Germany to pull out of Ecuador’s Yasuni initiative?
Ecuador plans to leave almost a billion barrels of oil in the ground below the Yasuni National Park, in return for US$3.6 billion or about half of the market value of the oil. It’s been hailed as “The world’s first really green oil deal”.
In 2008, the German Parliament agreed to support the Yasuni initiative. But now Germany’s Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation, Dirk Niebel, says Germany “will not consider payment into the trust fund”.
The Yasuni initiative applies to an area of 175,000 hectares of some of the most biodiverse rainforest on the planet, home to two of the world’s last remaining uncontacted indigenous groups: the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. Others, the Shuar, Waorani, and Kichwa, only recently came into contact with the modern world. Under the initiative, 846 million barrels of oil would be kept permanently underground, avoiding the emission of 407 million metric tonnes of CO2.
In August 2010, the UN Development Programme signed an agreement with the Ecuadorian government. Under the agreement, UNDP would be an independent administrator of the trust fund for the scheme. An analysis of the details of the agreement signed is available in this article on mongabay.com: “A look at Ecuador’s agreement to leave 846 million barrels of oil in the ground”.
The agreement with UNDP was a condition of Germany’s involvement in Yasuni, as was the support of at least one other country. In August 2010, Carlos Larrea, the initiative’s technical adviser, told the Independent that “Spain and Belgium have expressed support, as have a number of other European countries. We’re very optimistic.”
But in a letter dated 14 September 2010, to Ute Koczky, development spokesperson for the Green party, Dirk Niebels writes that there are “key questions” that are either “not satisfactorily answered or are unanswered”. He states that the Yasuni initiative “lacks a consistent rationale, a clear goal structure” and he expresses his concern about the guarantees that the oil will be permanently left underground. And he adds that so far, no other country has agreed to support the initiative.
The letter is available here (pdf file 252 KB, in German). German NGO Rettet den Regenwald has set up an online protest action (in German), here. So far, almost 8,000 people have sent the protest letter.
The Oilwatch International Network has produced a statement to the German Parliament, which is posted below. Spanish and German versions are also available.
OPEN LETTER FROM THE OILWATCH NETWORK TO GERMAN PARLIAMENTARIANS
20 September 2010
Oilwatch is an international network that has closely followed the impacts of oil industry operations, particularly on tropical ecosystems, and has found that these operations are inevitably disastrous for local communities. They contaminate water systems, affect local and global climate conditions, lead to militarization and violence, and subject countries to a model of dependence that is difficult to overcome. In this regard, Ecuador’s Yasuní-ITT proposal is an act of justice in which the international community can and should also play a part.In June 2008, when the German parliament passed a resolution to back the Yasuní-ITT initiative, it opened up the possibility that for the first time in history, a direct correlation would be made between the root causes of the climate crisis and decisions adopted to confront it.
However, the recent declaration by Federal Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development Dirk Niebel has sparked a crisis which, nonetheless, could serve as an opportunity to discuss certain underlying questions: How will we confront the climate crisis? What are the responsibilities of the North and South with regard to the crisis? How can new forms of plunder be prevented? How will we confront the accelerated production of oil and its decline?
The German parliament’s initial decision led to the undertaking of studies by a number of NGOs, such as the Germany agency GTZ. However, none of this research sought to answer questions such as those posed above, because these studies were limited to assessing the viability of the Yasuní-ITT initiative within the framework of current climate negotiations, without recognizing the true strength of the proposal. Through this initiative, Ecuador is offering the world a real possibility of preventing the emission of enormous volumes of greenhouse gases produced by the burning of fossil fuels, and it was hoped that the world would recognize this fact, show its solidarity and contribute to carrying the initiative through.
In international discussions of the climate crisis, the polluters, banks and companies responsible for creating the crisis have invested time and money into transforming the real problems of destruction of ecosystems, pollution, diseases and climate disasters into virtual discussions of carbon molecules and financing that almost no one is able to understand. In this way, they have distracted attention from the search for solutions and replaced them with a series of evasive measures that are often not only unviable or absurd but also perverse.
The strength of the Yasuní-ITT initiative has always resided in maintaining it as a proposal outside the carbon market and REDD, fully distanced from negotiations pursued under the Kyoto Protocol. The initiative was conceived as a new idea that broke onto the international stage with a different kind of language and proposals and with clear and effective results.
Linking the Yasuní proposal to REDD would not contribute to the success of the proposal. On the contrary, such an approach raises concerns, because REDD – and its probable national version, SocioBosque – neither fulfil the expectations of indigenous organizations nor provide a real solution to the climate problem. Critics also point out that this could lead to the loss of collective rights for the communities involved and violates the spirit and the letter of the Ecuadorian Constitution, which recognizes nature as having rights of its own (Art. 10 and 71) and that as a result, “… environmental services will not be subject to appropriation” (Art. 74).
We must not confuse the pragmatism of making the initiative viable at any cost with the renunciation of its core principles. Adapting the proposal to mechanisms that are constantly criticized and which we know are inefficient and foster new forms of plunder would be to impoverish and limit a good opportunity.
The Yasuní-ITT proposal is the best opportunity precisely because it is an alternative to the other proposals that have been on the negotiating table. In addition, it opens the way to talk about rights, and about biodiversity and climate in the context of oil extraction. It even strengthens the position of those who want to prevent deforestation, because it removes the need for highways, the building of infrastructure and other forms of occupation of the forests that are direct causes of the loss of forest cover.
It is also an opportunity to discuss the new trends emerging as a result of the decline in oil production and their effects, such as the impacts of deep-sea oil drilling or the extraction of extra heavy crude, as well as the consequences of oil exploration in the territories of the last free peoples, cornered by the threat looming over them. The impacts of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico demonstrate the irrationality of continuing operations in high-risk areas and expose the threats that endanger the planet’s stability. The Yasuní-ITT proposal is without question the first step towards the establishment of areas where oil drilling should be prohibited in perpetuity in order to protect biodiversity and the rights of free peoples, but above all for the urgently needed paradigm shift towards non-oil societies.
Oilwatch can provide the German parliament with information on the impacts of oil operations, the different types of operations, the consequences for local populations, and the relationship between oil and the climate crisis, in order to make it clear that the real threat to rights, biodiversity and the climate are oil operations.
German parliamentarians now have the opportunity to play a decisive role in the defence of the peoples and the planet through clear and determined support for the Yasuní-ITT initiative.
esperanza@oilwatch.org – info@oilwatch.org – www.oilwatch.org