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The troubled waters of the Magdalena
River
By María Isabel García
Bogota, Colombia, Feb. 9 (IPS)–- “Now there are more
cows than fish, and who knows what will happen with the oil that the
press said was found here,” said Rosendo Galvis, with a note of
nostalgia. He supplies fish from the Magdalena River to restaurants
in central Bogotá.
But it is not just fish in the river that are on decline. Deforestation,
erosion, contamination, and the disappearing wetlands around it affect
a quarter of the population in this country of 40 million people.
Oil drilling is slated to begin in October.
Along the 957 mile course of the Magdalena there are 73 municipalities,
and more than 700 populations in the jurisdiction of 18 departments.
In its journey from the Andes Mountains to the Caribbean Sea, the river
receives some 200 tons of domestic waste each day, according to the
Potable Water and Sanitation Department of the Colombian Ministry of
Environment.
Experts also report that rainfall patterns have been altered as a result
of the deforestation and the lack of territorial planning.
“Nearly all of the towns are located in flood plains,” Eduardo
Samudio, of the Colombian Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental
Studies, told Tierramérica.
The river dwellers are accustomed to flooding, which normally occurs
in November and December, and from May to July. But it brings environmental
problems and health problems, such as the proliferation of disease-spreading
vectors, said Samudio.
The watershed of the Magdalena and its main tributary, the Cauca, covers
159,940 square km, 26 percent of which is within Colombian territory.
Another 30 significant rivers, with numerous tributaries, flow into
the Magdalena.
In two decades, human settlement of the area led to the destruction
of 3.5 million hectares of forest. Recent inventories indicate that
a similar total area of forest remains intact.
Subsistence cattle raising is blamed for the conversion of thousands
of hectares into pasture, affecting the stability of the soil and altering
the dynamic of the river.
With an erosion rate of 330 tons of soil per hectare per year, according
to the National Planning Department, and a high sediment load, the navigability
of the river is also suffering.
The larger particles carried by the waters from the Andean glacier run-off
are a significant component of the sedimentation process, say studies
by the regional Magdalena environmental authority.
That is why there is concern about the oil exploitation that is set
to begin in October in the Middle Magdalena, in the departments of Boyacá
and Antioquia.
The oil field known by its English name Under River will be run by Omimex
of Colombia, an affiliate of the Omimex Resources, based in the Texas,
and by the governmental Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos.
With proven reserves of 22 million barrels and an estimated potential
of 45 million, investment in the operation is calculated to require
$25 to 28 million.
But, more than the environmental dangers involved in oil extraction,
the main threat to the river is reduced flow and the effects of global
warming, environmental activist Gonzalo Palomino, of the University
of Tolima, told Tierramérica.
“One can survive without a car, but not without a river,”
said Palomino.
The resources earmarked for oil drilling are the equivalent of the annual
budget of state investment in the Yuma Project, the effort to recover
the Magdalena’s navigability for passenger and cargo traffic. Yuma
is the indigenous name for the Magdalena.
The goal of the Yuma Project is to increase passenger traffic from 600,000
to 900,000 a year, and cargo shipments from two million tons to four
or five million tons annually by 2006.
Since the Spanish Conquest, the river and its geographical axis marked
the route of penetration by the Spaniards from the ports of Santa Marta
and Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, to the interior of what is Colombian
territory today.
In colonial times, the Magdalena was the natural connection between
the metropoli and the distant territories and with Santa Fe de Bogotá,
capital of what was then the Viceroyalty of New Granada.
Some historians and sociologists believe that the Magdalena River is
what led to the atypical demographic development of Colombia.
Despite its coasts on the Atlantic and the Pacific, political and administrative
power was concentrated in Bogotá, 8,530 feet above sea level,
reached by land from the Magdalena river ports of Honda and Girardot.
Green groups slam loans for BTC pipeline
By Stefania Bianchi
Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 4 (IPS)— Leading environment and
human rights groups have slammed commercial banks for financing a controversial
oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean.
The bank loans will help construct the 1,094 miles long pipeline that
will run from Baku in Azerbaijan through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan
in Turkey.
When fully operational early next year the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC)
pipeline is expected to supply 50 million tons of oil a year from offshore
oilfields in the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean for export by tankers
to western markets.
Agreements on loans worth $2.6 billion were signed in Azerbaijan’s
port capital Baku on Feb. 3. Some $1.5 billion have been spent already
on the construction, and 52 percent of work is complete.
But the project has faced considerable criticism from international
human rights and environment groups. They say the pipeline will cause
environmental damage, undermine human rights, and destabilize a conflict-prone
region.
Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and other green groups have
raised a number of concerns over the pipeline, which passes through
a national park in Georgia and threatens several other ecologically
sensitive areas.
The pipeline will run 275 miles through Azerbaijan, 154 miles through
Georgia and 669 miles through Turkey.
Construction of the Azerbaijan stretch of the pipeline is due to be
completed in September. It will be laid through Georgia by October and
through Turkey by March 2005.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the
International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the
World Bank, will each loan $250 million for the project.
A syndicate of 15 commercial banks and shareholders, including the oil
giants British Petroleum (BP), Statoil, ConocoPhillips, and Total, are
also financing the project.
Four non-governmental organizations — FoEI, the London-based environment
group Platform, the Kurdish Human Rights Project, and Corner House which
promotes community movements for environmental and social justice —
have condemned the financial institutions for giving the pipeline the
green light.
The groups say public money should not be used to deal with social and
environmental problems that should be the responsibility of the private
sector. They say loans to the project should be conditional on a positive
contribution that shareholders in the project make to economic and social
development in the region.
“This project has already taken away people’s land without
proper compensation,” director of the Kurdish Human Rights Project
said in a Feb. 3 statement. “With the Turkish gendarmerie assigned
to protect the pipeline, the human rights situation looks set to deteriorate
yet further.”
The groups say that the institutions backing the pipeline have failed
to apply the protection measures for minorities required by the Equator
Principles. These are a set of principles agreed by 18 major international
banks to apply the environmental policies of the IFC to lending practices.
Nine of the banks financing the pipeline have signed up to the Equator
Principles. These are Mizuho (Japan), ABN Amro (the Netherlands), Citicorp
(United States), Dexia (Belgium), Hypovereinsbank (Germany), ING (Netherlands),
KBC (Belgium), Royal Bank of Scotland (UK), and West LB (Germany).
In addition to barring support for projects that threaten sensitive
ecosystems, the principles require financial institutions to assess
the impact of lending decisions on local communities, particularly indigenous
groups.
“Our research shows that the BTC pipeline breaks the Equator Principles
on numerous counts, and people and the environment will be worse off
as a result,” Greg Muttitt from Platform told IPS. “The fact
that this deal nevertheless went through makes it hard to see the banks’
commitment to the Equator Principles as any more than lip service to
responsible lending.”
FoEI is concerned also about the effect of a new source of oil for western
nations on climate change.
“If the banks involved were serious about their environmental performance
they would put their money where their mouth is and fully implement
the Equator Principles,” Nick Rau from FoEI added. “But the
Principles are just a first step — what’s really needed is
for banks to stop funding dirty energy projects which worsen climate
change.”
The multilateral lenders and oil companies argue that the BTC is key
to unlocking the impoverished region’s economic potential.
“Finalization of the financing agreements comes after more than
two years of far-reaching monitoring and scrutiny of the project’s
environmental and social impact, as well as a thorough public consultation
process,” BP said in a statement.
“The pipeline employs over 12,000 people along its entire route
from Baku to Ceyhan,” BP says. “Overall, BTC together with
the South Caucasus Pipeline (SCP) will spend some $30 million (including
$5.5 million already awarded in Azerbaijan) on community and environmental
investment between now and 2006 in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey.”
The EBRD says it is confident that the pipeline meets international
requirements. “We conducted a thorough examination of the projects’
financial, legal, environmental and social impacts,” it said in
a statement. “They were shaped to meet EBRD, EU [European Union]
and World Bank standards, particularly with regard to environmental
concerns and land compensation.”
US groups demand sanctions for illegal
timber trade
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Feb. 5 (IPS) — A coalition of leading US
environmental groups called Feb. 5 for the administration of President
George W. Bush to impose trade sanctions against Malaysia unless it
takes immediate steps to crack down on the illegal timber trade.
In a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell, the groups, which include
the Sierra Club, the Defenders of Wildlife, Rainforest Action Network
and Greenpeace, among others, also called for an immediate ban on the
import of ramin, a rare type of Indonesian hardwood, from Malaysia.
They wrote that the illegal trade in ramin is threatening some of Indonesia’s
last remaining national parks and scores of the world’s endangered
species, including orang-utans and the Sumatran tiger.
In response to growing concerns about illegal logging and trade in ramin,
the Indonesian government banned all cutting and export of the tree
in April 2001. But timber is still being cut down elsewhere in Indonesia
by local and Malaysian logging interests and then smuggled to Malaysia,
according to the groups.
“Our concern,” they wrote, “is deepened by new evidence
indicating that officials in the Malaysian government are permitting
and perhaps actively facilitating this illegal trade. Repeated efforts
to address these serious problems have met with little success.”
The letter, which comes on the eve of next week’s meeting of the
188-nation Biodiversity Convention in Kuala Lumpur, was accompanied
by a new report, also released Feb. 5, by the Environmental Investigation
Agency (EIA) and Telapak, an Indonesian group that has collaborated
closely with western green groups.
EIA, which specializes in undercover investigations of the illegal trade
in rare and endangered species, said it found “wholesale laundering
of ramin through Malaysia on an unprecedented scale” by that country’s
traders, who circumvent existing bans on the export of Indonesian wood
by reporting it as grown in Malaysia.
But the amount of ramin exported from Malaysia annually is estimated
at more than twice what the country can itself produce in one year,
according to EIA and Telapak.
The report, which was accompanied by a secretly recorded videotape of
Malaysian businessmen bragging how they obtain government-issued documents
to export ramin to China, Taiwan, and other destinations where it is
often made into products — such as baby cribs, mop handles, pool
cues, and picture frames — for domestic consumption or export to
wealthy western nations.
A single port in Malaysia handles up to 70,000 metric tons of ramin
timber each year, according to the EIA-Telapak report, Profiting from
Plunder: How Malaysia Smuggles Endangered Wood.
The head of the Malaysian Timber Council (MTC), Ismail Awang, said the
report’s charges were “exaggerated and ridiculous.” In
an interview posted at the MTC website, he said the problem was mainly
one of Indonesia’s own enforcement of its export ban.
“Whatever timber exports Indonesia has deemed illegal and banned,
Malaysia has reciprocated by banning those imports,” Awang said.
“If Indonesia believes it cannot control its illegal logging because
of the vastness of the country and the numerous forest areas and exit
points, Indonesia must determine who is eligible, stipulate the governing
rules, and identify which ports Malaysia should deal with.”
The report also argued that Indonesian enforcement of its ramin export
ban falls far short of what is required. “This shocking evidence
highlight Indonesia’s continuing failure to bring to justice timber
barons who supply and transport this illegal timber,” it said.
But it stressed that Malaysia was also to blame for “callous complicity”
in the smuggling.
When Jakarta instituted the ban, it also listed the species on Appendix
III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES),
an international group that monitors and, if necessary, limits the trade
in threatened species.
The Appendix III listing requires consuming countries to ban the import
of ramin and ramin products that do not have CITES permits from the
exporting countries. But shortly after ramin’s listing, Kuala Lumpur
entered an official reservation to it, essentially opting out of its
own commitments to enforce the ban.
When no consuming country accepted ramin from Malaysia without a CITES
permit anyway, Kuala Lumpur began providing them. But the report charges
that Malaysian officials issue false documentation and certificates
of origin in order to “launder” the Indonesian ramin.
US customs authorities last year seized more than 120,000 goods made
from ramin exported from China without a CITES permit.
Malaysia is by far the world’s largest exporter of tropical timber.
In 2000, its exports of tropical logs, sawn timber, plywood, and veneer
were worth more than $2.4 billion — greater than the value of the
similar exports from Africa and South America combined.
But, as Malaysia’s own forests have been cut down, its timber industry
has become increasingly reliant on illegal imports from Indonesia, which
holds about 10 percent of the world’s remaining tropical forests,
according to the EIA-Telapak report.
While Malaysia’s total domestic log production, for example, was
cut almost in half over the past decade, its wood-processing industry
has maintained the same capacity.
The country’s reliance on ramin has been particularly devastating
to the Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan, one of the world’s
last orang-utan refuges, according to EIA and Telapak.
“Every shipment of illegal Indonesian ramin sold by Malaysia is
moving the orang-utans and other endangered species a step closer to
extinction,” said EIA director Allan Thornton in a statement.
“Malaysia is undermining the international community’s efforts,
through CITES, to protect ramin and orang-utans.”
At a presentation here, the environmental groups said Malaysia should
be given 90 days to withdraw its reservation to the CITES listing and
take strong measures to halt all imports, transshipments, and re-exports
of Indonesian ramin, including investigating and prosecuting individuals,
companies, and officials who have been complicit in the trade.
If it fails to do so, says the group’s letter to Powell, they will
petition the US Secretary of Interior under a 1971 law designed to strengthen
CITES to make a formal finding that Kuala Lumpur is undermining the
ramin listing and to adopt trade sanctions accordingly.
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