Ecuador

Much of the world’s population –especially males– will spend the coming weeks glued to the TV as the FIFA World Cup unfolds. While many are fully aware that this is no longer a mere sporting event, but rather a massive globalized business in which the players are little more than disposable gladiators at the service of big corporations, they are still drawn to keep watching, celebrating the victories and suffering the defeats as if they were their own.

Many letters have been sent from abroad to the Government of Ecuador in the framework of the campaign to support Ecuadorian social and indigenous organizations that are endeavouring to avoid the adoption in that country of a legislation that will imply the expansion of large scale monoculture tree plantations (see the article on Ecuador in this bulletin).

The experts at the service of transnational corporations have proved to have an unlimited inventive capacity to better serve those who are paying them. Among their most recent achievements is having managed to put up for sale nature itself under the guise of so-called “environmental services.” Expressions such as “oxygen sale” and “sale of carbon sinks” are now common currency, in particular in the countries of the South.

On 13 May, over 400 young people of both sexes participated in an action against the plantations of the Japanese EUCAPACIFIC Company in the area of Tortuga, located in the Muisne Canton, province of Esmeraldas (see power point presentation of the action at http://www.wrm.org.uy/paises/Ecuador/Muisne_sin_eucaliptos.pps)

To the south of the Yasuni National Park (see WRM Bulletin No. 96), an unequal battle is being fought. Spears against shotguns. The Yasuni National Park covers an area of 982,000 hectares. It is located in Huaorani territory and is part of the Intangible Zone where peoples of the Tagaeri and Taromenane ethnic groups live in voluntary isolation.

The Cayapas-Mataje Ecological Mangrove Reserve in the Province of Esmeraldas covers an area of 51,300 hectares and within it is the Majagual mangrove covering 28,367 hectares. The mangrove is the habitat of crustacean species including oysters, blue crabs and shrimps and of tree species such as the red, black, white and jeli mangroves.

In Ecuador three models of monoculture tree plantations coexist: the erroneously called “carbon sinks” belonging to the Dutch foundation FACE, the pine tree plantations in Andean communities promoted by organizations linked to the Church and the pulpwood plantation model. In this article we shall concentrate on this latter and more recent model.

Thousands of indigenous peoples are displaced from their land, which is militarized and expropriated in an unending genocide. Oil exploitation is carried out – causing damages that go uncompensated – without consulting the communities and with the connivance of the government of the time. Transnational companies such as Shell, Repsol, and Maxus appropriate territorial spaces under the pretext that they are of “public utility”, they contaminate bodies of water and river beds, they deforest virgin forests and generate impacts destroying the future.

From 17 to 23 July in Cuenca, Ecuador, over 1,300 participants from 80 countries in the five continents met under the slogan of “The voices of the Earth are calling” to analyze global health problems and to draw up health promotion strategies for all. The final declaration at the end of the event identifies neo-liberal policies transferring wealth from the South to the North, from the poor to the rich and from the public sector to the private sector, as the main cause of the worsening of the health conditions of the majority of the world population.

The Yasuni National Park, considered to be a Pleistocene refuge and declared Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1989, covers an area of 982,000 hectares and spreads out to the basins of the Yasuni, Conanoco, Nashiño and Tiputini Rivers. Its forests are host to the greatest number of species of trees per hectare in the world as well as a great diversity of species of fauna. The Huaorani indigenous peoples and some non-contacted groups such as the Tagaeri and Taromenane, live in the Yasuni Park. For this reason it is considered to be one of the most emblematic parks in the country.

Impacts of the Dutch FACE-PROFAFOR monoculture tree plantations' project on indigenous and peasant communities By Patricia Granda. Joint Research of Acción Ecológica and WRM Carbon Sink Plantations in the Ecuadorian Andes

The Latin American Network against Monoculture Tree Plantations (Red Latinoamericana contra los Monocultivos de Árboles - RECOMA) is a decentralized network of organizations from all the countries in the region, and its basic objective is to coordinate activities to resist the expansion of large-scale monoculture tree plantations in the region, either for the production of timber and pulp, for the production of palm oil or to act as “carbon sinks.”