Development & Aid, Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ENVIRONMENT-CHILE: Who Killed the Swans?

Gustavo González* - Tierramérica

SANTIAGO, Dec 10 2004 (IPS) - In a Río Cruces nature sanctuary in southern Chile, a massive die-off of black-necked swans (Cygnus melancoryphus) was reported by environmental groups, which blamed the contamination caused by a cellulose factory. But the plant’s owners deny responsibility, and the authorities have opted for a cautious attitude.

The Carlos Andwandter sanctuary, named in memory of a scientist and philanthropist, until recently was home to some 6,000 of these swans, the largest population in South America. Some 2,000 remain after approximately 100 died and thousands migrated.

The site, located in the province of Valdivia, 790 km south of Santiago, was declared an internationally important marsh in 1981 under the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands for protecting these ecosystems that are essential for water resources and biodiversity.

In February, after a long process for obtaining environmental permits, the Valdivia factory of the company Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Celco) began operating. Its waste is dumped into the Río Cruces some 15 km from where the river empties into the marsh.

The Regional Environmental Commission hit Celco with a 25,000-dollar fine in April for the foul smell coming from the factory, perceptible 60 km away in the city of Valdivia.

Celco belongs to the Angelini Group, one of the two largest Chilean business conglomerates thanks largely to lumber operations and cellulose production, with investments in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, owning a combined total of 779,000 hectares of forested lands.

Cellulose pulp is surpassed only by copper in generating revenues in Chile’s trade balance, and strong international prices have motivated the Angelini Group to maximise its production.

Sara Larraín, director of the Sustainable Chile Programme, told Tierramérica that at both the Valdivia plant and another in Itata, further north, Celco presented projects for producing 550,000 tons of cellulose annually.

"But it has been illegally producing (at the two sites) more than 850,000 tons, overwhelming the treatment plants, emitting foul odours and contaminating the environment," she said.

In October the black-necked swans began to die off, which the Chilean office of the World Conservation Union attributed to the liquid and gaseous waste from the Celco plant in Río Cruces, as they reported Nov. 25 in Bangkok at the World Conservation Congress.

On Nov. 29, the regional environmental commission for Los Lagos imposed two fines against Celco, worth 5,000 dollars each, for failing to turn in timely reports measuring toxic waste from cellulose production in sediments and water.

But environmental commission director José Luis García Huidobro and the national government’s designated intendant for the Los Lagos region, Patricio Vallespín, insisted it has not been proved that there is a relationship between that irregularity and the deaths of the swans.

They echoed the statements from Eduardo Dockendorff, minister of the presidential secretariat, who argued that the company "should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise."

Celco president José Tomás Guzmán himself said, "As the environmental authority has expressed, we must stress that no scientific study exists that allows us to concluded that this phenomenon (death of swans) is related to the operations of the cellulose plant."

Vallespín said he had entrusted the Southern University of Valdivia to study the causes of the swans’ death, and that the results would be released in two weeks.

Sustainable Chile leader Larraín said Vallespín should order the plant to halt operations, given the 19 environmental and production irregularities found in a report by a consultant for the National Environmental Commission.

The Río Cruces ecosystem "is ill or has been altered," because it no longer supplies food and other necessities for the birds, evidenced by the fact that this year the swans practically did not build nests or lay eggs, Miguel Stuzic, expert with the government’s Agriculture and Livestock Service, said in an interview with El Mercurio newspaper.

"It was obvious from the start that the Celco cellulose plant would discharge liquid waste into the Río Cruces, gravely harming the flora and fauna. The worst is that the damage is irreversible and will spread to other species through consumption of contaminated water," Manuel Baquedano, president of the Instituto de Ecología Política, told Tierramérica.

Baquedano and other environmentalists fought the construction of the cellulose plant, which under its initial plan was going to dump its waste into the Pacific Ocean through a duct, but that was rejected by the local fishing communities.

(*Originally published Dec. 4 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)