Whether all this oil will benefit the average citizen depends largely on whether extraction deals are handled in an open, transparent manner. A comparison between Brazil and Nigeria is instructive. The South American country provides monthly updates on oil production on a state website. Brazil became the seventh-largest economy in the world with the help of oil output, with 2011 per capita income of $12,594, according to World Bank statistics. In Nigeria, five decades of oil output have been mired in secrecy and conflict. Although the country's oil exports are comparable to those of Brazil, its per capita income is just $1,452.
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Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative - 0 views
eitransparency.org
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3.5 billion people live in countries rich in oil, gas and minerals. With good governance the exploitation of these resources can generate large revenues to foster growth and reduce poverty. However when governance is weak, it may result in poverty, corruption, and conflict. The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) aims to strengthen governance by improving transparency and accountability in the Extractives sector. The EITI sets a global standard for companies to publish what they pay and for governments to disclose what they receive.
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Attacks on the Press: Oil, Money, and the Press - Committee to Protect Journalists - 0 views
cpj.org/...ss-oil-money-and-the-press.php
petroleum industry development oil international extractive transparency curse resource uganda sudan kenya ethiopia extraactive industries initiative eiti
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While Uganda's 2005 Access to Information Act theoretically covers documents between the government and private companies, oil contracts typically have special provisions whereby both parties must consent before information is given to a third party, according to Gilbert Sendugwa, coordinator of the Africa Freedom of Information Centre in Uganda. The secrecy clauses prevent even parliament from getting key information, according to Dickens Kamugisha, chief executive of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance, a Kampala-based think tank that advocates for transparent energy policies.
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Since few Ugandan authorities comply with requests under the access law, few journalists bother to use it. Sendugwa noted that all government ministers are required to report how they implement the information act. "We decided to test the law and sent an information request to parliament in November 2010 asking for the ministers' reports on their implementation of the Access to Information Act," he said. "To this date, none have complied."
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The anti-corruption research organization Global Witness also analyzed the bills and concluded that all three lack guarantees on contract and financial transparency.
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Though the act offers broad assurances that oil information is public, a provision allows the ministry to determine whether or not a particular oil contract is published, said Dana Wilkins, a campaigner for Global Witness. No contract had been made public as of late 2012.
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Officials and oil companies in Uganda try to control the message by providing organized tours of oil drilling facilities. The Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development's 2011 communication strategy paper recommends two media tours of the Albertine Graben oil-drilling area each year. "Sure, it's easy to go to oil areas for oil company-organized events," Ssekika said. "You can talk to district officials, etc. But when you go alone with your own view, that's a different story."
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"When China National Offshore Oil Corporation [CNOOC] struck a deal with Tullow Oil to develop Uganda's fields, it warned [President Yoweri] Museveni that there wasn't time to wait for parliamentary debates over the issue--pausing now could mean Uganda losing its winning lottery ticket to Kenya," Lay wrote on the African Arguments news website. Tullow's communications manager in Kampala, Cathy Adengo, disputed that depiction. "Tullow did not push the Ugandan authorities into doing anything, considering we had a two-year wait to ratify the deal with CNOOC," Adengo said.
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The company has faced further lawsuits over pollution in the Delta and alleged ties to the Nigerian military, according to Reuters. "Imagine, it took a court case launched in America before activities of oil companies were discovered," said Omoyele Sowore, publisher of the anti-corruption website Sahara Reporters and a former Niger Delta resident. The legal disputes resulted in an estimated loss of one million barrels of oil a day for the Nigerian government and private companies, according to Nigerian writer Orikinla Osinachi.
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Oil revenues count for 80 percent of the national budget, yet the government is unable to determine the amount of oil extracted from its territory, according to Alex Awiti, an ecologist at Aga Khan University in Nairobi.
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Nigeria's situation is not unique. Although Angola is the second-largest oil producer in Africa with an annual GDP of $101 billion and per capita income of nearly $9,000, more than two-thirds of its 8 million people live under the $2-a-day poverty line, according to the World Bank and news reports. These statistics, said Awiti, are rooted in the lack of transparency in Angola's oil production--leading to corruption, millions of dollars being stashed abroad, and revenue sequestered in a secret "parallel budget." In 2012, the International Monetary Fund attributed a $32 billion gap in Angola's state funds from 2007 to 2010 to "quasi-fiscal operations by the state-owned oil company."
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With oil output still in early stages in East Africa, the region has time to learn from other oil-producing countries. Chad has drilled oil since 2003, with the contracts kept secret. "The fact is Chadians do not know how many barrels are actually produced and where the money goes," said former N'Djaména Hebdo journalist Augustin Zusanne, who now works for the United Nations. Without such information, residents can hardly press for more development. "Even the oil-producing region, Doba, does not benefit from oil revenues. The population of this area lives in poverty," said Eric Topona, a journalist with the state broadcaster. However, things might improve, as Chad is now a candidate for membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), an international forum that seeks openness by ensuring that oil payments are published annually. Government officials, oil companies, and civil society organizations oversee the process.
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In its 2008 Oil and Gas Policy, Uganda said it would apply for membership in the EITI, but it did not say when and nothing has been implemented, according to news reports. "The way the EITI section is drafted clearly shows a government that is not sincere or ready to implement--it's so vague," Kamugisha of the Africa Institute for Energy Governance said in describing the Ugandan policy. Kenya has made no commitment to join the Initiative. Eddie Rich, deputy head of the EITI secretariat, confirmed that South Sudan and Uganda have made public commitments to implement the initiative and said "international partners are working with those governments to progress toward official applications." None of the African countries working with EITI are disclosing information on compensation to local people affected by oil production, Rich said.
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But East Africa does not have to look overseas for mentors: Ghana, Liberia, and even the Democratic Republic of Congo publish oil contracts. "It took years, but contracts are now in the public domain," said Ghanaian development economist Charles Abugre, who vigorously campaigned for publication.
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Pambazuka - Oil-dependency and food: Livelihoods at risk - 0 views
pambazuka.org/...66792
petroleum industry development oil international extractive transparency curse resource food security foodsecurity agribusiness agriculture miles sovereignty
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Without diminishing the severity of the Gulf spill, several observers have pointed out the asymmetrical political reactions to oil disasters in the US and in other parts of the world.[6] Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International, explains the sense of frustration: ‘We see frantic efforts being made to stop the spill in the US, but in Nigeria, oil companies largely ignore their spills, cover them up and destroy people's livelihood and environments…This has gone on for 50 years in Nigeria. People depend completely on the environment for their drinking water and farming and fishing. They are amazed that the president of the US can be making speeches daily, because in Nigeria people there would not hear a whimper.’[7]
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Presumably, companies are not only put off by the prospect of increased red tape in the US, but also attracted – as they have been for decades – by the limited capacity of African States to regulate extractive activities. To attract foreign investment, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa also enter into generous production-sharing agreements that allow foreign oil companies to turn a relatively small upfront investment in exploration into billions in downstream profits.[11]
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Even after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the company has moved full-steam ahead with plans to sell off US$30 billion in onshore and shallow-water production assets in order to aggressively pursue deepwater drilling in West Africa, Angola, Egypt and, yes, Louisiana.[17]
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Critics also point to Ghana’s long history of extractive activities and primary commodity exports: Ghana produces gold, bauxite, manganese, diamonds, timber and cocoa, none of which have generated appreciable benefits for the majority of Ghanaians.
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Ghana has chosen to accept so-called ‘stabilisation clauses’ in its contracts with companies that lock in current laws and regulations. If the country should decide to strengthen its regulatory framework, companies with existing contracts could claim that the new laws do not apply to them, or require the government to provide financial compensation for the cost of compliance.[13] As foreign companies reap handsome rewards, and Ghana gains uncertain benefits (much of the content of these contracts remains secret), coastal communities are sure to pay the highest cost. At a recent Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) workshop held in the coastal town of Takoradi, representatives of six districts located closest to the oil find responded angrily to refusals to commit part of the petroleum royalties to an environmental mitigation or compensation fund, as is legally required in the mining sector.[24] No such provision has thus far been established for the oil and gas industry.
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corporate interests are often recast as national security concerns. It was President Jimmy Carter who cemented the connection in his 1980 State of the Union address by stating that any foreign attempt to gain control of Middle Eastern oil would be regarded as ‘an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America.’ The policy, now known as the Carter Doctrine, set a dangerous precedent of using military might to secure ‘strategically important’ resources throughout the world.
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In another case, the European Commission on Oil in Sudan (ECOS) has accused oil companies of complicity in crimes against humanity in a Southern oil field known as Block 5A. ECOS charges companies with pressuring armed groups to ‘clear the ground’, leading to a wave of repression in which 12,000 people were killed and another 20,000 displaced.
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Farming accounts for as much as 32 per cent of total emissions, a significant portion of which are created by industrial agriculture through the use of petroleum-based fertilisers, pesticides and forest clearing.[38] The issue of ‘food miles’ – the distance our food travels from farm to table[39] – has been well documented, while new data shows that the production phase accounts for as much as 83 per cent of the average US household’s carbon footprint for food.[40] Changing the way we produce food, therefore, constitutes a necessary step towards reducing oil dependence, its enormous carbon footprint and its human toll.
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Food sovereignty, the political project put forward by the international peasant movement Via Campesina, offers a promising road map.
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Industrial agriculture may be more ‘efficient’ in terms of labour (output per worker), but its productivity is achieved through massive applications of fossil fuel-based inputs such as tractor fuel and agrochemicals. Small organic farms, however, are generally more efficient in terms of land (output per acre), since they grow a variety of plants and animals, taking full advantage of each ecological niche.
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ADB backs Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative | Bank Information Center: Moni... - 0 views
www.bicusa.org/...Article.3689.aspx
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Pambazuka - Leave new oil in the soil in Africa - 0 views
pambazuka.org/...66289
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The desire to capture more oil reserves is driving exploration and development of oil and gas fields in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somaliland, Puntland, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, the Comoros, Seychelles and the coast of Durban in South Africa.
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The National oil spill detection and response agency (NOSDRA), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) have identified over 2,000 spill sites that need to be remediated. Some of these spills happened over 40 years ago. The Ebubu spill that occurred in 1970, has not been cleaned up and Shell, the company implicated in the disaster, is vigorously appealing a judgement of a federal high court which ordered it to pay US$40 million compensation as at 2001.[3]
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Even though Ikiogha is the government bureaucrat in charge of penalising Shell for the spill and signing off on the cleanup, he is also the contractor hired by Shell to do the cleanup… His cleanup operation consists of four shirtless men scooping oil from the surface of the polluted river with Frisbees… he claims that most of the oil had earlier been removed with absorbent foam and blankets.’[5]
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The idea of leaving oil in the ground within the Yasuni forest was taken up in far away Ecuador by no less than the government of the country itself and is receiving widespread acceptance.
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The world’s ecosystem is one and we have merely scratched the surface in understanding the intricate interconnectedness of nature at different levels. It is therefore short sighted to continue the reckless expansion of drilling around the world because in the long run the revenue we may earn today from oil extraction would not be sufficient to adequately return our environment to what it was before extraction when incidents like these occur.
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We must begin by acknowledging that the sensible use of our ecosystem has the capacity in the long-term to provide much more benefits and revenue than oil can ever provide. We must individually and consciously take up the responsibility of drastically reducing our use of oil and its by-products. We must also set up international tribunals that would try entities and individuals for their role in destroying the ecosystem. But more importantly we must begin to have the consciousness and think along the lines of building capacities within our communities to ensure as much as possible that the role of oil our energy matrix becomes inconsequential by investing more in renewable energy, energy efficiency, better public transportation and small decentralised energy projects.
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ECUADOR: Fate of Untapped Oil Hangs in the Balance - of Trust Fund - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views
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The initiative for not extracting the oil was originally proposed 20 years ago by Fundación Natura, the largest environmental organisation in Ecuador, and has since been supported by a number of environmental and indigenous groups defending the Yasuní National Park and its buffer zone, where the oilfields are located.
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But there are strong supporters for drilling, like the deputy minister of non-renewable natural resources and former manager of the state oil firm Petroecuador, Carlos Pareja, and President Correa himself has talked extensively about "Plan B".
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Meanwhile, the German government said it will not support the Yasuní-ITT initiative, because the precedent might be imitated by other countries. The announcement came as very bad news for the initiative.
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Correa cheerfully replied that he would continue to talk about "Plan B" because his main concern is the future of Ecuadorians, and if international cooperation is not forthcoming he will have to authorise it. In the circumstances, it appears increasingly unlikely that the oil under the Yasuní nature reserve will remain untapped for long.
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The proposal is for Ecuador to forego extracting the oil, in return for the international community contributing 50 percent of the cost of the greenhouse gas emissions that would be saved by not extracting and burning the oil – at least 3.6 billion dollars.
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PressTV - West using terror to plunder oil resources of Nigeria - 0 views
presstv.com/...-terror-to-destabilize-nigeria
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Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.
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Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”
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Campbell reiterated the significant observation: “The Mubi atrocity will feed a popular perception that the government can no longer ensure security in large parts of the country.”
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However, the fragmentation of Nigeria would undermine the political base of the central government. Nigeria’s political class has an unenviable reputation for institutionalized corruption and graft. Those flaws would most probably intensify in splintered and weakened political administrations. In that scenario, the powerful Western oil companies stand to gain by extracting even more favorable terms for oil production.
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Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode is convinced that Britain, France and Israel have also stepped up covert military involvement in Nigeria over the same period.
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The same Western objective of fracturing, balkanising and weakening countries is also seen to be playing out in Sudan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria. Nigeria’s oil and gas riches and its position as a natural leader of African nations underscores the Western objective with regard to West Africa.
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AMAZON WATCH » Chevron: Clean Up Ecuador - 0 views
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Unlike BP's Gulf spill that was the result of a single cataclysmic event, Texaco's oil extraction system in Ecuador was designed, built, and operated on the cheap using substandard technology from the outset. This led to systematic pollution from multiple sources on a daily basis for almost three decades.
CommDev: Community Development 101: Opportunities and Challenges of Extractive Industries - 0 views
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Publish What You Pay - 0 views
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The Publish What You Pay coalition of over 300 NGOs worldwide calls for the mandatory disclosure of the payments made by oil, gas and mining companies to all governments for the extraction of natural resources. The coalition also calls on resource-rich developing country governments to publish full details on revenues. This is a necessary first step towards a more accountable system for the management of natural resource revenues.
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Extractive Industries Advisory Group, September 11-12, 2007 Meeting Minutes - 0 views
siteresources.worldbank.org/...WBGEISept07.pdf
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"It was noted by an Advisor that work done by ICMM (International Council on Metals and Mining) showed that the resource curse was not inevitable. The ICMM studies showed that some countries did manage to use the development of their mineral endowment as a base for faster growth although experience had been variable. The key difference between countries that had been successful in doing this and those that had been less successful was in the overall policies adopted by governments. The issue was how to ensure that appropriate pro development policies were adopted and implemented effectively and to ensure that the World Bank was engaged where its support was needed."
Oil, Gas, Mining & Chemicals - Extractive Industries Review - 0 views
web.worldbank.org/...16618~theSitePK:336930,00.html
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Monthly Review September 2006 Michael Watts ¦ Empire of Oil: Capitalist Dispo... - 0 views
www.monthlyreview.org/0906watts.htm
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
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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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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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allAfrica.com: Ghana: Oil Flows Amid Legal & Transparency Gaps - 0 views
allafrica.com/...201012190029.html
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"The Ghanaian government must establish a legal framework that ensures transparent publication of oil payments received, open and competitive contract bidding and contract disclosure, and active monitoring and participation by civil society," Oxfam America urged.
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Richard Hato-Kuevor, Oxfam America's Extractive Industries Advocacy Officer in Accra, says "The Ghanaian Parliament is currently debating an oil revenue bill, and important provisions - such as a prohibition against using oil revenue as collateral for loans - have already been stripped out of the bill. A Petroleum Exploration and Production Bill, which had numerous weaknesses, has been shelved. Celebrations of first oil are clouded by the fact that the government has yet to establish an independent regulator since the Jubilee discovery was announced in 2007."
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Despite overwhelming public support for the provision baring oil-backed loans, Parliament last week voted to remove the bar and allow for oil-backed loans. Following on that, Ghana has signed the STX housing agreement, which many believe uses oil as collateral.
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Ecuadoreans Plan Spasm of Lawsuits Against Chevron - NYTimes.com - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...16ecuador.html
petroleum industry development oil international extractive transparency curse resource ecuador chevron texaco social movements intervention human rights corporate
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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shared by Arabica Robusta on 08 May 11
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OIL POLITICS: Drilling in the dark - 0 views
234next.com/...story.csp
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Remember that in their 2010 budget, they had a chicken-change sum of N90m for staff marriages and bereavements! The commission defended the outrageous budgetary allocation on the grounds that it was dictated by emotional intelligence. Peculiar intelligence, one would say.
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We perceive a matrix of high-powered players in the oil theft industry. This is far beyond pointing fingers at petty thieves who steal crude oil in buckets only to ferry them in crude barges to ships lurking off the coast.
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Obama on Wrong Side in Shell Oil Human Rights Case | Black Agenda Report - 0 views
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But now, under these circumstances, Shell Oil claims it is not a person, subject to human law, but an entity possessing corporate immunities.
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When Shell Oil walked into the U.S. Supreme Court building, this week, claiming that it is not responsible for the torture and murder of Nigerians in its oil fields in the Niger River Delta, the Dutch corporation had a friend in the courtroom: the Obama administration.
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With a population of 160 million, Nigeria is the known as the “giant of Africa”. In addition to crude oil, Nigeria has also the biggest reserves of natural gas among Sub-Saharan nations. Western energy companies are gearing up to tap this wealth even further in the coming years. Balkanising the country into North-South entities would undermine the central government in Abuja and bolster exploitation by these corporations.
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However, some Nigerian analysts believe that the organization is being used by powerful external forces as a conduit for destabilizing Nigeria. Political analyst Olufemi Ijebuode says: “The upshot of this latest massacre is to destabilize the state of Nigeria by sowing sectarian divisions among the population. The killers may have been Boko Haram operatives, but Boko Haram is a proxy organization working on behalf of foreign powers.”
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Campbell reiterated the significant observation: “The Mubi atrocity will feed a popular perception that the government can no longer ensure security in large parts of the country.”
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