Six years after working to elect Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, the country’s indigenous population is now taking to the streets against the very government they helped bring to office.
Hundreds of people from Ecuador’s Andean and Amazonian indigenous groups marched into Quito today, after a 14-day trek across the country. Dressed in colorful traditional clothing, they are protesting against the government’s large-scale mining projects, which they say go against Mr. Correa’s electoral promise to protect the rights of nature, and could impact their access to clean water.
“What we’re asking is for the government to honor our democracy,” Humberto Cholango, head of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the largest indigenous group, told foreign reporters on March 21, the eve of the protesters’ arrival into Quito.
“We ask the president to stand by the promises he made five years ago,” Mr. Cholango says.
Rights of Mother Nature
Correa took office in January 2007 with a progressive platform that gained widespread support by indigenous groups. This was thanks in large part to proposals such as the inclusion of the “Rights of Mother Nature” in the country’s new constitution, approved in 2008. Ecuador was the first country to approve such legislation, which stipulates that citizens have rights to healthy and ecologically balanced environments, and have a duty to respect nature.
While the president remains hugely popular among large swathes of the population for his social projects aimed at the poor and the disabled, his relationship with indigenous people has been far from rosy, most recently due to his desire to build a large scale mining industry on biodiverse, indigenous land.
“We can’t be beggars sitting on a sack of gold,” said Correa earlier this month, referring to the country’s need to tap its natural resources. The government hopes to attract $3 billion in mining investments by next year – a significant contribution to its economy. “It is a lie that good mining destroys water,” Correa said.
Motivation to mobilize
Correa’s administration says indigenous organizations are just trying to destabilize the government ahead of the February 2013 presidential elections.
But according to indigenous leaders, the timing is connected to the government’s negotiation of a mining contract with the Chinese-owned company Ecuacorriente. The contract was signed earlier this month and is to be carried out in the southern province of Zamora Chinchipe with a $1.4 billion investment. Another multi-billion dollar contract for a silver mine is expected to be signed with a Canadian company in coming months.
The open-pit copper project would be the first of its kind in Ecuador, a country that relies on oil exploitation but is new to large-scale mining.
“The government has caused this mobilization,” says Salvador Quishpe, one of the march organizers, and governor of Zamora Chinchipe.
Mr. Quishpe says the government did not consult with local populations before approving the project – something many claim is required by the constitution. Quishpe says there are 227 water sources inside the mining project’s zone, and locals are worried they will all be contaminated through the extraction process.
Recent widespread news coverage heralded the success of a United Nations’ goal of greatly improving access to safe drinking water around the world.
But while major progress has been made, a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill indicates that far greater challenges persist than headline statistics suggested.
Earlier this month (March 6), UNICEF and the World Health Organization issued a report stating that the world had met the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goal target of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water, well in advance of a deadline.
That goal aimed to boost access to improved drinking water sources, such as piped supplies and protected wells, between 1990 and 2015.
However, the new UNC study estimates that 1.8 billion people – 28 percent of the world’s population – used unsafe water in 2010.
That figure is 1 billion more than the official report’s estimate that 783 million people (11 percent of the globe) use water from what are classified as unimproved sources by WHO and UNICEF’s Joint Monitoring Program.
The new study’s lead author, Jamie Bartram, Ph.D., professor of environmental sciences and engineering in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, said the WHO/UNICEF report highlighted the progress that could be achieved through concerted international action, but left outstanding the needs of millions of people who only have access to dangerous contaminated drinking water.
“If you look at the water people use and ask ‘Is this contaminated?’ instead of ‘Is this water from a protected source?’, the world would still be well short of meeting the Millennium Development Goal target,” said Bartram, also director of the Water Institute at UNC.
“In many parts of the world, water from ‘improved sources’ – like protected village wells and springs – is likely to be microbiologically or chemically contaminated, either at the source or by the time people drink it,” he said. “In developing countries, whether you live in small village or a big city, safe water can be hard to come by: pipes and taps break, clean springs and wells become contaminated or people have to carry or store water in potentially unsanitary ways.”
The study, “Global Access to Safe Water: Accounting for Water Quality and the Resulting Impact on MDG Progress,” was published March 14, 2012, in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Bartram and colleagues analyzed water quality and sanitary risk information from an earlier study of five countries, and extrapolated the data to estimate global figures. Their study suggested that of the 5.8 billion people using piped or “other improved” water sources in 2010, 1 billion probably received faecally contaminated water. Adding that tally to the nearly 800 million people who collect water from unimproved sources would mean 1.8 billion people are drinking unsafe water.
Furthermore, Bartram and colleagues estimated that another 1.2 billion people got water from sources that lack basic sanitary protection against contamination.
“All told, we estimate 3 billion people don’t have access to safe water, if you use a more stringent definition that includes both actual water quality and sanitary risks,” Bartram said.
He highlighted that the recent WHO/UNICEF announcement confirmed how much had been achieved since the Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000, and that this progress should lead to a progressive shift towards ensuring that every home, workplace and school has reliable water supplies that are – and remain – safe.
However, he said the magnitude of the UNC study’s estimates and the health and development implications suggest that greater attention needs to be paid to better understanding and managing drinking water safety.
India is hungry for energy. Over 173 power plants, all of them coal-fired, will be built to power the nation’s high-tech industries and booming cities.
This is accelerating an ongoing “coal rush” which has put our dirtiest fossil fuel at the heart of India’s breakneck growth, and could soon make a single state, Andhra Pradesh, one of the world’s top 20 carbon emitters.
On 101 East, filmmaker Orlando de Guzman takes a dark journey through the coal belt of Jharkhand and West Bengal, to look at the winners and losers of this booming industry.
By Philip Fearnside / National Institute for Research in the Amazon
Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River is now under construction despite its many controversies. The Brazilian government has launched an unprecedented drive to dam the Amazon’s tributaries, and Belo Monte is the spearhead for its efforts. Brazil’s 2011-2020 energy-expansion plan calls for building 48 additional large dams, of which 30 would be in the country’s Legal Amazon region. Building 30 dams in 10 years means an average rate of one dam every four months in Brazilian Amazonia through 2020. Of course, the clock doesn’t stop in 2020, and the total number of planned dams in Brazilian Amazonia exceeds 60.
The Belo Monte Dam itself has substantial impacts. It is unusual in not having its main powerhouse located at the foot of the dam, where it would allow the water emerging from the turbines to continue flowing in the river below the dam. Instead, most of the river’s flow will be detoured from the main reservoir through a series of canals interlinking five dammed tributary streams, leaving the “Big Bend” of the Xingu River below the dam with only a tiny fraction of its normal annual flow.
What is known as the “dry stretch” of 100 km between the dam and the main powerhouse includes two indigenous reserves, plus a population of traditional Amazonian riverside dwellers. Since the impact on these people is not the normal one of being flooded by a reservoir, they were not classified as “directly impacted” in the environmental study and have not had the consultations and compensations to which directly impacted people are entitled. The human rights commission of the Organization of American States (OAS) considered the lack of consultation with the indigenous people a violation of the international accords to which Brazil is a signatory, and Brazil retaliated by cutting off its dues payments to the OAS. The dam will also have more familiar impacts by flooding about one fourth of the city of Altamira, as well as the populated rural areas that will be flooded by the reservoir.What is most extraordinary is the project’s potential impact on vast areas of indigenous land and tropical rainforest upstream of the reservoir, but the environmental impact studies and licensing have been conducted in such a way as to avoid any consideration of these impacts. The original plan for the Xingu River called for five additional dams upstream of Belo Monte. These dams, especially the 6,140 square kilometer Babaquara Dam (now renamed the “Altamira” Dam), would store water that could be released during the Xingu River’s low-flow period to keep the turbines at Belo Monte running.The Xingu has a large annual oscillation in water flow, with as much as 60 times more water in the high-flow as compared to the low-flow period. During the low-flow period the unregulated flow of the river is insufficient to turn even one of the turbines in Belo Monte’s 11,000 MW main powerhouse. Since the Belo Monte Dam itself will be essentially ‘run-of-the-river’, without storing water in its relatively small reservoir, economic analysis suggests that the dam by itself won’t be economically viable.
The official scenario for the Xingu River changed in July 2008 when Brazil’s National Council for Energy Policy (CNPE) declared that Belo Monte would be the only dam on the Xingu River. However, the council is free to reverse this decision at any time. Top electrical officials considered the CNPE decision a political move that is technically irrational. Brazil’s current president blocked creation of an extractive reserve upstream of Belo Monte on the grounds that it would hamper building “dams in addition to Belo Monte”. The fact that the Brazilian government and various companies are willing to invest large sums in Belo Monte may be an indication that they do not expect history to follow the official scenario of only one dam.
In addition to their impacts on tropical forests and indigenous peoples, these dams would make the Xingu a source of greenhouse-gas emissions, especially methane (CH4) which forms when dead plants decay on the bottom of a reservoir where the water contains no oxygen. The Babaquara Dam’s 23m vertical variation in water level, annually exposing and flooding a 3,580 square kilometer drawdown zone would make the complex a virtual ‘methane factory’. The reservoir’s flooding of soft vegetation growing in the drawdown zone converts carbon from CO2 removed from the atmosphere by photosynthesis into CH4, with a much higher impact on global warming.
A 93-year-old anti-nuclear activist was among more than 130 protesters arrested at the corporate headquarters of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant on the first day of the plant’s operation after the expiration of its 40-year license.
Frances Crowe, of Northampton, Mass., said she wants Vermont Yankee to cease operations because she feels it’s a threat to the people who live nearby.
“As I was walking down, all I could think of was Fukushima and the suffering of all the people, and I don’t want that to happen to New England,” Crowe said, referring to the Japanese nuclear reactor damaged last year after an earthquake and tsunami.
When asked how many times she’d been arrested, she answered: “Not enough.”
A heavy police presence and ropes blocked off access to the offices in Brattleboro during Thursday’s protest. The arrests were made calmly and without any confrontation, with obvious signs that protesters and police had worked out the logistics beforehand.
Brattleboro Police Chief Gene Wrinn said in a statement that more than 130 people had been arrested for unlawful trespass. He said after being processed, they were later released.
