The wording could hardly be clearer. The “development of the exploration and exploitation of gas reserves,” states Article 4 of a bill submitted by seven members of Peru’s Alianza para el Progreso party to Congress just over a week ago, “in the Manu National Park, the Bahuaja Sonene National Park and the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve is authorised, when such activities form part of the strategic development of the Madre de Dios Gas Basin.”
For anyone confused, surprised or perhaps even astonished by that sentence - gas operations in a park? Wtf? - the next one attempts to smooth things over. “This authorisation constitutes a specific exception to what is established by the [1997] Law on Protected Natural Areas”, which explicitly prohibits “the extraction of natural resources” in parks and certain other categories of “protected natural areas” (PNAs), as Peruvian law formally calls them.
These aren’t your average PNAs. For sometime UNESCO was calling Manu, which forms the core part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site, the “most biodiverse place on earth”, while Bahuaja Sonene, established exactly 30 years ago, has long been recognised for its extraordinary diversity of mammals, birds and ecosystems. The Amarakaeri Communal Reserve sits right between them.
The territories of various indigenous peoples, including the Arakbut, Ese’eja and Matsigenka, as well as some people living in “isolation”, like the so-called “Mashco-Piro”, these three PNAs extend for more than three million hectares across the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon. No doubt about it, this is one of the most biodiverse, wildlife-rich regions anywhere in the world.
But lying under that forest are believed to be large natural gas deposits. Just to the west of Manu gas has been pumped for more than 20 years from what has come to be known as the Camisea Gas Project, after deposits were discovered by Shell in the 1980s. That gas appears to be part of a “Trend Gasífero” - or “Tren Gasífero”, as it seems to have been mis-spelt or Hispanicised by some of its Peruvian promoters - running south-east from Camisea and the banks of the River Urubamba through Manu, Amarakaeri and into Bahuaja Sonene, where a serious attempt to exploit gas in the mid-2000s was fended off.
This new bill, presented by Congressman Eduardo Salhuana Cavides, follows one submitted in July last year which sought to modify the Law on Protected Natural Areas so that extractive operations can take place in parks. It didn’t name Manu or Bahuaja Sonene specifically, but was widely understood to have them in mind. Indeed, various indigenous federations, including CONAP and FENAP, publicly charged that the “main interest” of that bill was to open up Manu, Bahuaja Sonene and Amarakaeri, as well as the Alto Purús National Park.
Today that bill remains live, although in November the Congress’s Commission on Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples, the Environment and Ecology (CPAAAEE) recommended shelving it, and it was fiercely condemned by indigenous federations, dozens of other civil society organisations and more than 100 individuals. The reasons given included that it violates and/or compromises Peru’s Constitution, indigenous peoples’s rights, government policies on energy, climate and conservation, and many of the country’s international obligations, in addition to the obvious risks that it poses to some of Peru’s most stunning locations, landscapes and the territories and livelihoods of indigenous peoples.
Now there is this new bill to fight too, which presumably will generate similar condemnation from civil society. In a worrying initial development Peru’s Congress decided last week that it will be discussed by the Commission on Energy and Mines and the Commission on the Economy, Banks, Finance and Financial Intelligence - but not the CPAAAEE.