Jun 21st 2001 | QUITO
From The Economist print edition

Poor countries need economic development, but, like rich countries before them, increasingly dislike the pollution it brings. Two examples, from Ecuador and Peru

“FOUR birdwatchers and a couple of mayors.” That is how Ecuador’s president, Gustavo Noboa, describes environmental opposition to the route of a new $1.1 billion oil pipeline. The pipeline, already approved by the government, promises to double Ecuador’s oil-transport capacity and boost GDP growth by 2.5% a year until 2020. Unfortunately, it will also slice through one of the world’s few cloud-forests still intact.

OCP Ecuador, a consortium led by an Argentine-Spanish oil giant, Repsol-YPF, and Canada’s Alberta Energy, will build and operate the heavy-crude-oil pipeline that will run 500km (310 miles) from Ecuador’s oil-rich Amazon across the Andes to the export docks on the Pacific coast (see map). For most of its length, the pipeline runs meekly parallel to the existing oil pipeline. But one 157 km section, known as the northern route, takes a new path through primary Andean cloud-forest in the Mindo-Nambillo reserve. The area supports over 450 species of birds, almost 5% of the world’s total, 46 of which are considered endangered. It also provides jobs in eco-tourism for over 70% of the local population.

Entrix, the American company hired by OCP Ecuador to carry out the environmental study, says that, all things considered, the northern route was the best of the five studied. Environmentalists contend that the company had decided on the northern route from the beginning, and failed to study the alternatives in sufficient depth.

The risk of damage was highlighted last week when landslides ruptured Ecuador’s state-owned transnational pipeline, spilling over 7,000 barrels of oil into the Andean forests east of Quito. Since 1998 this pipeline has burst 14 times, spilling a total of 145,000 barrels of oil.

Since the area is prone to landslides and earthquakes, accidents are inevitable, even if OCP Ecuador proceeds as carefully as it has promised. At the least, a corridor seven metres wide and 13.6km long will have to be cleared through protected forest. Environmentalists say this must inevitably mean the building of access roads, and with the roads will come illegal colonisation and cattle grazing. Techint, an Argentine company that is part of the OCP consortium, has already been fined $13,800 by the environment ministry for felling trees in a federally protected forest.

With Ecuador’s economy still struggling to recover from its worst period in over a century (GDP shrank by 7.3% in 1999), environmental protection comes low on Mr Noboa’s list. It was the energy ministry that had to bestow final approval on the enviromental study, a clear conflict of interest. Days before the study was approved, Mr Noboa said the government liked the route and he would not let environmentalists delay things. “I’m not going to let anyone screw with the country,” he said. “I’ll give them war.”

According to the government, the pipeline will provide 52,000 new jobs directly and indirectly while it is being built and will attract foreign investment of $2.6 billion over the next three years. In a country in desperate need of foreign direct investment and higher exports, and where 52% of the population earn less than $2 a day, only the wildest environmentalists deny the need for the pipeline. They just wish it could go somewhere else