The Threat To The Forest
Over the last few decades, the intrusion of oil and timber companies has seen repeated exploitation of the rainforest. Even worse, vast tracts of forest have disappeared as successive waves of colonos have cleared trees to grow cash crops (especially coca). Since the late 1980s, conservationists have shown that this large-scale, haphazard slash-and-burn agriculture is unsustainable. The rainforest's nutrients are held in the vegetative and animal life-forms that live, die and are consumed and transformed into new life, mainly by fungal and insect species; the soil itself contains less than twenty percent of the nutrients, so jungle quickly turns to desert when its plant life is destroyed. The decline in nutrient yields has been irreversible. When the Peruvian economy began to suffer in the mid-1980s, foreign credit ended and those with substantial private capital fled, mainly to the US. The government, then led by the young Alan Garcia, was forced to abandon the jungle region, and both its colonist and indigenous inhabitants were left to survive by themselves. This effectively opened the doors for the coca barons , who had already established themselves during the 1970s in the Huallaga Valley, and they moved into the gap left by government aid in the other valleys of the ceja de selva - notably the Pichis-Palcazu and the Apurimac-Ene. During the next ten years, illicit coca production was responsible for some ten percent of deforestation in the twentieth century; furthermore, trade of this lucrative crop led to significant corruption and, more importantly, supported the rise of terrorism . Strategic alliances between coca-growers (the colonists), smugglers (Peruvians and Colombians) and the terrorists (mainly, but not exclusively, Sendero Luminoso) led to a large area of the Peruvian Amazon being utterly lawless. Each party to this alliance gained strength and resources whilst the indigenous peoples of the region suffered, stuck seemingly powerless in the middle. Over the last ten years the Peruvian authorities have persecuted the colonos for the one crop that made them money, and their greatest successes in this area have come largely from the tenacity and lust for cultural and territorial survival among the indigenous groups themselves, like the Ashaninka tribe. Armed by the authorities, they were among the vanguard of resistance to the narco-terrorists, whose movement, once rooted in politics and agriculture, had become blood-thirsty, power-hungry and highly unpopular. In the aftermath of this civil war, which began to fizzle out with the capture of Sendero's leader in 1992, the international financial institutions, whose earlier loans had helped fund the disastrous colonization, started to determine development policy in the Peruvian Amazon at least partly so that those same loans could be repaid, and resources such as fossil-fuels, lumber and land were privatized and sold to the highest bidder. President Fujimori's neo-liberal agenda led to new investment in this legitimate exploitation, but this was mirrored by a huge increase in illegal mining by the informal sector, in many ways beyond the control of the government. Hordes of landless peasants from the Cusco region also flocked into the Madre de Dios to make their fortune from gold mining . In itself this was neither illegal nor an environmental threat, but the introduction of front-loader machines and trucks - which supplanted child-labour in the mines in the early 1990s - increased the environmental damage and rate of territorial consumption by this unregulated industry. By 1999, a massive desert had appeared around Huaypetue, previously a small-time mining frontier town, and the neighbouring communities of Amarakeiri Indians (who have been panning for gold in a small-scale, sustainable fashion for some 30 years) are in serious danger of losing their land and natural resources. As the danger from terrorism faded in the mid-1990s, oil and gas exploration by multinational companies began in earnest. Initially the Peruvian government appeared to be bending over backwards to assist them, and the reserves discovered - mainly in the Madre de Dios and the Camisea - were believed to be of world-shattering importance, with only the Amazonian indigenous organizations and environmental conservationists active in opposition. For the moment, the momentum seems to have slowed right down, as the decision to drill in the Rio de las Piedras has been reversed and work has stopped in the Camisea. However, at macro-economic and political levels this appears to be due more to an unforeseen extension of Fujimori's policies than genuine concern for environmental protection or the territorial and resource rights of the tribal groups. Ultimately, the Peruvian government was not prepared to offer the multinational oil companies as big a monopoly over the country's power supply industry as they desired. In the late 1990s, the price of coca continued to drop in Peru as production shifted to Colombia, and many peasants and jungle Indians alike were looking seriously for alternative cash crops , such as the traditional chocolate and coffee products or newer options like una de gato (a newly rediscovered medicinal herb) and barbasco (a natural pesticide). The way things are going, though, it's hard to see how much longer the indigenous peoples can maintain their culture or their traditional territories. The present forest-dwellers' children will be without a means of earning a living if the forest disappears, but there is still time to save most of it.
Your Tip for Jungle
Help other backpackers! Write your own guides and backpacking tips to Jungle - they will appear instantly on this page - Please only write a tip/guide to Jungle - visit the main Jungle forum to ask a question!
Please do not post links to your site here (they won't work) - please use the Jungle webguide section below! Thanks.
|
