By Peter Kostishack, Global Greengrants‘ director of programs
On May 22, 2014, International Biodiversity Day, the government of Ecuador decided to celebrate by issuing permits to drill for oil in what is probably the most biodiverse place on Earth, Yasuní National Park.
Global Greengrants Fund believes Yasuní must be protected from any further oil development for its globally important biodiversity, but even more urgently to ensure protection of the rights and health of the indigenous people who live there. Some of them, like the Taromenane, live without contact with the outside world. Oil companies entering into their territory would be catastrophic.
The government issued the permits after nullifying a petition drive led by YASunidos, a loose coalition of Ecuadorian environmentalists, youth and civil society that collected over 760,000 signatures from citizens requesting a national referendum on future of Yasuní. Using procedures that petition organizers claim are illegal and that they are challenging in court, Ecuador’s National Election Council rejected nearly 400,000 of the signatures, leaving the petition short of the required 584,000 signatures.
The drive to protect Yasuní gained attention on the world stage in 2007, when the administration of President Rafael Correa proposed to the world a plan to leave 846 million barrels of oil in the ground in Block 43—known as Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini, (ITT)—if half the oil’s value (about US$3.5 billion) could be raised over 13 years through international aid and financing.
Last August, Correa abandoned the proposal after only $300 million had been pledged to the fund. The decision was viewed as a foregone conclusion by many environmentalists. They point to the fact that the government has already mortgaged its oil reserves by borrowing billions of dollars from China to pay for its programs. Since 2007, Ecuador has also doubled the area of land available for oil development, most of it in the Amazon region and overlapping the territories of indigenous peoples. Increased road and pipeline development in neighboring Block 31, and leaked government documents showing that the government was already pursing US$1 billion in financing from a Chinese bank, left little doubt of the government’s intentions to open up ITT despite the environmental rhetoric.
Anticipating this reality, grassroots groups in Ecuador have been working for years to raise awareness among Ecuadorian citizens and to make Yasuní’s protection an issue of national pride. The Amazon for Life campaign, led by Oilwatch Ecuador, involved marches, concerts, art exhibits, and even a smartphone game called the Age of Yasuní iPhone game, funded by Global Greengrants. Media events, some including children decorating and offering their piggy banks to Correa to save Yasuní, helped grow Ecuadorian’s awareness of Yasuní from 17 percent to more than 85 percent. These efforts kept pressure on the government not to drill.
The work to protect Yasuní from oil development continues. Petition organizers are launching legal appeals to reject the government’s ruling on the call for a referendum. Meanwhile Ecuador’s indigenous peoples’ organizations are also working to defend the rights of communities in Yasuní and of other Amazonian indigenous peoples affected by a rash of new oil concessions that they assert are being leased without their free, prior, and informed consent.
The Yasuní proposal was abandoned early because the government clearly intended to drill in ITT from early on. Global Greengrants strongly believes the plan should have been given its full 13 years, and that the public and local communities should be consulted before opening up this special place.
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