Is one of the world’s most biodiverse areas under threat again from oil and gas?
Draft bill in Peru hopes to open up national parks like Manu to exploration and exploitation
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the Manu National Park in the south-east Peruvian Amazon, arguably one of the most well-known protected areas in the world. For years UNESCO, which designated it a biosphere reserve in 1977, said the biodiversity in Manu “exceeds that of any other place on Earth.” In May SERNANP, the Peruvian state agency running the park, described it as a “natural marvel” where over 1000 bird species and 1300 butterfly species have been recorded.
But is Manu, together with other parks and protected areas in Peru, now under serious threat from the oil and gas industry? In March at a press conference during a visit to the Madre de Dios region Energy Minister Oscar Vera Gargurevich was reported to be talking up a “gas zone extending from the upper River Camisea, in Cusco, towards Madre de Dios, which would permit the installation of a petrochemical industry benefitting the region”, while the then Vice-Minister of Hydrocarbons Enrique Bisetti Solari was quoted by local media referring to “an entire area of gas running from the Upper Camisea. The whole area must be open to investment.”
Congressman Eduardo Salhuana Cavides, who the month before had publicly compared Madre de Dios’s gas deposits to Camisea's, was also at that press conference and reported to have said: “Two or three lots of gas were discovered years ago. What are we doing leaving such an important resource underground?” Regional governor Luis Otzuka Salazar was there too and named one protected area in particular, the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve (ACR), adjacent to Manu: gas has been discovered there, he was reported to say, “but because of NGO interests it has been set aside.”
Have a look at the map below and it’s obvious what areas Vera Gargurevich et al have in mind. The Camisea gas fields - marked by the two big red blobs to the centre-left, discovered by Shell in the 1980s - have produced huge quantities of gas since 2004, but running from there in a south-easterly direction, into Madre de Dios, there are any number of potential deposits, marked in yellow. Some of them, to the far east, lie under the Bahuaja Sonene National Park (“BSNP”), some of them under the ACR, not identified on the map, and some of them, apparently the very biggest, are under Manu, whose hydrocarbon potential has been known about for years. Companies were exploring the region in the 1960s before the park was established and shortly afterwards too, and, as I’ve exposed in articles in The Guardian and elsewhere, the Netherlands-based firm Pluspetrol, which leads the Camisea consortium, has been interested in Manu as well. Indeed, evidence suggests that someone has actually been operating inside the park already, despite it being forbidden.
Worse, the Energy Ministry and Perupetro, the state agency responsible for promoting oil and gas operations in Peru, is currently circulating a frankly extraordinary draft bill that threatens the fundamental integrity of the country’s entire protected areas system, dating from the 1960s, by attempting to open up parks to oil and gas companies, among other things. What part of the word “protected” doesn’t Perupetro et al understand?
The draft bill seeks to amend nine articles of Peru’s 1997 Law on Protected Natural Areas as well as add several extra provisions, with the ultimate intention being to promote the “sustainable exploitation of renewable and non-renewable natural resources.” One of the most dangerous proposals concerns Article 21. Whereas the Law currently states that in protected “areas of indirect use” - national parks, national sanctuaries and historic sanctuaries, such as Machu Picchu - “the extraction of natural resources is not permitted”, Perupetro’s proposal is that that remains the case only “in principle” and that when “the development of a project has been declared by Supreme Decree to be a matter of public necessity and national interest, sustainable exploration and exploitation will be allowed.”
In other words, Perupetro wants to add a giant loophole for the oil and gas industry to jump through.
Manu, along with Bahuaja Sonene, three other parks and numerous other protected areas, is specifically mentioned in the draft bill’s explanatory memorandum. It is the second in a long list of areas which, while not overlapping with existing oil and gas concessions, do or almost overlap with zones that Perupetro has dubbed “promotional areas” where hydrocarbon potential is obvious, thereby “generating the contingency they may not be able to be exploited in the future.” The zone apparently overlapping Manu, dubbed “SM53-19”, currently only includes parts of Manu’s buffer zone, according to a map on Perupetro’s website. Perhaps in a deliberate attempt to downplay just how old Manu is, the memorandum claims the park was established in 2002, when actually it was expanded that year following its creation in 1973.
Condemnation of the draft bill has been swift. NGOs like the Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental (SPDA) have fiercely criticised it, while an Environment Ministry report described it as “unfeasible.” According to one media report, more than 60 civil society organisations, including indigenous federations, have come out against it saying that it proves how “there are people interested in exploring and exploiting the subsoil of highly-protected natural areas like the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park, Manu National Park and the Megantoni National Sanctuary, among others.”
For Vanessa Cueto, from the NGO Derecho, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (DAR), the draft bill is part of a wider push to open up more of the Peruvian Amazon to oil and gas. The number of Perupetro’s “promotional areas” currently number 31 - 25 of them in the Amazon - and the agency is working hard to attract potential investors. For example, a Perupetro delegation made an appearance at a “Global Energy Week” event hosted in London last month, giving a presentation that included a map of Madre de Dios showing potential deposits in both the ACR and Bahuaja Sonene National Park.
“We believe the threat of the bill remains, that it’s very serious, and that it’s connected to the promotion of new hydrocarbon concessions throughout the Amazon,” Cueto tells me.
Certainly, allowing oil and gas firms into areas like Manu, or indeed any part of the Amazon, makes no sense at all given the urgent need to stop burning fossil fuels, and it would be no exaggeration to say that for Peru, its wildlife, biodiversity and many Peruvians in particular, especially indigenous people, it could be catastrophic. Marc Dourojeanni, professor emeritus at the country’s National Agrarian University, could not have put it better when, in a powerful written response to the draft bill, he said there must be people at the Energy Ministry and Perupetro “still living in the 20th century.”
“It is to be hoped that this unfortunate bill does not go anywhere and that, as it should be, it is shelved by the very same sector promoting it,” Dourojeanni wrote. “It is a technically absurd proposal, morally indecent and contrary to the interests of Peru and its Amazon region in particular whose population would be left with the oil era’s death rattle’s worst impacts.”