Mark Turner , RGE monitor

June 5th: Happy World Environment Day! As tribute to this day when environmental issues should take up at least some of our thinking time, it seems an excellent chance to bring to your attention a novel plan for the ITT oil development in Ecuador…or should that be undevelopment?

Yasuní Rainforest Campaign  

In recent weeks, an intense debate has been unfolding in Ecuador: develop the massive oil fields in the heart of the country’s only Amazonian national park, Yasuní, or leave the oil in the ground in order to protect the park’s extraordinary biodiversity and indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. Yasuní National Park is part of the Napo Moist Forest Region, considered by many scientists to be the most biodiverse forest on earth, with record or near record amounts of insects, birds, monkeys, amphibians, trees, and plants.

The countries rich in natural resources are not the most highly-developed. They may well have abundant income or a high per capita GNP, but they almost always lack solid institutions and an adequate standard of living for the entire population. The virus of the «Dutch Disease», a distorted internal assignation of resources and the consolidation of a rentist mentality are some of the causes of this apparent paradox which affects particularly those Latin American countries which produce oil. In order to avoid these problems, the article proposes the inclusion of energy policy within the wider framework of a strategy for autonomous development.

Nueva Sociedad 204: Geopolítica de la energía 

J. Schuldt / A. Acosta 

Download full article in Spanish in PDF

UNITED NATIONS, May 18 (IPS) - A novel proposal by Ecuador is testing world leaders' commitment to fight global warming and preserve the biodiversity of the Earth.

Ecuadorian officials told an international meeting this week that their government would ban exploitation of huge oil reserves if it was compensated for its effort to save the natural habitat of the Amazon region.

By JT Nguyen, Deutsche Presse, New York, Petroleumworld.com
Ecuador wants to keep the Yasuni National Park's rich biodiversity and its estimated 900,000 barrels of oil untouched, if the world can provide 350 million dollars a year for health and educational programmes to the indigenous people living there.

By Mercedes Alvaro
QUITO (MarketWatch ) -- Energy Minister Alberto Acosta Wednesday proposed a massive debt swap to avoid developing Ecuador's Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputi or ITT oil fields.

QUITO, Ecuador, April 24, 2007 (ENS) - The government of Ecuador will wait up to one year to see if the international community offers to compensate the country for not developing a major oil field in the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Energy Minister Alberto Acosta says. The area of lush, primary rainforest shelters a unique diversity of animals and plants.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa and his government say that if the international community can compensate the country with half of the forecasted lost revenues, Ecuador will leave the oil in Yasuni National Park undisturbed to protect the park's biodiversity and indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation.

"The first option is to leave that oil in the ground, but the international community would have to compensate us for immense sacrifice that a poor country like Ecuador would have to make," said Correa in a recent radio address.

By Javier Ponce

Diario El Universo, Guayaquil, Ecuador

Alberto Acosta proposed an unprecedented shift in oil politics: to leave the hundreds of thousands of oil barrels of Yasuní National Park's existing fields untouched. This would be possible if Northern governments and international ecological organizations handed over, as a compensation to Ecuador, fifty percent of the ITT fields production during the next ten years if these were exploited.

I don't know of any similar proposal in other regions.

Esperanza Martínez, Oilwatch
When couple of days ago President Rafael Correa affirmed that the environmentalists want to return to the Stone Age on requesting an oil moratorium he was only repeating what has been said for years by those who have shaped and maintained the dependent country we have… The problem is that this time he made this statement while the international press was sounding the alarm over global warming…if we burn more oil we will end up in the Stone Age!