to mobilise “in defence of Mother Earth and against the commercialisation of life,” added to specific causes championed by each nation, such as the fight against hydroelectric power stations in Brazil that flood vast areas of Amazon rainforest and displace riverbank dwellers, he said. The voices of indigenous people are bound to have a greater impact on environmental matters when “the risk of catastrophic climate change in the near future and disputes over natural resources are threatening the survival not only of indigenous peoples, but of humanity itself,” Espinoza said. Launching a campaign led by the peoples of the Amazon, who “want a society that values them and understands the value that the land has for them,” is a proposal for discussion at the WSF, according to Miquelina Machado, a COIAB leader belonging to the Tukano ethnic group.
“The hydroelectric dams flood the land and destroy biodiversity,” she said, while lamenting the fact that attempts to block the building of highways, that cause immense deforestation, have been frustrated in the courts, “which have more power.” The presence at the WSF of presidents of Amazon region countries like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, as well as Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, should increase the impact of the event, hopefully benefiting the peoples of the Amazon, Machado concluded. Furthermore, “we are the first to suffer the effects” of climate change. Rich people can cool themselves down with air conditioners and buy food in supermarkets, but “we depend on the fish in the river and the animals in the forest, so we are concerned about the future that belongs to everyone,” added Batista. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 25th, 2008 The 21 members of the APEC Summit agreed, with President G.W. Bush present, among other things, that: On climate change, energy security and clean development, the leaders recognize that climate change must be addressed in a comprehensive manner, through international cooperation under the UNFCCC, and that poverty is linked to climate-vulnerability. They indicate their support to long term cooperation “now, up to and beyond 2012″ to address climate change under the UNFCCC, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and welcome the decisions adopted at the Bali Climate Conference in December 2007, as well as the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Network for sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet). The Declaration is to be found on the link at the end of the posting. Now it will be for the 44th US President – Barack Obama – to help put meet on the suggested bones.
APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting Adopts Declaration Committing to Combat Climate Change
23 November 2008: The sixteenth Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum economic leaders’ meeting was organized under the theme “A New Commitment to Asia-Pacific Development,” and convened in Lima, Peru, from 22-23 November 2008. The meeting concluded with the adoption of a declaration in which the economic leaders commit to enhance their cooperation to improve risk reduction and fight climate change. On disaster risk reduction, preparedness and management, the leaders agree on the need for: greater international cooperation and coordination in this area with the private sector, international organizations and non-governmental organizations; and greater focus on disaster risk reduction, emergency preparedness and building domestic disaster management capabilities. On climate change, energy security and clean development, the leaders recognize that climate change must be addressed in a comprehensive manner, through international cooperation under the UNFCCC, and that poverty is linked to climate-vulnerability. They indicate their support to long term cooperation “now, up to and beyond 2012″ to address climate change under the UNFCCC, in accordance with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and welcome the decisions adopted at the Bali Climate Conference in December 2007, as well as the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Network for sustainable Forest Management and Rehabilitation (APFNet). In the declaration, the economic leaders also express their support to, inter alia, cooperation and capacity building for climate change mitigation and adaptation, including actions that promote the development and deployment of clean technologies. The leaders further commit to: concerted action under the UN to reach “an equitable and effective post-2012 international climate change arrangement” in Copenhagen in December 2009; and promote open energy markets and free energy trade and investment in order to develop renewable sources of energy and disseminate low emission energy technologies. [The Declaration] ——————————– Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008 EDITORIAL, The Japan Times online. Substance, however, was lacking. For the most part, they merely backed the decisions of the Group of 20, a similar group of nations — whose membership overlaps substantially with that of APEC — that met recently in Washington and outlined a real response to the crisis. That raises a fundamental question: Should we spend our time and money on an APEC cheerleader? Spanning both sides of the Pacific Ocean with members that include some of the world’s richest nations and some of the poorest, as well as some of the largest and smallest economies on the globe, finding APEC’s lowest common denominator has always risked settling for too little. Members are torn between competing missions: pushing aggressive plans for the region (such as an Asia-Pacific Free Trade Agreement) or promoting low-level capacity building programs. More recently, a new divide has emerged between governments that promote a more security-focused agenda (chief proponent of this view has been U.S. President George W. Bush) and those that want to get back to basics such as trade and economic policy. The result has been a series of high-level meetings that offer boilerplate rhetoric exhorting members to back various initiatives, but little in the way of concerted action. Progress has been made at the working level, but this hardly justifies the photo opportunity at the annual summit. This year’s final declaration identified the usual list of concerns: regional integration, structural reform, the negative impact of growth and development, corruption and building capacity. The security agenda embraced the standard pledges to combat terrorism, increase trade security and better prepare for disasters. Efforts to fight global warming, increase energy security and promote clean development also got their due. This year’s spike in food prices made food security an inevitable element of the final declaration: The leaders pledged to “expand food and agricultural supply in the region” through the use of “market forces to encourage new investment in agricultural technology and production systems.” The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression spurred the leaders to adopt an additional statement. This document supports the Washington Declaration from the G20 meeting that Mr. Bush hosted a few weeks ago, and specifically endorses the Action Plan for the reform of financial markets that they agreed on. Consistent with that position, the statement embraces the idea that “the principles of free trade and investment rules and open trade will continue to guide global growth, job creation and poverty reduction.” The leaders promise to refrain from any protectionist measures for the next 12 months. Keeping that promise will be tough: One government’s protectionism is another country’s effort to stave off real hardship. The leaders called for more APEC participation in international financial institutions. Japan repeated its promise to provide $100 billion to the International Monetary Fund for emerging economies, a pledge that went unmatched. And, as at all meetings of the last few years, they called on each other to do more to make the Doha Development Round of trade talks a success. That last statement makes plain APEC’s shortcomings. APEC members have the capacity to push a Doha deal; among them are governments that have blocked agreement. The gap between their rhetoric in APEC and their actions at trade talks raises questions about sincerity and commitment. Sending trade ministers back to Geneva next month for another round of talks looks like the triumph of hope over experience: It is hard to believe that negotiators are prepared to make thus far impossible political compromises when economic circumstances are more dire and the costs of adjustment even harder to absorb. APEC has its uses. Building capacity at the government level, promoting the dissemination of best practices for both the public and private sectors, and creating regional networks that will develop constituencies for free and fair trade are invaluable contributions and essential to the Asia-Pacific region’s march toward prosperity. But the larger message from the most recent meeting, especially when contrasted with that of the G20, is that APEC has not shown that it can inspire or lead its members. The failure to acknowledge that fact, or to remedy it, risks creating expectations that APEC cannot meet. To maximize its effectiveness, APEC should focus on what it does best — trade and economic policy. If leaders are not prepared to put together action plans that require real action — and implement them — then maybe they should spend their time elsewhere. It is not clear that the Asia-Pacific region needs a high-level meeting of cheerleaders. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 24th, 2008 At APEC Summit, Anticipating Obama. Washington Post – November 24, 2008.
George W. Bush was the U.S. president at an economic summit here this weekend, but many foreign leaders were focused on President-elect Barack Obama instead. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper cautioned Obama against plans to rework the North American Free Trade Agreement, saying it would worsen a global financial crisis. Chinese President Hu Jintao said he hopes Obama will recognize the importance of U.S.-China ties while treading carefully on the thorny issue of Taiwan. And Mexican President Felipe Calderón, in an impassioned speech to delegates at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum Saturday, warned Obama that any tightening of trade restrictions would send a flood of illegal immigrants into the United States. “The next U.S. administration must assume leadership in a very firm manner — not just for Americans but for the whole world,” Calderón said. The stern words for Obama came during an annual APEC gathering dominated by fears over the ongoing financial crisis and underscored the difficult balance that Obama must strike if he intends to forge a new economic path for the United States. Bush returned to Washington from Peru on Sunday after securing an agreement from the 21-member group to keep trade barriers low along the Pacific Rim as leaders fashion responses to the global financial storm. The APEC statement closely mirrors a pledge signed in Washington on Nov. 15 by leaders from the Group of 20 economic powers, nine of which were represented in Lima. The leaders said Sunday that they could overcome the financial crisis, which has the world on the edge of recession, within 18 months. But they provided few details on how they plan to do that. Many delegates to the APEC summit said there was little point in considering additional actions until Obama gets involved. The president-elect did not send any representatives to APEC, although transition officials said Obama’s team was briefed by the Bush administration before the summit. “There’s one president at a time, and we intend to respect that,” said Brooke Anderson, an Obama spokeswoman. Obama unveiled plans Saturday to create or preserve 2.5 million jobs in the United States, and is expected to name two experienced policymakers, Timothy F. Geithner and Lawrence H. Summers, to lead his efforts to address the economic crisis. Yet many of the leaders who met in Peru were clearly uneasy with Obama’s campaign pledge to reform NAFTA and his opposition to several pending free-trade agreements. As a senator, Obama supported an earlier trade pact with Peru. The nations along the Pacific Rim include powerhouses such as China, Japan and South Korea, where rapid growth is heavily dependent on open trade with the United States and other Western economies. Many of those countries have stiff tariffs and other limits in place that elicit howls from U.S. manufacturers. Bush himself offered an implicit criticism of Obama’s potential economic policies, railing against congressional opposition to the proposed trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea and warning nations against turning inward in the face of the financial meltdown. He also boasted about his record, including trade pacts with 11 nations, in a speech to business leaders here. “Expanding trade and investment has been one of the highest priorities of my administration,” Bush said. Anderson, the Obama spokeswoman, responded by saying that Obama “believes that the goal of our trade policy must be trade that works for all people in all countries, and he supports trade that spreads the benefits of globalization, instead of steering them to special interests while we shortchange workers at home and abroad.” Obama has suggested that Bush has neglected Latin America during his presidency and has vowed to increase diplomatic and anti-drug-trafficking efforts in the region. The Obama references at the summit were not confined to economics. Dennis Wilder, Bush’s Asian affairs adviser, told reporters that the nations that agreed to push ahead with six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program were fearful of what the next administration might have in store. “I think the very understandable concern of these foreign governments is, ‘Will the new administration do some sort of policy review? Will it try to work with some new ideas?’ ” Wilder said of the nuclear talks. “And the one idea that all of these countries are definitely committed to is that the six-party process is the right format, the right venue. And so I think they want to, if you will, put this in the most attractive place possible so that the next American administration will see its value.” As the APEC leaders looked ahead to Obama, they also bade farewell to Bush. The White House insisted that Bush’s last scheduled overseas trip was not a goodbye tour, but many foreign leaders and Bush himself seemed to disagree. His meetings with foreign leaders, both private and public, were peppered with references to his “forced retirement,” as Bush jokingly referred to it at one point. Peruvian President Alan GarcÃa bounded across a reception room Saturday afternoon to shake hands with the U.S. leader he referred to as “my friend.” Bush reminisced with Hu, the Chinese leader, and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. He also joined other world leaders in donning traditional local clothing, as is the custom at APEC summits. In this case, that meant brown ponchos spun from baby alpaca shearings. Bush even had kind words for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, at a time when the two countries are locked in disputes over Georgia and missile defense, saying that he had always worked to maintain a “cordial relationship” with Moscow’s leaders. “I recognize I’m leaving office in two months,” Bush said during his keynote speech in Peru. But, he added, he would continue to “send a message” during his last two months that “we refuse to accept protectionism in the 21st century.” Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on November 19th, 2008 From The washington Center on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA): Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to Embark on a Highly Revealing Latin American Journey Sure to Give Washington Heartburn - • Russia continues to secure a position as a growing ally of rising-star Brazil • First visit of a Russian leader to Cuba in 8 years; $355 million loan to be extended to Havana • Medvedev will not visit Cold War-era ally Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and snubs Buenos Aires After attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima on November 21-22, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev will embark on a short regional tour, where he will meet the leaders of Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba, for which Moscow is intensely motivated for different reasons. The selection of the countries that the Russian leader will visit is not as surprising as those not included in his itinerary. Nevertheless, each country – even host nation Peru – is to some degree an ally of Russia, and a visit by Medvedev will keep the Russian flag flying high in the region. All countries that will be visited by the Russian leader, with the exception of Peru, are currently experiencing somewhat strained relations with Washington, and are advocates of a less dominant American role in the integration of the Western Hemisphere. Even if no particular agreement is reached with the countries Medvedev is to visit the tour should serve as a reminder to the Bush White House, as well as incoming President Barack Obama, that Russia has not forgotten Latin America, and is now beginning to consider it Moscow’s backyard, just as Washington has regarded the Caucasus as its own fiefdom. The meeting could also result in a new Venezuelan weapons purchase as Medvedev is scheduled to extend the $355 million credit to Havana. Both the U.S. and Russia know that Washington is a wounded regional player and could be surpassed by the Kremlin, unless the former is proposed to constructively engage in a respectful and well-meaning policy to the rest of the hemisphere. The APEC summit follows upon last week’s G-20 meeting, where the major point of discussion was the ongoing world financial crisis. In a telegram sent to Peruvian President Alan Garcia to confirm his attendance, Medvedev wrote that he hoped that the APEC participants “will have a constructive dialogue on the wide range of measures aimed at sustained development of the Asia-Pacific region.” The Russian leader went on to say that “one of the key aspects in this respect is the search for best solutions for such urgent problems as the prices for food and energy resources, the climate change.” Apart from his APEC meeting commitments, Medvedev will look forward to personal meetings with fellow leaders in attendance. For example, Kyodo reported that a bilateral meeting will take place between Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and Medvedev during the summit. RIA Novosti has mentioned that Medvedev will also meet with Chinese President Hu Jintao. The Kremlin leader may also decide to indicate that Moscow is soliciting Russian membership in the World Trade Organization as well as push for greater Russian integration into the APEC economic region. This could be interpreted as part of a continuing initiative in which Moscow will invite the economies of Latin America and the Pacific toward closer ties with Russia as a possible major trading partner. According to a report by RIA Novosti, trade between Russia and Latin America has exhibited an annual growth rate of 25-30% over the past few years, and is expected to hit a record of $15 billion in 2008. *** Agreements between both countries range from commerce to education, military, and space cooperation. Nevertheless, Russia is seeking greater influence in Brazil along with a number of other countries such as France, China, South Africa, as well as India. *** Venezuela: Petrodollars-r-Us The Russian visit comes on the heels of the visit of two Russian Tu-16 medium-range bombers to Venezuela this past summer. The Russians have also dispatched elements of its fleet led by the guided-missile cruiser Peter the Great to do a port visit as well as carry out war games with their Venezuelan counterparts in the Caribbean. This has raised some Cold War-era alarms in Washington, as it is the first time since the end of the Cold War that the Russian military enters the Western Hemisphere. In mid-October, the Russian news agency Kommersant mentioned that Russian and Venezuelan officials were discussing the Venezuelan purchase of Russian BMP-3 armored vehicles; Medvedev and Chavez are expected to sign the contract during the Russian leader’s upcoming visit. In addition Russia is building a Kalishnikov-assault rifle factory on Venezuelan soil, as well a complimentary one nearby to manufacture the rifles’ ammunition. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that “the weaponry we supply [to Latin America] is not offensive […] these are purely defensive means in their technical specifications.” Lavrov is scheduled to meet today with conservative Colombian president Alvaro Uribe and foreign minister Jaime Bermudez to discuss possible Russian investment in Colombia. In an attempt to offset Venezuela’s ties to Russia, Colombia has increased its high-level contacts with Moscow this past year. Colombian vice president Francisco Santos traveled to Russia in June to attend the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, and defense minister Juan Manuel Santos attended an Interpol summit held in Moscow in October. Though Colombia is not an APEC member, Uribe’s government has displayed an increasing interest in generating closer economic links with Russia, fearing that it is courting political isolation by having the outgoing Bush administration being one of its few close friends. Cuba: The Forgotten Ally The meeting will bring together Medvedev and Fidel’s brother, Raul Castro. It is unclear what the delegations will discuss, though they will probably focus on ways to promote greater cooperation. Early in November, Moscow approved a state loan to Cuba for $355 million. The loan’s provisions required that it had to be used to purchase Russian goods and services. In an interview with COHA, Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. interests section in Havana and the director of the Cuba Program at the Center for International Policy, explained “I don’t foresee anything major coming out of this meeting, Russia’s interest seems to be centered around Venezuela these days.” Smith went on to mention that “a Russian military delegation visited Havana some months ago, and there was speculation about growing military cooperation between both countries but nothing came out of it.” The former U.S. diplomat mentioned that when military exercises between Russia and Venezuela take place Cuba is invited to participate, “that would be extremely interesting.” Indeed, such a scenario may add more fuel to the fire of Bush administration officials who promoted the restoration of the Fourth Fleet which had been dismantled in 1950, for the purpose of patrolling Latin American waters when it came to providing medical and humanitarian services, as well as project U.S. power in the Western Hemisphere. *** The Other Side of the Coin: Likewise Nicaragua, under the leadership of Daniel Ortega, Moscow’s ally during the Cold War, is being overlooked. Ortega could use some international support, particularly after the controversial results of recent municipal elections, in which the ruling Sandinista party was judged the winner in a close vote. The elections were held almost without international observers and there have been widespread accusations of electoral fraud. The civic group Ethics and Transparency said it had recorded irregularities in 32 percent of the polling places it monitored. An AP report quotes State Department deputy spokesman Robert Wood as saying “unfortunately, the [Nicaraguan] Supreme Electoral Council’s decision to not accredit credible domestic and international election observers has made it difficult to [...] properly assess the outcome of the elections.” Furthermore, Washington is not amused as Nicaragua has been, so far, the only country (besides Russia) to recognize the independence of Georgia’s breakaway republics, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This past summer, Russia made a military incursion into Georgia and subsequently, to Washington’s anger, recognized both breakaway regions as independent states. Nevertheless, a RIA Novosti article briefly mentions that the leaders of both of the aforementioned countries, Argentina’s Cristina de Kirchner and Nicaragua’s Ortega, as well as Uruguay’s Tabare Vazquez, are expected to visit Moscow in the coming months. One should note that Peru itself would not have been on Medvedev’s agenda if it had not been the organizer of the APEC 2008 summit. Lima and Moscow maintained good defense relations during the Soviet era, including major purchases of Soviet warplanes and tanks during that period. In mid-October, Mercopress published a report that Chile is continuing with its aggressive acquisition policy by purchasing F-16 warplanes from Holland, as well as from the U.S. The report explains that “when all [plans] are delivered Chile’s Air Force will have 44 F16, probably the strongest and most modern in the continent [with the probable exception of Venezuela].” When one contemplates Chilean modernization initiatives, its historically antagonistic relations with Peru come to mind. Peru’s largely hardware is mostly Russian or Soviet-made, including Sukhoi and MiG warplanes, as well as Mi-type helicopters. President Garcia may attempt to arrange a personal meeting with Medvedev to discuss bilateral defense issues and the possible agreements for upgrades of Russian military equipment. Interviewed by COHA, a senior Peruvian army official explained that “Russia may not see Peru as a critical ally, but the Peruvian military certainly regards Russian military equipment as critical to its national defense [...] the Garcia administration must safeguard this strategic relationship.” *** The incoming Obama administration soon will have to begin assessing its ties to various Latin American nations and the nature of its ties with the region. Policy decisions such as the ongoing and largely ineffective Cuban embargo, and a confrontational stance toward Venezuela (illustrated by the re-establishment of the Fourth Fleet) are likely to be revisited by the new administration and could be rejected. Medvedev’s present round of calls, as well as a growing presence by extra-hemispheric actors like the European Union, China, India and Iran, demonstrate that the region is open to new relationships outside of the hemisphere and is getting noticed. This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Fellow Alex Sánchez Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on October 22nd, 2008 U.S. agrees to debt-for-nature swap to preserve Peru rainforests. In a bid to preserve some of Peru’s biologically diverse rainforests, the United States agreed this week to a $25 million debt-for-nature swap with the country, Peru’s second since 2002. Over the next seven years, in exchange for erasing millions of their debt, Peru will fund local non-governmental organizations dedicated to protecting tropical rain forests of the southwestern Amazon Basin and dry forests of the central Andes. “This agreement will build on the success of previous U.S. government debt swaps with Peru and will further the cause of environmental conservation in a country with one of the highest levels of biodiversity on the planet,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Other debt-for-nature agreements have already been brokered with Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Panama, Paraguay, and the Philippines.
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 16th, 2008 The original September 15th posting: Bolivia crisis summit for Latin American leaders: guardian.co.uk, Monday September 15 2008 Latin American leaders are to gather in Chile today in an attempt to end a political crisis in Bolivia that has seen more than a dozen people killed. Violent clashes between supporters of Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and his opponents have led to concern among neighbouring countries. Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, who is the temporary president of the 12-member Union of South American Nations, called the emergency summit late last week. The scale of the protests against Morales’s plans to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution and redirect gas revenues has forced the president to declare a state of siege in some opposition-led provinces. Bachelet said: “We can’t remain impassive in the face of a situation that worries us all.” ***
“If the two sides haven’t asked us to meet and we make a decision that neither side will respect, the meeting will end up being useless,” Lula said.
————— IN THE MEANTIME THE US AMBASSADORS WERE EXPELLED FROM VENEZUELA AND BOLIVIA – WILL THIS MOVE EXPAND TO A FEW MORE LA STATES? ————– At least 28 have died in violence. Evo Morales’ government and the opposition accuse each other of arming paramilitaries. SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA — The death toll in last week’s violence in a remote northern province rose to more than two dozen, Bolivia’s government said Sunday, as it held frantic talks with opponents to avert further bloodshed. Sporadic clashes were reported Sunday on roads outside this eastern city, center of opposition to President Evo Morales. Many Bolivians expressed fears that a tense situation could spin out of control if a deal was not reached. *** *** “Better that we take action now, before we have 100 or 1,000 dead,” said Gov. Mario Cossio of Tarija province, designated negotiator for the states opposed to Morales. There was no immediate word on the outcome of the talks in La Paz, the capital. Rifts have been widening for two years, with intermittent outbursts of violence, but so far Bolivia has avoided falling into full-fledged civil conflict. However, many analysts call the current crisis the nation’s most perilous point in decades. “Political, civic and union leaders must know that whatever happens from now on — whether this country becomes a peaceful and harmonious society or a battleground — will be because of their work,” the daily La Razon editorialized Sunday. The government and the opposition called Sunday for an independent investigation into Thursday’s killings in Pando, a sparsely populated province along the Amazonian frontiers with Brazil and Peru. In La Paz, Interior Minister Alfredo Rada said 10 more bodies had been found. That would bring the death toll to at least 26 in Thursday’s confrontation. Two more deaths were reported Friday in Pando, when the army retook control of the airport in Cobija, the provincial capital. The army is now patrolling the province, which is under martial law. Rada labeled Thursday’s killings near the town of Porvenir a genocide organized by Pando Gov. Leopoldo Fernandez, an opponent of Morales. The government has accused the governor and his allies of importing sicarios, or hired killers, from Peru and Brazil to shoot down defenseless peasants allied with the president. Fernandez has denied provoking the violence and blamed the central government for the clash. On Saturday, Morales called the killings a massacre and told a crowd in the central city of Cochabamba that a “fascist, racist coup” was being mounted. The conservative leaders of five of Bolivia’s nine provinces are aligned against Morales and his socialist program of nationalizations, land reform and stiff resistance to what he calls U.S. imperialism. *** Foes of Morales are seeking greater autonomy for their provinces and a bigger share of revenue from gas and oil fields, which are concentrated in the dissident regions. Morales says his rivals want to take away funds that aid the poor and put the cash into plans to break away from Bolivia. The opposition denies separatist or violent motivations. “We want peace, but with dignity,” said Ruben Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz province and a central opposition figure. The president has frequently accused Washington of collaborating with his enemies and last week expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip S. Goldberg for allegedly fomenting rebellion. In his farewell address Sunday, Greenberg called Morales’ charges against him “false and unjustified,” and said his expulsion would have “serious effects in many forms.” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a close Morales ally, tossed out the U.S. envoy in Caracas, saying he acted in solidarity with the Bolivian president. Washington responded by expelling both the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors. The deteriorating scenario has alarmed Latin American leaders, who have expressed support for Morales. Several nations, including neighboring Brazil and Argentina, have offered to help mediate, but Morales has not agreed. Today, South American leaders are to gather in Chile for an emergency session aimed at preventing Bolivia’s slide into civil war. Morales reportedly planned to travel to Santiago. The Bolivian opposition has also asked to attend. The crisis has strong ethnic and regional roots. “Their plan is to topple the Indian,” Morales told the crowd in Cochabamba this weekend. “They may topple the Indian, but they won’t topple the Bolivian people.” patrick.mcdonnell @latimes.com ========== A Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Press Release – September 16th Bolivia: A Profound Breakdown of Communication with Latin America. With UNASUR having just met in Santiago, Chile to discuss the escalating crisis in Bolivia, the stage is set for a huge surge of autonomy for Latin America, owing to a series of newly auto-generated, self-managed and extensive regional initiatives. In an extraordinary shift from a decades-long hegemonic status-quo during which Washington exercised de facto hemispheric supremacy, the U.S. role has dramatically diminished, at times becoming almost irrelevant. In fact, even though U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, is a relatively enlightened figure who at times has stressed a rational dialogue between Venezuela, Bolivia, and Washington, U.S. attention toward the region, when at all focused, has been willful, narrow-minded, and self-absorbed. Once installed in office, the Bush administration found itself distracted from Latin American issues by the Iraq war, giving the region the required space to develop its own consensus on regional developments, regardless of Washington’s ululations. This has heightened the ability of hemispheric leaders to halt or reverse some of the most imprudent U.S. policies that had gained ascendancy starting in the Clinton administration, and which then blossomed under Bush. Nevertheless, despite all signs to the contrary, the Bush administration continues to act as if its fiat still is supreme in Latin America, when, in fact, it has rapidly shrunk. An example of this is the revival of the Fourth Fleet as a Washington policy riposte, and with it the pretense of gunboat diplomacy on the ready, after a half-a-century of the fleet being dismasted, and the use of the “terrorism” factor to reassert an authority that is no longer exercisable. Washington cannot continue to conduct itself as if it had a backyard in which Latin America could be firmly found. The U.S. has been absent from the region for far too long to attempt to roll back the tide of anti-private capital, anti-U.S. sentiment that has swept over much of the region. In its stead, the region yearns for a “third way” and for change. In fact, during this period of unilateral neglect, due to Iraq, the hemispheres started going its own way, coming up with new formulas in its quest to diversify relationships, pluralize its world trade contracts and engage in constructive relations across the board, including forming ties to what Washington, at the time, sees as “rogue” nations. During this period of transition, more left-leaning presidents were being elected president than ever before in the Americas’ history, a raft of regional organizations (which did not include the U.S. as a member) were formed, the region suddenly saw a remarkable rise in its importance on the world stage as its metal and agricultural commodities increased in relevancy and value during the current fuel and food crisis, and new links emerged between Latin America and India, China, Russia, and the EU. *** The Breakdown of Bilateral Relations:
Instead, for a number of months U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg assumed the role of quarterback at meetings with the opposition, discussing strategies with his team. He did this even though the opposition figures had clearly called for extra-constitutional actions against democratically-elected Evo Morales, even his ouster, and in spite of the fact that his widespread support was affirmed in July’s recall elections. (For more information, see COHA Research Associates Chris Sweeney and Jessica Bryant’s article, “Bolivia in Crisis”). It also insisted that he categorically denies La Paz’s accusations of his signaling support behind the opposition, let alone any involvement in secret plots against the central government. Yet, complicating matters in the Andean country is the fact that any number of U.S. ambassadors throughout Latin America –particularly dating back to the inauguration of the present U.S. administration– have a lengthy record of intervention in the domestic affairs of the countries to which they have been accredited. It is no secret that the State Department has had a long history of inappropriate and often covert intervention in Latin American internal affairs, often making use of a Reagan-era institutional facility known as the National Endowment for Democracy. Goldberg’s predecessors, Manuel Rocha and David Greenlee, persistently inserted themselves into Bolivian domestic issues. This scenario often involved U.S. ambassadors on station elsewhere in the region, where they openly threatening the end of remittances, trade benefits, or U.S. development assistance to a given country, if a leftist regime was elected to office –El Salvador and Nicaragua would be some examples of these. They also have pressured conservative political parties in such countries as Bolivia, El Salvador and Nicaragua to unite behind one candidate in order not to split the vote, allowing the otherwise weaker leftist candidate to ship into office. Ultimately, a historical memory was invoked of humiliation, plunder and such transgressions as the Chaco war and a spate of U.S.-backed military Juntas under which the largely aboriginal majority of Bolivians have suffered as a result of self-serving past U.S. policies. Such acts of arrogance and intolerance that Washington recurrently has visited upon the region, served to incite the unbridled passions of a man with the Brobdingnagian temper of Hugo Chávez and even the more self-disciplined Evo Morales. *** Washington Diplomacy or Lack of it: It is clear that the U.S. remains largely oblivious to the multifaceted developments that are taking place in an increasingly self-confident Latin America. Washington would do well to introduce a sense of perspective on Iraq and terrorism, and turn its attention once again to its vital national interests in this hemisphere. These issues go far beyond drugs, terrorism and security concerns. If the U.S. is to play a constructive role there, it must architect a new relationship with the region that can be deemed credible and taken to heart. Its investment must be more than just a Parthian shot aimed at a token act of respect for their sovereignty and must display an earnest concern for the area’s well-being. *** UNASUR’s Debuting Role: *** The near breakdown of relations between Washington and La Paz in the midst of the Bolivia crisis, perfectly exemplifies the disastrous consequences of the inherent intolerance and disrespect that the U.S. has long exhibited towards the region. Despite La Paz and Washington’s ideological differences, Assistant Secretary Shannon, while being a very significant improvement over his two most recent predecessors, Otto Reich and Roger Noriega, might have used this opportunity to more clearly indicate a U.S. commitment to the spirit as well as the letter of democratically-elected governance in the region, and that any form of separatism would be condemn. More vigorous support of Morales and the central government in the face of the reckless and greedy same plan of the pro-autonomy leaders in Bolivia might have provided a compelling reason for the secessionists to preserve order and avoid the violence which, tragically, has already claimed upwards of thirty lives. This analysis was prepared by COHA Director Larry Birns and COHA Research Associate Raylsiyaly Rivero *** COHA Forthcoming Research Puerto Rico: Another Lone Star? Venezuela’s Military in the Hugo Chávez Era A Closer Look at the Violence in Bolivia Raul Castro and the Recent Reforms in Cuba Venezuela: Internal Opposition to Chávez This analysis was prepared by COHA Tuesday, September 16, 2008 | Press release 08.96 The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, founded in 1975, is an independent, non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. It has been described on the Senate floor as being “one of the nation’s most respected bodies of scholars and policy makers.” For more information, please see our web page at www.coha.org; or contact our Washington offices by phone (202) 223-4975, fax (202) 223-4979, or email coha at coha.org. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 11th, 2008 Thirty-five Years Ago, Latin America Experienced Its Own September 11. by: Teo Ballve, Colombian Writer, The Progressive, September 9, 2008. In 1970, Salvador Allende became the democratically elected president of Chile. On Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military, supported by Washington, overthrew Allende and in his place a US-financed 17-year regime of terror took over. Latin America, which experienced its own September 11 thirty-five years ago, is no longer under Washington’s thumb. On Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military, supported by Washington, overthrew the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. It was a day that was burned in the memories of millions of people across the continent. Allende had come to power in 1970 as a democratic socialist, and his victory raised hopes among Latin Americans that peaceful social change was possible. But three years later, when military tanks and fighter jets blasted the presidential palace where Allende had taken refuge, those hopes were dashed. Allende took his own life during the attack, and in his place a U.S.-financed 17-year regime of terror took over. The junta, led by Augusto Pinochet, murdered more than 3,000 people and tortured and detained thousands more. Now, 35 years after Allende’s overthrow, a lot has changed in Latin America. For starters, Chile’s current president (Michelle Bachelet) is not only a woman, but also a member of Allende’s Socialist Party. And Washington, once the unofficial arbiter of the politics and economies of Latin America, has been sidelined, as progressive reformers have claimed victory in an ever-growing number of countries. ***
Today, left-leaning leaders control almost every country of South America. These leaders are by no means a uniform bunch. But they all share the popular mandate of addressing the needs of the most disadvantaged citizens of Latin America, where nearly half the population of 550 million lives in grinding poverty. Fulfilling campaign promises, many of these leaders have defied Washington’s economic and political strictures – first introduced in post-Sept. 11 Chile – in trying to lift millions out of poverty. Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have moved to take a larger share of profits from their nations’ vast oil and gas reserves to reinvest the money in anti-poverty programs. Morales also plans to use windfall gas profits in Bolivia – the poorest country in South America – to strengthen its faltering social security system. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a former union organizer, has similar plans for the profits expected from newly discovered massive oil reserves. *** Despite persistent U.S. meddling, it’s hard to see how Washington could once again so recklessly block the desperately needed reforms now sweeping Latin America. When it has recently tried to impose its will, Latin American governments have fended off Washington by banding together. The region’s new leaders finally are implementing policies that make real improvements in people’s lives. Allende tried to do so, but he was not allowed to see them through to fruition. From his tragedy, new hope has arisen. Teo Ballve is a freelance journalist and editor based in Colombia. He can be reached at pmproj at progressive.org. Permalink |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 31st, 2008
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