San Francisco, CA. – Amazon Watch today condemned the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to approve a “Free” Trade Agreement (FTA) with Peru, warning that the treaty would encourage devastation of the Peruvian Amazon, and abuses against the region’s indigenous peoples.
Passage of the United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement in the House, by a vote of 285 to132, means the Bill will become law if approved by the U.S. Senate. It has already been approved by the Peruvian legislature. According to Amazon Watch, the Free Trade Agreement:
• Grants new rights for oil companies to drill in the Peruvian Amazon, potentially causing massive deforestation and environmental destruction;
• Will therefore lead to more road construction, literally paving the way for colonists, illegal loggers and poachers;
• Fails to explicitly prohibit trade in endangered species, instead merely re-asserting the U.S.’s existing right to reject timber imports from species listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES);
• Includes in Chapter 10, investor rights provisions that would allow foreign companies to skirt Peruvian law and regulatory authorities. This goes further than controversial equivalent clauses in NAFTA and CAFTA;
• Will benefit U.S. corporations such as Hunt Oil, ConocoPhillips, Occidental Petroleum and Newmont Mining over Peruvian and U.S. citizens.
The Peru FTA has also been condemned by AIDESEP, a federation representing Peru’s 350,000 indigenous Amazonian peoples. In an open letter to U.S. Representatives, AIDESEP President Alberto Pizango Chota writes: “We are convinced that the FTA will give incentives for further and irreversible destruction of virgin rainforest, which will in turn increase global warming and displace our communities from their home territories. This is an absolutely unacceptable outcome for our planet, and particularly for the territory where our communities live.”
Amazon Watch Executive Director Atossa Soltani added: “This trade agreement sells both Peruvians and Americans short. In this age of global warming, it is imperative that trade policy be environmentally sustainable. The Amazon is the world’s largest carbon sink and we urgently need to not just slow but halt deforestation in the region. This treaty will, instead, speed up that deforestation.”
Approximately 11 percent of the Amazon rainforest lies in Peru, an area nearly twice the size of California that is home to some of the world’s most biodiverse primary tropical rainforests and some of the last indigenous peoples still living a traditional, isolated lifestyle.
Currently, deforestation around the world, but especially in the tropics, accounts for between one fifth and one quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions, with the Brazilian Amazon alone accounting for an estimated 600 million tons of carbon emissions every year – more than U.S. automobile use.
From 2004 to 2007, the proportion of the Peruvian Amazon zoned into oil and gas concessions has risen from 15 percent to around 65 percent, a figure which now looks set to increase further. Those concessions often overlap indigenous territories – despite the failure to receive permission from local communities – and have direct and indirect impacts on the fragile rainforest ecosystem, including through the construction of roads, which then open the forest up to illegal logging, colonization and poaching.
