Ecuador invites world to save its forest

President Rafael Correa launches a proposal Tuesday for the international community to compensate Ecuador if the country prohibits oil drilling within its rain forest.

By Amy E. Robertson | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 5, 2007 edition

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Quito, Ecuador - – Last year's presidential campaign posters for candidate Rafael Correa were lime green with the slogan "Citizen Revolution" blazed across them. Five months after taking office, the leftist leader is proposing another revolution, and again a green one – this time to save one of the world's most biologically rich regions.

Yasuni National Park – 2.5 million acres in the Ecuadorian Amazon – is home to some of the world's most diverse communities of birds, amphibians, insects, and trees. There are nearly as many species of trees in a single hectare (2.5 acres) of the Yasuni as in the entire United States and Canada combined. But it's also home to some of Ecuador's largest untapped oil fields. And with nearly 40 percent of Ecuador's people living in poverty, revenue from the estimated 930 million barrels under the ground in the oil block known as the ITT (Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha) would give a significant boost to the country's economy.

In a radical shift from the traditional politics of oil timed with the United Nations' World Environment Day on Tuesday, Mr. Correa is asking the international community to come up with a viable plan to compensate Ecuador for not exploiting the ITT. If foreign governments, businesses, and environmental organizations match half of the projected revenue for 10 years worth of oil extraction, Ecuador will not allow drilling in the region.

If the proposal succeeds, it would be unprecedented. But the clock is ticking. Foreign companies are preparing to bid on the oil extraction, and the plan must be developed before the bidding process is up (an estimated eight to twelve months).

"The proposal will be emblematic, a banner project for nature, for the future," says Vice President Lenin Moreno. "If we obtain at least 50 percent of the revenue that would be generated by the oil, we are willing to sacrifice the other 50 percent that we would have been able to apply to another noble cause, that of social development."

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Rich Clabaugh – Staff