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ENVIRONMENT-LATIN AMERICA: Unsustainable Development

Marcela Valente

BARILOCHE, Argentina, Oct 1 2007 (IPS) - Latin America is blessed with the greatest biodiversity on the planet, but its model of economic development, based on intensive exploitation and export of natural resources, destroys ecosystems and even protected areas, while governments do nothing to halt the despoliation.

This is the warning being delivered by environmentalists and academics at the Second Latin American Congress on National Parks and other Protected Areas, which is being held in the ski resort town of Bariloche, 1,500 kilometres southwest of Buenos Aires, in the heart of Nahuel Huapí National Park.

“Latin America is growing at an annual rate of five to six percent, but its economic growth model is accountable not to local needs but to global demand, and this takes a heavy toll on the geography of the region,” Robert Hofstede, head of the South American regional office of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), told IPS.

“Its governments are from different parts of the political spectrum, but there is one thing that nearly all of them have in common: none of them is aware that they must base development on sustainable management of natural resources,” Hofstede said, urging that conservation of protected areas “be adopted as state policy.”

“We have been working on sustainable development for 30 years, but governments have not taken the debate to heart. We are preaching to the converted, at gatherings of those who are already convinced,” he said.

The congress, which opened on Sunday and will run through Saturday, has drawn over 2,000 registered participants, and is organised by the IUCN, the United Nations Environment Programme, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Argentina’s National Parks Administration.

The aim of the conference is to analyse the condition of protected areas in the region, which harbours over 40 percent of the world’s plant and animal species.

Conference speakers made several presentations in which they warned of the main threats looming over ecosystems. Expanding monoculture and production of crops for biofuels, mining, drilling for oil and gas and the development of infrastructure on a grand scale were the most frequently mentioned.

“We’ve already crossed the threshold of environmental degradation,” said Eduardo Gudynas, a Uruguayan working at the Latin American Centre for Social Ecology (CLAES). To illustrate, he pointed to deforestation in the Amazon to enable expansion of cattle ranching, aimed at exporting beef and dairy products.

Gudynas said that the region had experienced a political renewal, which in many countries brought to power leaders who are critical of the free market economic reforms of the 1990s. But he argued that their new attitude did not appear to have had an impact on the environmental agenda.

“Why aren’t progressive governments equally progressive on environmental issues?” he asked.

The exception to the trend is Ecuador, where the Rafael Correa administration is blocking oil extraction in the Yasuni National Park, because the economic benefits are outweighed by the potential environmental damage.

Given the current situation, where preservation is the exception rather than the rule, IUCN’s head of Global Strategies, Gabriel López, said it was necessary to create a new model of sustainable development, in which the environment is not just one more column alongside the economy and society, but the foundation and basis of the new scheme.

“Progress has been made in Latin America, but we’re also losing ground. We urgently need a fundamental change, a new model of development with greater equality and respect for ecosystems. Without this change, the protected areas will become unsustainable islands in only a few years’ time,” he said.

The protected reserves fulfil a major function as providers of environmental services. Purification of air and water, carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change, maintenance of soil fertility and supplying medicines, fibres and timber are just a few of these.

“The current model is getting us nowhere,” Carlos Castaño Uribe, a FAO adviser and compiler of the Diagnosis of the Current Situation of Protected Areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, which was presented at the congress, told IPS.

“Now it’s time to act, not to go on mulling things over,” he said. Castaño, who presided over the First Latin American Congress on National Parks and other Protected Areas in 1997, in Santa Marta, Colombia, said that what is needed is “harmonious management of resources, which sets clear rules for land use.”

“The environmental movement has been making great efforts over the past 30 years,” he said. “It has gained enormous ground and has successfully involved a variety of social sectors, but it’s still not strong enough to combat the challenge of a globalised free market economy, in which even the way we think is being homogenised.”

According to Castaño, the key to a new development model lies with local communities, and there are major problems with these, he said. “The public policies of national, provincial and local governments offer different and even contradictory incentives to the same local people.”

“From the agricultural and livestock viewpoints, people are encouraged to dry out the wetlands, and loans are available to do this, while in the national parks or from environmental authorities, incentives are offered to conserve them. For the local person, it’s just a matter of taking the best offer, whatever suits him or her best,” he complained.

According to Castaño’s report, protected reserves in Latin America and the Caribbean have doubled in area over the past decade, and many more social sectors are involved in their conservation. But Hofstede said that it was important to involve industry, international trade and governments.

The head of Argentina’s National Parks Administration, Héctor Espina, acknowledged that strategies are needed to prioritise protected areas in public policy-making. He pointed out that national parks in this country receive three million visitors a year, who bring in 600 million dollars.

Julia Carabias, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a former environment secretary in Mexico, said she regretted that people from many countries criticise protected areas as “a luxury” that poor countries cannot afford. Protected reserves, she said, “are not a barrier to development, but an alternative.”