Treasury Dept. blocks required reviews of international projects

Washington, DC, Sept. 20 (ENS)— US Treasury Department officials are blocking Congressionally mandated environmental reviews of projects financed by multinational banks, according to documents released by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

PEER, a national alliance of local state and federal resource professionals, says that as a result of the Treasury Department’s actions, destructive projects in Asia, Africa, and South America are receiving improper US support in obtaining loans from institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

“The Bush Administration is giving short shrift not only to environmental protections but also to safeguards against rank corruption and disruption of native peoples,” said PEER executive director Jeff Ruch. “While a domestic project like oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge receives extensive study and debate, each year the US is financing scores of projects in developing countries, each with potentially far greater impact, with little or no environmental review.”

Under a statute called the Pelosi Amendment, named after its author, California Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi, the US delegations to international lending institutions, such as the World Bank, are forbidden from supporting any financial aid to projects that have not undergone environmental review. The agency charged with monitoring compliance with review requirements is the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Interagency correspondence obtained by PEER shows that the Treasury Department has directed USAID to exclude from its reports to Congress that:

• Almost half the money loaned by multilateral development banks has received no environmental review at all
• Many of the reviews are incomplete and do not meet the law’s standards. For example, the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline — the biggest development project in Africa — lacks plans for dealing with oil spills, invasive species from tanker ballast and other foreign commerce, and the absence of support infrastructure for large scale petroleum operations
• Reviews are often completed after the fact, with little consideration of alternatives and are not readily available to outside groups or native populations

One memo from Treasury Department international economist Gretchen Biery, sent to acting USAID assistant administrator Robert Lester in March 2001 details information that the Treasury Department wanted omitted from USAID’s report to Congress entitled “Multilateral Development Bank Loans that Raise Environmental Concerns.”

The memo recommends that USAID delete references or quotes pertaining to critics of international financial institutions, including multilateral development banks (MDBs), that have not been analyzed by the federal government. USAID was also asked to remove “recommendations on and analysis of broad MDB policies,” including energy policies, lending practices, and whether environmental assessments are a “fiduciary duty” of MDBs.

PEER charges that, in addition to violating the Pelosi Amendment, suppression of the environmental reviews also means that environmental problems do not get analyzed until much later in the process, sometimes after international financing has already been committed or spent.

Amazon forest dwellers, NGOs blockade loggers

Porto De Moz, Brazil, Sept. 20 (ENS)— Some 600 Amazon forest dwellers seeking to save their forests and way of life were joined by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations this week in a blockade of Brazil’s Jaraucu River. The boats and banners represent the first such community protest in nearly 20 years.

The forest communities want the government to grant them an extractive reserve, the kind of sanctuary that Brazilian rubber tapper and community activist Chico Mendes died for in 1988.

Without this protection, Greenpeace said in a statement Thursday, they fear loggers and farmers will continue to destroy their rainforest home in Pará state in the eastern Brazilian Amazon.

The Jaraucu River is the main transport route for illegal timber around the town of Porto de Moz, a region known for land squatting and illegal logging. Loggers entered the Porto de Moz area in 1990, after the forests east of Pará state were logged out.

For the past three years, these forest communities have sought to create Verde Para Sempre (Forever Green), an extractive reserve covering an area of 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) almost half the size of Belgium.

Claudio Wilson Barbosa, a community leaders participating in the protest, said, “Loggers and farmers are invading our traditional land and destroying our forest and the future of our kids. They need to get out and return the forest to the real owners, the people of Verde Para Sempre.”

But in this area of about 125 communities and 15,000 inhabitants, loggers, farmers and politicians are fighting the extractive reserve. Some resort to violence to stop the process, the type of conflict that led to Mendes’ 1988 murder at the hands of farmers.

Five years of Greenpeace research has yielded a map showing the illegal activities in this disputed area around Porto de Moz and implicating national and international logging companies.

Companies including Curuatinga, DLH Nordisk, Eidai, Marajó Island Business, Madenorte, Porbrás and Rancho da Cabocla are directly or indirectly involved in operations here, according to the Greenpeace map.

Greenpeace Amazon campaigner Marcelo Marquesini said at the Jaraucu river protest, “We believe that extractive reserves are one of the ways to ensure the sustainable use of forest resources, and the traditional communities are the first ones interested in protecting their forest land and environment, which they depend on to survive.”

ENVIRONMENT BRIEFS

Norton wants energy bill veto if no ANWR drilling

US Interior Secretary Gale Norton said Sept. 18 she would recommend the White House veto a broad energy bill if Senate and House negotiators failed to include opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

The Bush administration is urging Congress to give energy firms access to the Arctic refuge, located in northeast Alaska, arguing the area’s possible 16 billion barrels of oil are needed to reduce US crude imports from the Middle East.

In an interview, Norton said she would prefer Bush veto the energy bill if it kept the Alaskan refuge closed because boosting domestic oil production is the centerpiece of the administration’s energy plan. Senate and House negotiators face a deadline at the end of September to reach a compromise energy bill that is expected to include tax incentives for drilling, require more ethanol use to stretch gasoline supplies, and tighten energy efficiency standards. Whether to allow drilling in the Arctic refuge is expected to be the most contentious issue that lawmakers face in hammering out the final energy bill.

Supporters of ANWR drilling have been quick to use the specter of war with Iraq as a powerful bargaining chip for their cause. Last year, Iraq was the sixth largest supplier of foreign oil to the US, and military strikes would cut off Iraq’s roughly 2 million barrels a day of oil exports to the world market. However, tapping the Arctic refuge could not immediately offset such a disruption. If Congress agreed to open ANWR, it would take several years for oil to start flowing and about eight years to reach peak production of about 1 million barrels a day, according to industry executives. (Reuters)

Pollution emergency in Mexico City

Hundreds of thousands of cars were ordered off Mexico City streets Sept. 19 as the city declared its first pollution alert in almost three years after ozone levels reached about 2 ½ times acceptable limits. The one-day driving ban may be extended if the smog does not dissipate. In the past, almost half of the city’s estimated 3 million vehicles were ordered off the streets during such alerts. But many residents have bought newer, cleaner models that are allowed even during emergencies. Thursday’s ban affected about 350,000 of the city’s older-model vehicles.

The last such emergency was declared in October 1999. Despite the urging of environmentalists, the city has not changed the level at which smog alerts are declared: 240 points on a scale in which 100 is considered acceptable. Environmentalists say the threshold should be lowered. While Mexico City has a reputation for smog problems, scientists now believe that several cities, mainly in Asia, have worse air quality on average. (AP)

Intense logging blamed for wildfires

The Bush administration’s timber-cutting prescription for the West’s wildfire epidemic runs counter to the record of the last half century, when large forest fires erupted on the heels of the heaviest logging ever conducted by the US Forest Service.

In an initiative that could come up for a Senate vote any day, the administration is seeking to waive environmental reviews to speed up tree-cutting on up to 10 million acres of federal land at high risk of wildfire.

While administration officials say the work is urgently needed to thin out forests jammed with fire-prone, dense growth, the Forest Service’s own statistics show that the modern era of big burns began not in the 1990s, during a period of declining logging, but in the 1980s, when trucks groaning with public timber headed for the mills.

In 1950, when about 3 million board feet were logged, a quarter of a million acres of federal forests burned. Nearly six times that amount went up in flames in 1988, when the harvest had climbed to nearly 12 billion board feet.

Many experts say that by removing the largest and most fire-resistant trees and replacing them with dense young growth, conventional logging and tree planting practices helped create the conditions that stoke wildfires. (LA Times)