2023-04-22 14:00:41
On Wednesday, March 22, the Board of Administration of the Contingency Fund for Environmental Remediation (FCRA), responsible for monitoring the environmental remediation process of the 146 areas impacted as a result of hydrocarbon activities in the Pastaza, Tigre, Corrientes and Marañón river basins. To date, no area has been remediated.
Before that, the Federation of Native Communities of the Corrientes Basin (Feconacor), the Quechua Indigenous Federation of Pastaza (Fediquep), the Cocama Association of Development and Conservation of San Pablo de Tipishca (Acodecospat) and the Organization of Amazonian Kichwa Indigenous Peoples of the Peru-Ecuador Border (Opikafpe) expressed their concern, over the setbacks of the Ministry of Energy and Mines (Minem), since more than 500 native communities are still exposed to the risk of contamination.
The delays are due to the fact that Minem has proposed to cancel the current contract with the company Consorcio Ecodes Varichemin charge of designing the remediation plans, and acquiring the services of a new, with a budget of S/ 38 million. This through National Fund for Natural Areas Protected by the State (Profonanpe)a private entity in charge of the administration of the FCRA since 2020.
The federations warn that the change would take more than two years, with the consequent increase in health risks for those affected. But this would not be the only problem that would be delaying attention to disasters.
Timeline
in 2020 Profonanpe assumed the administration of the Fund created by Law 30321. Since then, it has prepared rehabilitation plans to be executed in 32 areas impacted by crude oil. However, more than two years after taking command of said Fund, the Ministry of Energy and Mines has barely given the green light to 15 plans: 12 correspond to the Corrientes river, one to the Pastaza and two to the Tigre.
Worse still, to date none of the approved plans has established the costs of transporting the specialists and their equipment to the affected places.
The communities of the Northern Amazon have spent more than 50 years denouncing the lack of responsibility on the part of oil companies such as Petroperú and Pluspetrol Norteand state abandonment that permanently impacts the attention to assistance claims for environmental and health emergencies.
Flower White Hauchecornemanager of the Profonanpe Environmental Liabilities Program, affirmed that, despite the continuity of spills in the country, the Fund is only allowed to deal with those that have occurred in the rivers in the past years Pastaza, Cashew, Tigre and Corrientes, a territory that only covers the department of Loreto.
He added that, since the private entity assumed the administrative responsibility of the Fund, in 2020, the State has given them a total budget of S/ 431 million to deal with disasters only in the Four Basins.
“The Fund is not for places where there are spills right now, but for the old ones. Until now, the State has transferred a total of S/ 431 million to the Fund. The plans that began to be made in 2018 were presented to the Minem in 2019, and in 2020 the observations arrived at these 30 plans and there are almost 5,000. But there are close to S/ 51 million that have been executed in preparing rehabilitation plans, making observations, going out to the field, transfers”, he indicated.
Recently added to the list of impacted places 102 new prioritized areas have been added. However, the federations of the Four Basins have communicated that, between Block 192 and Block 8, located in Loreto, exist more than 3000 sites without any kind of technical or budgetary attentionwhich means a distant and uncertain remediation for the native communities that live in these areas, and without counting other affected sectors as a result of the 424 spills that have occurred in the last 10 years.
In this sense, Blanco warns about some of the difficulties to quickly manage the remediation actions, which include the identification of the places, work carried out by the Agency for Environmental Assessment and Enforcement (OEFA).
“What costs the most in remediation is definitely logistics, getting to those sites with all the equipment, all the personnel, has a fairly high cost. There are some places that we cannot reach by land because there is no road maintenance, which translates into paralyzing or going by river or air, which is much more expensive, then the situation is serious because if people cannot access health and education services, how are we going to get there with remediation”, warns Blanco.
Although Profonanpe is dedicated to prioritizing which areas to attend to and how to spend the resources by contracting and supervising companies specialized in carrying out rehabilitation plans, the entity currently in charge of the Fund points out that the Minem delays the authorizations to execute said plans, causing the delay in the attention of the places contaminated with oil.
“A critical issue is whether the proposal is going to work for the situation. What Minem is asking for is the demonstration that this technology will work, and that implies going to the field and additional resources. It is critical because you cannot advance if the Minem is not convinced of the technology”, the spokeswoman for the environmental fund expressed with concern.
Blanco highlights the need for this environmental problem not to continue to go unnoticed by the Executive, since the demands by the indigenous peoples of the Northern Amazon continue to increase and the delays increasingly put their living conditions at risk, impacted severely due to oil contamination. “Perhaps we should insist on international events to put the issue on the agenda,” he concluded. Inforegion repeatedly requested the position of Minem on the delays that compromise the execution of the remediation plans in the Cuatro Cuencas. However, he got no response.
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