Did the world fail Ecuador?

AutorSaavedra, Luis Angel

The Ecuadoran government has decided to allow oil drilling in Yasuni, a national park in the country's Amazonian region. The decision follows six years of frustrated efforts to secure financial contributions from the international community in exchange for leaving the oil in the ground (NotiSur, Feb. 5, 2010).

The government blames the plan's failure on a lack of international cooperation. Some social sectors, however, say the government itself is responsible. They plan to defend the intangible area by organizing a popular referendum and by taking legal actions that could force the government to halt oil operations.

"Unfortunately, we must say that the world failed us," President Rafael Correa said while announcing, on national radio and television, the end of the Initiativa Yasuni. "The main factor behind this failure is the world's great hypocrisy."

Correa said the countries most responsible for causing climate change were the least understanding when it came to the Ecuadoran proposal. "It wasn't charity we were asking for," he said. "It was coresponsibility for climate change."

Ecuador had been seeking US$3.6 billion in exchange for not drilling in Yasuni's Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil fields, whose reserves are estimated at 920 million barrels. The government claims the oil is worth more than US$18 billion. Others estimate the value at closer to US$7 billion.

Did the international community fail?

By attributing the problem to the international community's lack of cooperation, Correa is glossing over his government's own share of the responsibility. The initiative failed in part because of government ambivalence. During six years of negotiations, the Correa administration was inconsistent, altering the content of the proposal and shuffling the negotiation team.

The Yasuni Initiative drew on new ideas about environmental law and was consistent with a constitutional philosophy that extends rights to nature, treating it as a living being. The proposal did not follow standard ideas about economics, let alone world market dynamics, but was instead based on a new concept that sees the human, both individually and in community, and the natural worlds as a collective whole. Whatever is damaging to one is necessarily harmful to the other, the theory holds.

"The proposal is philosophical, not economic," Esperanza Martinez, an advisor with the Ministerio de Energia y Minas, said in 2007. The ministry was led, at the time, by Alberto...

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