Ecuadoran President Confirms Deal to Leave Oil Under Yasuni Park
Environment News Service
04/26/2010
QUITO, Ecuador, April 26, 2010 (ENS) - President Raphael Correa now has approved an agreement to leave Ecuador's largest oil reserves, amounting to some 900 million barrels, underground in Yasuni National Park in exchange for more than $3 billion.
Under the unprecedented agreement, known as the Yasuni-ITT Initiative, the government of Ecuador will refrain from exploiting the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini oil field within the Amazon rainforest park, which scientists have determined to be the most biodiverse area in all of South America.
The agreement between Ecuador and the United Nations Development Programme creating a trust fund to receive donations to the Yasuni-ITT Initiative was nearly signed in December at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, but at the last minute, President Correa instructed his negotiators to hold back until several sticking points were resolved.
Now, those issues are settled and the agreement will be signed within the next week to 10 days, according to Ivonne Baki, who now heads the president's negotiations committee for the Yasuni-ITT Initiative.
"It has been reviewed by the president and was approved by the president," she said of the detailed Terms of Reference for the UN Development Programme trust fund.
Baki, a former Ecuadoran ambassador to the United States, told ENS in an interview that the trust fund agreement presented in Copenhagen needed changes to gain presidential approval. "In order for us to get the money from countries, we needed to have an international fund. But that fund was set up not as the president was told it would be, not according to discussions before," she said. "He had to change some of those things."
The agreement now refers not to "donors," a term President Correa found unsatisfactory, but to "contributors."
"Ecuador is a contributor, other countries are also contributors," Baki said.
In addition, President Correa insisted that Ecuador have a majority on the trust fund board of directors. Under the revised agreement, there will be three board members from Ecuador, two board members from contributing countries, and one position representing civil society that was not there in the previous version.
