Peruvian Amazon on sale

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I quote part of an article which appeared in Article 21 of January 29, 2008, entitled "Peruvian Amazon on sale". (Read the entire article, in Italian)

Peruvian President Alan Garcia has announced that he wants to sell to timber multinationals 8 million hectares of primary forest in the Amazon. According to Alan García only with privatization the forest can produce "oxygen, timber and work for the benefit of all Peruvians." But to make this announcement he had to go to Madrid, the so-called homeland, where he had the support of the multinational timber companies. This sale would finally exceed the limits established by the laws of the 1970s, which gave lands in concession only and not for sale, and only in small lots so that the state could monitor its use and encourage the traditional usage of the forest resources of the Amazon.

The privatisation draft of Peruvian Amazon regions is meeting strong opposition from the local people, indigenous and peasant communities that consider themselves not only excluded, but even at risk of extinction in a model of industrial exploitation of the forest such as the neoliberal model desired by Alan García. The Peruvian Amazon regions inhabitants traditionally live with an extensive model of forestry which coincides with long periods of rest of the forest. It is the model that has preserved the primary forest until today avoiding the primary forest depletion that characterizes large parts of Brazilian Amazon regions.

In reading the article I am reminded of what I have always regarded as an essential prerequisite to think about before any reasoning: it seems that in any financial or commercial event on a large scale – mega-concessions for exploitation, financial giants, hypermarkets or mega shopping malls, gigantic infrastructures, mega interventions on territory – the only real beneficiaries of all hyper, mega, giga, super enterprises of this kind are the major power groups in which the wealth of a country is concentrated, at the expense of ordinary people, of the needs, well-being and future of ordinary people.

Bruno Picozzi (in translation)