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Arabica Robusta

BIC's new handbook for advocacy on extractive industry revenues | Bank Information Cent... - 0 views

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    The Handbook is intended as a tool for civil society organizations, journalists and other members of the public interested in learning more about transparency and fiscal management in the natural resource sectors. It distills and builds upon information contained in the IMF's document, with a focus on areas especially pertinent for civil society groups seeking to better understand how extractive industry (EI) sectors are managed. The Handbook aims to help civil society groups hold governments and private companies accountable for the exploitation of natural resources in their country.[2] In producing this Handbook, BIC is not endorsing the extractive industries or asserting that improved transparency, alone, would address the myriad social, environmental and economic impacts associated with natural resource exploitation. Rather, this document aims to provide citizens in resource-rich countries with one more tool to strengthen their efforts to hold industry actors and governments accountable.
Arabica Robusta

Can indigenous operators cope after foreigners' exit? - The Nation - 1 views

  • Akabogu added: “Local content in the oil industry is supposed to be a long term thing; it is supposed to be implemented in a gradual manner because the enabling environment is not there. The ideal thing would have been to retain the IOCs by addressing the issues that necessitated their divestment.” He said the IOCs were merely shifting their risks to the local operators who would now deal with issues of oil bunkering and theft.
  • To renowned environmental expert and coordinator of Oil Watch International, Mr. Nnimmo Bassey, the development is hardly surprising. According to him, divestment is a business strategy by the IOCs to cut losses and maximize profits. “You will notice that they are divesting mostly from onshore and swamp fields that intersect with communities that they have massively polluted and abused. Their aged facilities in those locations will certainly bring on more resource ownership and social conflicts. So, if local companies are happy to step in and take the flak that means ‘good’ business for the IOCs,” he observed
  • Bassey also said that on the other hand, the IOCs mostly divested to the extent of their equity holdings in such fields and production also activities. “They still own the pipelines and related facilities. What that means is that they are renovating their image, collecting rents from their facilities and generally smiling to the bank while the local companies will eventually take the beating for the pollutions, conflicts and other social disruptions. We see the divestment as a business strategy that benefits the IOCs and leaves the oil field communities and the environment at risk,” he told The Nation.
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  • Bassey noted, for instance, that although the PIB is a good first step, the document as packaged, is not as strong as it ought to be. According to him, the PIB does not have stringent pro-people and pro-environment provisions, as the country, despite the PIB, will still be having illegal routine gas flaring. He blamed the delay in passing the bill on what he described as ‘toxic politics’ and pressure from the IOCs who have openly said they would not accept laws that curb their excessive profits as well as wrong perception by some legislators that provision of funds for communities mean more money to the oil-bearing states.
  • Nnimmo argued that although, the PIB makes the offer of money to oil-bearing communities on one hand, it takes it away on the other. “The PIB criminalises communities when it says that if oil facilities are tampered with then the communities, local government areas, and states would pay. Communities are not the policemen of oil facilities. The PIB speaks the old language of subsisting laws that free IOCs of responsibility where facilities are interfered with by third parties. That has made the claim of sabotage the favourite refrain of the oil companies even before incidents are investigated. The PIB fell into the same anti-people trap,” he explained.
  • Bassey insisted that what Nigeria needs to do right now is to “massively increase oil revenues by halting oil theft. We are not talking about poor villagers scooping crude oil in buckets and jerry cans. Those also need to be stopped. We are talking about the industrial-scale oil theft going on in the oil sector. The official figure bandied by the Ministry of Finance as well as the National Assembly is that 400,000 barrels of crude oil are stolen everyday,” he said As for local operators, Bassey and other experts and stakeholders said the ability of local operators to hold their own would depend, to a very large extent, on better collaboration, better host community management, proper valuation and raising smart financing. They also require huge investment in knowledge, research and development (R&D).
  • Mutiu Sunmonu, Managing Director of SPDC, said the divestment of his company’s assets was a deliberate measure to encourage indigenous participation in the upstream oil and gas industry. His words: “We want to create a new set of indigenous players in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry within the next 10 to 20 years from now, while the IOCs concentrate on more difficult issues and also allow us focus on material oil and gas fields.” The divestments are seen by some industry watchers as representing the single largest opportunity for Nigerian operators with the requisite expertise and capital to emerge as major upstream players.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Review of Duncan Clarke's Crude Continent: the Struggle for Africa's Oil Prize - 0 views

  • The thrust of Crude Continent is precisely (and often, not so precisely) this: oil, far from being a curse, could actually save Africa. It is oil that will modernise Africa and oil that will lead it out of what Clarke dubs – without ever defining – ‘African medievalism’. Clarke argues that those countries without oil are the ones that are truly cursed, for they will be left ‘largely backward’.
  • This intriguing notion is preached throughout Crude Continent, with Clarke seeking to expose as fools those who argue that Africa's oil-rich countries are being poisoned to the core by the so-called ‘resource curse’. Our candid author is particularly incensed by two experts' ‘scribblings on oil’, both released last year: Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an Oxford lecturer; and Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson, an associate fellow at Chatham House, London.
  • Clarke asks us to consider what he calls the long-term ‘multiplier effects’, the direct and indirect benefits of the oil and gas industry, including employment creation, foreign exchange inputs and capital inflow, technology transfers, fiscal funding and ‘indirect supply chain effects’. These are much more significant than the ‘palliative band-aid…of corporate social investment’ that Clarke clearly detests. He berates the fact that no one has ever ‘properly identified and measured’ the social and economic benefits of oil and gas projects in Africa.
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  • Regularly tumbling into appalling metaphor and analogy, Clarke nevertheless concludes: ‘North and south Sudan may be bound by the umbilical cords of a chequered politics and oil history, but as with Siamese twins these links can also be severed.’
  • Parts three and four provide the reader with 140 pages of comprehensive information on corporate oil operations in Africa and the global scramble for the big prize. Leaving aside his irritating penchant for metamorphosis – lions becoming countries, rhinos turning into multinationals – Clarke offers readers the chance to delve into his vast wealth of knowledge. Together with a comprehensive index, these two sections make it easy to find out which company is drilling what wells, where and with whom. Our expert guide also leads us around the world explaining how different nations are capturing Africa's oil and gas potential. All fascinating stuff.
  • The perpetuation of the petroleum age might make the current crop of oil executives and certain political leaders happy, but it is dangerously optimistic to suggest that the future well-being of African people depends primarily on drilling oil.
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    The thrust of Crude Continent is precisely (and often, not so precisely) this: oil, far from being a curse, could actually save Africa. It is oil that will modernise Africa and oil that will lead it out of what Clarke dubs - without ever defining - 'African medievalism'. Clarke argues that those countries without oil are the ones that are truly cursed, for they will be left 'largely backward'.
Arabica Robusta

Oil: Fueling Another Debt Crisis? - 0 views

  • it is clear that soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of debt cancellation in some countries, especially poor oil-importing nations.
  • In Escaping the Resource Curse, Columbia University professors Macartan Humphreys, Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz identify a vast array of contributing causes to the resource curse. Corruption is among the most severe, they conclude. “The short run availability of large financial assets increases the opportunity for the theft of such assets by political leaders. Those who control these assets can use that wealth to maintain themselves in power, either through legal means (e.g., spending in political campaigns) or coercive ones (e.g., funding militias).” Local corruption, they note, is often aided and abetted by international companies. “International mining and oil companies that seek to maximize profits find that they can lower the costs of obtaining resources more easily by obtaining the resources at below market value — by bribing government officials — than by figuring out how to extract the resources more efficiently.”
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      Corporate and government underpinnings of "resource curse."
  • High oil prices have a clear economic effect. But for highly indebted, impoverished countries, climate change, fueled significantly by CO2 emissions from cars and other gas-guzzling vehicles in the North, will have serious ecological, social and economic impacts as well.
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  • Says Saul, “A key way to transition away from dependence on oil is through debt cancellation. Countries need fiscal space in order to invest in the post-fossil fuel economy — but the debt trap keeps countries from meeting a wide variety of social needs.”
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    it is clear that soaring oil prices are undermining the benefits of debt cancellation in some countries, especially poor oil-importing nations.
Arabica Robusta

Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispo... - 0 views

  • Although Africa is not as well endowed in hydrocarbons (both oil and gas) as the Gulf states, the continent “is all set to balance power,” and as a consequence it is “the subject of fierce competition by energy companies.” IHS Energy—one of the oil industry’s major consulting companies—expects African oil production, especially along the Atlantic littoral, to attract “huge exploration investment” contributing over 30 percent of world liquid hydrocarbon production by 2010. Over the last five years when new oilfield discoveries were scarce, one in every four barrels of new petroleum discovered outside of Northern America was found in Africa. A new scramble is in the making. The battleground consists of the rich African oilfields
  • Africa is, according to the intelligence community, the “new frontier” in the fight against revolutionary Islam. Energy security, it turns out, is a terrifying hybrid of the old and the new: primitive accumulation and American militarism coupled to the war on terror.
  • To see the African crisis, however, as a moral or ethical failure on the part of the “international community” (not least in its failure to meet the pledges promised by the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty by half by 2015) is only a partial truth. The real crisis of Africa is that after twenty-five years of brutal neoliberal reform, and savage World Bank structural adjustment and IMF stabilization, African development has failed catastrophically.
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  • The pillaging and privatization of the state—whatever its African “pathologies”—and the African commons is the most extraordinary spectacle of accumulation by dispossession, all made in the name of foreign assistance. The involution of the African city, notes Davis, has as its corollary not an insurgent lumpenproletariat but rather a vast political universe of Islamism and Pentecostalism. It is this occult world of invisible powers—whether populist Islam in Kano or witchcraft in Soweto—that represents the most compelling ideological legacy of neoliberal utopianism in Africa.
  • The African accumulation crisis, and the dynamics of capital and trade flows, are in practice complex and uneven. In addition to oil (and the very few cases of manufacturing growth in places like Mauritius which are little more than national export-processing platforms), the other source of economic dynamism is the (uneven) emergence of global value chains. This can be seen especially in relation to high-value agricultures (fresh fruits and vegetables) in South Africa, flowers in Kenya, green beans in Senegal. Such forms of contract production, typically buyer-driven commodity chains in which retailers exert enormous power, have created islands of agrarian capitalism that contribute to and deepen patterns of existing inequality across Africa and further the interests of business elites, which are often not African. The deepening of commodification in the countryside in tandem with demographic pressures (caused as much by civil war and displacement as high fertility regimes) has made land struggles a vivid part of the new landscape of African development.
  • It is no surprise that against this backdrop the development establishment flails around wildly. On the one side stands former World Bank economist William Easterly for whom all aid (“planning”) has been a total (and unaccountable) failure.
  • On the other stands the one-man industry otherwise known as Jeffrey Sachs who seeks to expand foreign aid—$30 billion a year for Africa—and to initiate a Global Compact by which “the rich will help save the poor,” who are as much hampered by poor physical geography as governance failure.
  • In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphically depicted in the documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare. At the other pole are the black holes of recession, withdrawal, and uneven commodification. These complex trajectories of accumulation are dominated at this moment by the centrality of extraction and a return to primary commodity production.
  • All African governments have organized their oil sectors through state oil companies that have some forms of collaborative venture with the major transnational oil companies (customarily operated through oil leases and joint memoranda of understanding).
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      Production share arrangements and joint ventures.
  • In general the international oil companies operating in Africa have production share arrangements with state oil companies (Nigeria is the exception which operates largely through joint ventures).
  • The nightmarish legacy of oil politics must be traced back to the heady boom days of the 1970s. The boom detonated a huge influx of petro-dollars and launched an ambitious (and largely autocratic) state-led modernization program. Central to the operations of the new oil economy was the emergence of an “oil complex” that overlaps with, but is not identical to, the “petro-state.” The latter is comprised of several key institutional elements: (1) a statutory monopoly over mineral exploitation, (2) a nationalized (state) oil company that operates through joint ventures with oil majors who are granted territorial concessions (blocs), (3) the security apparatuses of the state (often working in a complementary fashion with the private security forces of the companies) who ensure that costly investments are secured, (4) the oil producing communities themselves within whose customary jurisdiction the wells are located, and (5) a political mechanism by which oil revenues are distributed.
  • The oil revenue distribution question—whether in a federal system like Nigeria or in an autocratic monarchy like Saudi Arabia—is an indispensable part of understanding the combustible politics of imperial oil.
  • there has been a process of radical fiscal centralism in which the oil-producing states (composed of ethnic minorities) have lost and the non-oil producing ethnic majorities have gained—by fair means or foul.
  • the oil complex. First, the geo-strategic interest in oil means that military and other forces are part of the local oil complex. Second, local and global civil society enters into the oil complex either through transnational advocacy groups concerned with human rights and the transparency of the entire oil sector, or through local social movements and NGOs fighting over the consequences of the oil industry and the accountability of the petro-state. Third, the transnational oil business—the majors, the independents, and the vast service industry—are actively involved in the process of local development through community development, corporate social responsibility and stakeholder inclusion. Fourth, the inevitable struggle over oil wealth—who controls and owns it, who has rights over it, and how the wealth is to be deployed and used—inserts a panoply of local political forces (ethnic militias, paramilitaries, separatist movements, and so on) into the operations of the oil complex (the conditions in Colombia are an exemplary case). In some circumstances oil operations are the object of civil wars. Fifth, multilateral development agencies (the IMF and the IBRD) and financial corporations like the export credit agencies appear as key “brokers” in the construction and expansion of the energy sectors in oil-producing states (and latterly the multilaterals are pressured to become the enforcers of transparency among governments and oil companies). And not least, there is the relationship between oil and the shady world of drugs, illicit wealth (oil theft for example), mercenaries, and the black economy.
  • oil complex is a sort of corporate enclave economy but also a center of political and economic calculation that can only be understood through the operation of a set of local, national, and transnational forces that can be dubbed as “imperial oil.” The struggle for resource control that has taken center stage o
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      oil complex as a corporate enclave economy.
  • The current crisis points to the fact that the oil-producing region in Nigeria now stands at the center of Nigerian politics—for four reasons. First, the efforts led by a number of Niger Delta states for “resource control” expanded access to and control over oil and oil revenues. Second, there was the struggle for self-determination of minority peoples in the region and the clamor for a sovereign national conference to rewrite the constitutional basis of the federation itself. Third, there is a crisis of rule in the region as a number of state and local governments are rendered helpless by militant youth movements, growing insecurity, and ugly intra-community, inter-ethnic, and state violence which—as the recent events point out—can threaten the flow of oil and the much vaunted energy security of the United States. And not least, there is the emergence of a so-called South-South Alliance making for a powerful coalition of small and hitherto politically marginalized oil producing states (Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Cross River, Delta, Ondo, and Rivers) capable of challenging the ruling ethnic majorities (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Ibo) in the run-up to the 2007 elections.
  • Not surprisingly the deadly operations of corporate oil, autocratic petro-states, and the violent potentialities of the oil complex have forced the question of transparency and accountability of oil operations onto the international agenda. Tony Blair’s Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the IMF’s oil diagnostics program, and the Soros Foundation’s Revenue Watch are all (voluntary) efforts to provide a veneer of respectability to a rank and turbulent industry. But the real action lies elsewhere. The danger is that the ongoing U.S. militarization of the region could amplify the presence of mercenaries and paramilitaries, creating conditions not unlike those in Colombia.
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    In reality what is on offer is an even bleaker world of military neoliberalism. At one pole are enclaves of often militarily fortified accumulation (of which the oil complex is the paradigmatic case) and the violent, sometimes chaotic, markets so graphica
Arabica Robusta

Shell returns to massively polluted Nigeria oil region - 0 views

  • “The intention is to determine the state of our facilities since we suspended operations in the area in 1993, and determine how best to decommission them,” the head of Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC), Mutiu Sunmonu, said in a statement.
  • “If the purpose is to clean the spills, they are welcome but UNEP should supervise the exercise… The problem we have with Shell is that it is not socially responsible,” said Wiwa, an activist with the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People.
Arabica Robusta

Some good background reading while waiting for the Kiobel decision - Pipe(line)Dreams - 0 views

  • Amid severe repression, nine members of the movement, including Dr Barinem Kiobel, were arrested, charged with specious crimes, tortured and summarily hanged. Dr Kiobel’s widow Esther and 11 other plaintiffs, all either victims of torture or relatives of victims residing in the US brought a class action suit in the US District Court.
  • In its defence, Shell argued that “the law of nations” does not recognise corporate liability for human rights abuses and that the ATS does not apply extraterritorially. Legal observers expect a decision in the Kiobel case at any time.
  • In justifying its position against the extraterritorial application of US laws, Shell underscored the “adverse consequences to US trade and foreign policy of a liberal expansion of private causes of action against corporations under international law”. It also posited that the costs associated with potential liability “may lead corporations to reduce their operations in the less-developed countries from which these suits tend to arise, to the detriment of citizens of those countries who benefit from foreign investment”.
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  • The US is not alone in grappling with the liability of transnational corporations for human rights abuses: in path-breaking litigation, Hudbay Minerals stands accused in Canadian courts of complicity in human rights abuses in Guatemala.
  • Complicating efforts to hold transnational corporations accountable is the fact that companies often construct a series of subsidiary companies that mask their true ownership, make it hard to impost corporate liability. Imposing corporate accountability is further impeded by other factors.
  • Logistically, many countries in the Global South where many transnational corporations operate lack the institutional and judicial capacity to manage complex litigation. Moreover, subsidiary companies often funnel profits to the parent corporations, leaving them with inadequate cash reserves to satisfy legal liabilities. Lastly, as noted above, governments may be reluctant to send a message of corporate accountability because those in power are often the most direct beneficiaries of corporate activity.
  • The corporations that voluntarily adhere to principles of Corporate Social Responsibility are likely not the vociferous opponents of accountability, and are arguably at a competitive disadvantage when others are permitted to violate human rights with impunity. Given corporate complicity in egregious abuses around the world, respect for human rights should not be a function of voluntary compliance but instead a matter of enforceable legal rights. The international community must demand accountability, and reinforce and reaffirm the practices of corporations that do take seriously the impact of their behaviour. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Kiobel case should advance global justice by categorically rejecting impunity for human rights abuses in which transnational corporations are complicit.
Arabica Robusta

Nigeria Bans Occupy Video About Its Oil Curse, Video Obviously Goes Viral | Motherboard - 0 views

  • But instead of protesting financial institutions that had left the economy in ruins, Nigerians turned out in droves to protest the removal of a fuel subsidy that kept gasoline affordable for the public—and also threatened to destroy Nigeria's economic stability
  • Replete with commentary from a Nobel laureate, it offers a pretty even-handed look at the economics of the subsidy, the protests, and the political situation in Nigeria. But when it was submitted to Nigeria's National Film and Video Censors Board for approval it was promptly banned. The film was obviously nixed because it casts the government in a critical light; but, of course, banning a controversial film without blocking it online is a surefire way to make it go viral.
Arabica Robusta

Fuelling Poverty: a Film on the (Mis)Management of Nigeria's Oil Wealth | Zainab's Musings - 0 views

  • It was towards the end of our lunch discussion that the journalist mentioned the documentary “Fuelling Poverty”, credited it to Ishaya Bako and urged me to watch it on Youtube. The filmmaker, true to his African values, was quite bashful as he smiled modestly, lowered his voice and acknowledged he made the film. It all sounded really interesting so I promised to watch the short film afterwards.
  • Ironically, the move by the government to ban the documentary from TV stations in Nigeria, simply fueled people’s interest in it – those who had never heard of it prior to this incident and others, like myself, who only just got round to watching it. Now the film has gone viral! Nigerians are sharing the link to the Youtube video via Blackberry Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools. Soon, counterfeit DVD copies will be sold freely at traffic jams in Nigerian cities
Arabica Robusta

Angola: The Bloody 'Democracy' Of An Oil Republic - International Business Times - 0 views

  • The Angolan government, led by reformed socialist strongman President Jose Eduardo dos Santos since 1979, has recently touted its oil wealth, economic growth and social stability to attract foreign investment, but avoids the topic of political repression and glaring economic disparities. Rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized the government's use of violence to silence critics, exemplified by the recent attack on the 10 activists in Luanda. "This brutal beating highlights the ongoing threat of violence that anyone speaking up for free speech in Angola faces," Muluka-Anne Miti, Amnesty International's Angola researcher, said in a statement.
Arabica Robusta

Exxon 'loses' Venezuela nationalisation case - Features - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  • In the latest showdown between western oil companies and Venezuela’s populist president, Exxon Mobil is widely seen as the loser, after the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ruled that the world’s biggest oil company would not be entitled to most of the damages it demanded after its fields were nationalised.
  • Despite this recent victory, PDVSA is facing some trouble. Under Chavez, the energy giant has undertaken ambitious social spending, running subsidised food distribution programmes and international aid projects as if it were a state unto itself. Critics say oil companies should not be delivering government services. And the money used for "Bolivarian" projects means the corporation has less to invest in developing new reserves; production has dropped from about 3.3m barrels per day in 1998 to about 2.25m in 2011, The Economist reported.
  • Like many of its South American neighbours, Venezuela has drastically reduced poverty in the past decade; the Bolivarian Republic’s poverty rate fell from 48.6 per cent in 2002 to 27.8 per cent in 2010, according to the UN Commission for Latin America's 2011 report. Inequality also declined sharply. This progress is linked to tough negotiations with foreign oil companies, so the state can have more resources to invest in local communities, Chavez’s supporters contend.
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    This kind of oil company development is certainly more sustainable than self-interested CSR and public-private partnerships by corporations legally required to maximize their own profits.
Arabica Robusta

Ecuadoreans Plan Spasm of Lawsuits Against Chevron - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The case stems from oil pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest, but Chevron does not operate there and has no significant assets in the country. It was Texaco, which Chevron acquired in a merger in 2001, that was accused of widespread environmental damage before pulling out of Ecuador in the early 1990s.
  • Chevron has much larger operations elsewhere in Latin America, and the plaintiffs’ strategy of pursuing the company across the region could open a contentious new phase in the case — one that would test Ecuador’s political ties with its neighbors and involve some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and lawyers.
  • Advisers to the plaintiffs said Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela would be obvious candidates to pursue Chevron assets, but they acknowledged it would not be easy. Venezuela, for instance, is a close Ecuadorean ally and its president, Hugo Chávez, is a frequent critic of the United States. But Chevron has extensive operations in Venezuela and enjoys warmer ties with Mr. Chávez’s government than just about any other American company.
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  • In the memo, lawyers also identified the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, Angola, Canada and several other countries where Chevron has significant assets as potential targets. In the Philippines, it even suggested using the services of Frank G. Wisner, the retired diplomat and a foreign affairs adviser for Patton Boggs, who recently waded into the crisis in Egypt as an envoy for the Obama administration.
  • The ruling’s impact is already being felt in Ecuador and beyond as a cautionary tale of the environmental and legal aftermath of oil exploration. Alberto Acosta, a former oil minister in Ecuador, called the ruling “a historical precedent.” It is “a reminder that we have to defend ourselves from the irresponsible activity of extraction companies, both oil and mining,” Mr. Acosta said.
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    The case stems from oil pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest, but Chevron does not operate there and has no significant assets in the country. It was Texaco, which Chevron acquired in a merger in 2001, that was accused of widespread environmental damage before pulling out of Ecuador in the early 1990s.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Leaving oil in the soil - 0 views

  • Although the area contains the world's largest tiger reserve, according to reporter Thomas Maung Shwe of Mizzima news service, ‘the Burmese regime has encouraged logging, gold mining, large scale farms and the building of factories inside’. As the scandal grew, Silver Wave denied what its own press release had announced, but conceded it would drill near the reserve.
  • A company this dastardly is a high risk, and to prove the point, Silver Wave's environmental impact document includes a description of the notorious Agulhas Current, which begins at the Mozambique border: ‘Compared to other western boundary currents the Agulhas Current adjacent to southern Africa's East Coast exhibits a remarkable stability.’ Huh? In reality, the Natal Pulse races down the Agulhas a half-dozen times each year, pushing 20km per day. It is one reason Durban's coastline hosts more than 50 major ship carcasses. Creating havoc further south on the Wild Coast, the Pulse contributes to the rouge waves that have sunk 1,000 more vessels in what is considered one of the world's most dangerous shipping corridors.
  • Daily, poisons are flared onto thousands of neighbouring residents. The Indian, coloured and African communities suffer the world's highest-ever recorded asthma rate in a school (52 per cent of kids), as Settlers Primary sits next to the country's largest paper mill (Mondi) and between two refineries: one run by Engen, Chevron and Total; and the other, called Sapref, by BP, Shell and Thebe Investments. Sapref's worst leak so far was 1.5 million litres into the Bluff Nature Reserve and adjoining residences in 2001.
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  • Venezuelan dirty crude is akin to Canadian tar sands, and hopefully sense will prevail in Caracas.
  • In Quito and Neuva Rocafuerte deep in the Amazon last week, I witnessed the most advanced eco-social battle for a nation's hearts-and-minds underway anywhere, with the extraordinary NGO Accion Ecologica insisting that Correa's grudging government leaves the oil in Yasuni National Park's soil. Because he was trained in neoclassical economics and hasn't quite recovered, Correa favours selling Yasuni forests on the carbon markets, which progressive ecologists reject in principle.
Arabica Robusta

Nigeria: Whistleblower Accuses Shell of Concealing Data On Nigerian Oil Spills - allAfr... - 0 views

  • But a Shell Nigeria spokesman, Mr. Precious Okolobo, said the company accepted responsibility for the two deeply regrettable operational spills in Bodo and was fully committed to ensuring clean-up but that since 2015, the Bodo community of Rivers State has failed to permit access by contractors appointed to carry out the clean-up.
  • Chairperson of BMI, Inemo Samiama, to whom Holtzman addressed the letter, said in a statement that BMI had carried out Shoreline Clean-up Assessment Technique (SCAT) as recommended by the UNEP representative in the BMI, Dr. David Little, so as to form judgments on the best remedial methods applicable to each grid at individual sites. According to Samiama, the results of the pre-SCAT and main SCAT as issued by the SCAT team leader, Dr. Erich Gundlach, had confirmed areas of pollution and the need for clean-up but the results did not raise new concerns because they were not different from existing observations from earlier reports.
  • Shell had accepted liability for the 2008 and 2009 oil spills, and in 2015, agreed to pay £55m to the Bodo community for losses caused by the spills. UNEP had in 2011 published a damning report anticipating that it would take up to 30 years to clean the Niger Delta from oil spills, caused by theft and operational failures.
Arabica Robusta

Big Oil's sleazy Africa secrets: How American companies and super-rich exploit natural ... - 0 views

  • Luanda consistently ranks at the top of surveys of the world’s most expensive cities for expatriates, ahead of Singapore, Tokyo, and Zurich. In glistening five-star hotels like the one beside Chicala, an unspectacular sandwich costs $30. The monthly rent for a top-end unfurnished three-bedroom house is $15,000.
  • The railways, the hotels, the growth rates, and the champagne all flow from the oil that lies under Angola’s soils and seabed. So does the fear.In 1966 Gulf Oil, a US oil company that ranked among the so-called seven sisters that then dominated the industry, discovered prodigious reserves of crude in Cabinda, an enclave separated from the rest of Angola by a sliver of its neighbor, Congo.
  • “When the MPLA dropped its Marxist garb at the beginning of the 1990s,” writes Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, an authority on Angola, “the ruling elite enthusiastically converted to crony capitalism.” The court of the president—a few hundred families known as the Futungo, after Futungo de Belas, the old presidential palace— embarked on “the privatization of power.”
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  • the family of José Eduardo dos Santos, the party’s Soviet-trained leader who assumed the presidency in 1979, took personal ownership of Angola’s riches. Isabel dos Santos, the president’s daughter, amassed interests from banking to television in Angola and Portugal. In January 2013 Forbes magazine named her Africa’s first female billionaire.
  • Vicente built Sonangol into a formidable operation. He drove hard bargains with the oil majors that have spent tens of billions of dollars developing Angola’s offshore oilfields, among them BP of the UK and Chevron and ExxonMobil of the United States. Despite the tough negotiations, Angola dazzled the majors and their executives respected Vicente. “Angola is for us a land of success,” said Jacques Marraud des Grottes, head of African exploration and production for Total of France, which pumped more of the country’s crude than anyone else.
  • Sonangol awarded itself stakes in oil ventures operated by foreign companies and used the revenues to push its tentacles into every corner of the domestic economy: property, health care, banking, aviation. It even has a professional football team
  • Oil accounts for 98 percent of Angola’s exports and about three-quarters of the government’s income. It is also the lifeblood of the Futungo. When the International Monetary Fund examined Angola’s national accounts in 2011, it found that between 2007 and 2010 $32 billion had gone missing, a sum greater than the gross domestic product of each of forty-three African countries and equivalent to one in every four dollars that the Angolan economy generates annually. Most of the missing money could be traced to off-the-books spending by Sonangol; $4.2 billion was completely unaccounted  for.
  • For Joe Bryant, Cobalt’s founding chairman and chief executive, a punt based on prehistoric geology appeared to have paid off spectacularly. A hundred million years ago, before tectonic shifts tore them apart, the Americas and Africa had been a single landmass—the two shores of the southern Atlantic resemble one another closely. In 2006 oil companies had pierced the thick layer of salt under the Brazilian seabed and found a load of crude. An analogous salt layer stretched out from Angola. Bryant and his geologists wondered whether the same treasure might lie beneath the Angolan salt layer.
  • There was just one snag. What Cobalt had not revealed—indeed, what the company maintains it did not know—was that three of the most powerful men in Angola owned secret stakes in its partner, Nazaki Oil and Gáz. One of them was Manuel Vicente. As the boss of Sonangol at the time of Cobalt’s deal, he oversaw the award of oil concessions and the terms of the contracts.
  • A long-neglected 1977 statute prohibits American companies from participating in the privatization of power in far-off lands. Updated in 1998, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) makes it a crime for a company that has operations in the United States to pay or offer money or anything of value to foreign officials to win business. It covers both companies themselves and their officers. For years after it was passed the FCPA was more of a laudable ideal than a law with teeth. However, from the late-2000s the agencies that were supposed to enforce it—the Department of Justice, which brings criminal cases, and the Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator, which handles civil cases—started to do so with gusto. They went after some big names, including BAE Systems, Royal Dutch Shell, and a former subsidiary of Halliburton called Kellogg Brown & Root.
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