Contextualising Yasuni

Isabella Colonos responds to “Yasuni – our future in their hands” by Esperanza Martinez in CarbonWeb Issue 8

The Yasuni National Park in Ecuador has recently become the main stage for discussions negotiating pathways to an oil-free future. The “Leave the oil in the soil” proposal, instigated by environmental grassroots organisations and taken on by Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, is to not extract oil from certain parts of the Yasuní National Park. Ecuador has offered to leave the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil fields untouched in exchange for international compensation.

However, the ITT proposal should be seen in a context where Correa's government is rapidly expanding destructive resource extraction elsewhere in the Yasuni area. Secondly, the proposal raises difficult questions over sovereignty and the role of the state and the market in supposedly “protecting” indigenous peoples.

Ecuador: Expanding extraction in the Amazon

Even as Ecuador develops programmes for radical social economic reform, it is part of the Latin American integration project (UNASUR), which includes the expansion of projects oriented towards global free market capitalism - albeit with a changing geopolitical emphasis: not the US or Europe, but China is now the most popular partner in town.

Thus the ITT proposal has to be understood against the backdrop of intensifying resource exploitation and infrastructural integration of the entire Amazon basin. Megaprojects to enlarge road and river transport, the socalled interoceanic corridors, combined with dams for hydroelectricity stations and extensive power and communications cabling, are set to tear open the rainforest. This will facilitate intensive agricultural use of the area, above all for ranching, soya and biofuel crops, enabling logging, mining and of course oil exploitation. The corridors will connect the Pacific with the Atlantic, boosting trade links between the most important economic hubs of the region, and with China whose shipping companies will circumvent the US-controlled Panama canal to reach booming Brazilian cities.

There is already a road straight into Yasuní - for the exclusive use of the oil companies and Ecuadorian military. Passing by Yasuní on the Napo River, it might surprise the innocent traveller to encounter trucks, docks, and general industrial activity. The Manta-Manaus corridor, a multi-modal transport structure between the Ecuadorian and Brazilian coast, will transform this river into a major highway, and bring the inevitable ecological and social pressures that accompany such infrastructural undertakings right into Yasuní territory. Yasuní might soon resemble a zoo on the outskirts of a big city.

Moreover, not drilling the ITT fields will only protect part of Yasuní. There are five different concessionary blocks in the Ecuadorian Amazon which overlap Yasuní territory. Further, the Yasuni National Park is smaller than the Yasuni UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The latter includes an equally biodiverse area just outside the Park's boundaries and the ancestral territory of the Huaorani people, now full of oil wells belonging to Block 16 and the Spanish oil company REPSOL. 70% of Block 31, awarded to Brazilian company Petrobras, lies inside the Yasuní National Park, and 100% inside the Yasuní Biosphere Reserve. According to seismic studies from 1998, this block is estimated to contain 230 million barrels of heavy crude.

65% of Block 14 is also within the National Park, as are smaller percentages of Block 15 and 17. Block 17 partly extends into the “Untouchable Zone”, home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane, peoples in voluntary isolation, who refuse to have any contact whatsoever with other human groups. Venezuela's and Ecuador’s state oil companies have a joint venture to build a $5.5 billion refinery in the coastal province of Manabí with a processing capacity of 300,000 barrels a day.

Correa’s zero-tolerance policy to demonstrations in oil producing areas, combined with such “energy integration” ventures as the joint refinery, make the purportedly radical environmental proposal of leaving the ITT oil in the soil appear in an opportunistic rather than a green light.

Whose sovereignty? Whose self-determination?

Of course, Correa is not the only one pushing the ITT proposal in Ecuador. There is also a civil society campaign for deeper socio-economic change that combines ITT demands with the search for pathways towards a post-oil Ecuador where all remaining oil, not just from the ITT fields, would stay underground. Not everyone working on the broader campaign envisions it to be reliant on the international community for compensation. Even though there are attempts to frame the proposal as a matter of ecological justice - as a reparation or ecological debt which the North owes the South - prevalent global power dynamics are likely to favour the usual “market solutions to market disasters”.

They will convert Yasuní into a set of pollution licenses for sale to the highest bidder in the new bioeconomic world order of environmental services and carbon trade.

In her recent piece in this newsletter, Esperanza Martinez from OilWatch Ecuador argued that sovereignty, the concept and the practice, cannot be commodified. But, as she points out, the struggle over the meaning of sovereignty remains unsettled. Who is the self in self-determination? Appeals to sovereignty are still very much haunted by the spectres of the nation state, place, and property. To generate a vision of shared planetary self-determination, subversion of such concepts is probably indispensable. Sovereignty implies supreme decision-making power. If linked to a nation state and its territory in a context of hegemonic private property, it amounts to a license to exploit, destroy, sell off. For the time being, the official ITT proposal is a conversion of one commodity (extracted oil) into another (unextracted oil), with no particular commitment to the selfdetermination of those locally implicated.

In fact, their rights to voice their opinion in this specific context are being systematically undermined through the investing of ever more draconian powers in the army and police force.

Framing the proposal in terms of ecological debt would be a stronger move. Yet this could not remain conditional on a country’s geographical luck of extending over oil fields. What about the ecological debt owed countries without oil wells, or megadiverse rainforests for that matter?

If ecological damage is the guide, then surely Bangladesh and the Maldives are owed a significant debt, regardless of their lack of fossil fuel reserves. There still remains some conceptual work to be done.

Data on oil blocks from: “Atlas Amazonico del Ecuador: Agresiones y resistencias” by Accion Ecologica and CONAIE (funded by Oil Watch et al.). Limited edition. 2006.

Isabella Colona is currently engaged in several grassroot projects in Peru and Ecuador.

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Carbon Web Newsletter Issue 9 May 2nd 2008