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24 November 2002 | Intag | By Carlos Zorrilla
RESPONDING TO "Ecotourism
Is All Very Well, but $3 a Day Isn't"
PLEASE REVIEW THE INACCURACIES, FALSITIES, "EXCLUDED"
INFORMATION REPORTED OR NOT REPORTED IN THE ARTICLE BELOW,
AND THE OBVIOUS SLANT OF THE ARTICLE. MY COMMENTS ARE IN BOLD.
Ecotourism Is All Very Well, but $3 a Day Isn't
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
(To begin with, the title makes the seriously misleading implication
that the people who work at the Community Ecotourist initiative
make $3.00 per day. In reality, they receive between $9 and
$10 per day -- which includes the cost of meals.)
(Text under photo of Junín)
The village of Junín is trying, not too successfully,
to reinvent itself as a shrine to ecotourism. For $28 a day,
visitors of the new bamboo house get three meals and forest
tours.
JUNÍN, Ecuador - Even now, many people in this remote
patch of Andean cloud forest celebrate the day in 1997 when
they burned down the mining camp and ran its owners out of
town. "We had tried for months to get them to listen to our
concerns about things like contaminated water," said Alirio
Ramírez. "Once we had a pile of ashes, the mining guys
were suddenly interested in talking. But by that point, the
time for negotiations was over." (One of the reasons the
community reacted this way was also that the miners had built
latrines discharging straight into the Junin river, knowing
it was the community's only source for drinking, washing and
bathing purposes, and government officials did nothing about
it.) Today, this village of 46 families is trying to reinvent
itself as a shrine to ecotourism. But a growing number of
villagers are questioning whether they took a wrong turn.
True, a new bamboo lodging house now charges foreign travelers
$28 a night each for a bed, three meals and guided tours of
the forest.
Village leaders boast of being able to find 40 kinds of
orchids, rare varieties of hummingbirds and toucans and at
least the tracks of jaguars, pumas, tapirs and bears. Environmental
guides now list the mist-shrouded forests around here as an
official "hot zone" of intense biodiversity. (More precisely,
its forests are in the middle of two of the world's 25 Biological
Hotspots -- shouldn't this have been reported?) But for
all the effort to develop a new economy, Junín and
other villages in this region remain impoverished and isolated.
Junín is part of a parish of 18,000 (The total
population for the parish is approximately 5,000; the 18,000
figure is for all 6 parishes) people scattered across
several dozen communities in northern Ecuador. The village
is cradled in a valley and surrounded by forests. The river
here is clean and cold and remains the main source of drinking
water. (False; people stopped using the Junin river a source
of drinking water when the miners contaminated it beyond drinkability
years ago!)
Most people live either directly or indirectly from small
farming - bananas, aloe, miniature oranges and cabulla, a
cactus-like plant that produces fiber used in baskets. (No
one cultivates "miniature oranges" in Ecuador, least of all,
in the Junin area. He is referring to Naranjillas, a native
Andean crop belonging to a totally different family than oranges
(the Nightshades). Cabulla (misspelled), is Sisal in English,
and it is NEVER used for making baskets, but for making ropes,
sacks, and handicrafts -- only 4 or 5 families live from aloe,
most live from cattle raising and naranjilla production and
some small scale logging -- no one makes a living from bananas.)
The town has no electricity, telephones or running water
- not even postal service. (Totally false. The town has
running water -- every house in Junin has it. It is due to
get electricity in the next couple of months; and thanks to
the Ecotourism, it at least has a satellite phone. My guess
that about 90 percent of Ecuador's rural communities lack
regular fixed, phone service, as most of rural Latin American
communities; POST OFFICE services are even more scarce!!!)
The mud road to the nearest town is so primitive that even
four-wheel-drive trucks get bogged down in the rainy season.
(Anyone who has ever traveled to rural areas in developing
countries during the rainy season will not be surprised at
this statement. One of the only true statements in the whole
article).
"The ecologists love the nature here and they love the fact
that it's so remote," said Tarquino Vallejos, who owns a small
farm just outside of town. "But the fact is that not one child
in the community can go to secondary school. We don't have
a school past sixth grade, and nobody here has enough money
to send their child to another city." Only about three families
here earn a living through ecotourism; the rest live largely
through subsistence farming. (This is a seriously misleading
claim that "only three families" make a living through ecotourism.
In total, more than 40* people from two different communities
are being employed by the community ecotourism business, which
translates to approximately 18 families.*)
(Sadly, the lack of high schools is a national problem
that three decades of petroleum-based development has not
been able to solve. Less than 10 percent of Ecuador's school
kids have a high school education, not so much because of
poverty, as the government's disinterest in supporting education.
About 5 percent of the Ecuador's budget goes to Education,
when the Constitution calls for 30 percent... Mr. Vallejos
was one of the only families in the whole region that actually
made good money from mining. He has also threatened anti-mining
activists and community members. In order to capture his old,
good, high-paying job, he is willing to see four communities
and 100 families relocated, and untold destruction to the
land.)
While many people have deep fears about the impact of mining,
many in the region argue that miners would be forced to provide
roads, electricity and other services simply to conduct business.
(So do narco-guerrilleros and multinational logging companies;
is this a good enough reason to accept mining?) "The mining
company had promised to build us a good road and a real medical
center," said Garzón Vallejos, a farmer in the nearby
town of García Morena. "We don't have any of that now."
(They will definitely need a medical center when mining
rolls into town.)
After five, largely fruitless years of trying to establish
alternatives sources of growth, the frustration of people
is becoming evident. (Mr. Edmund L Andrews spent a few
hours of his valuable time in the Junin area, how can he come
up with such a sweeping claim?)
Ernesto Meza, who is 32 and unemployed, looks back on the
destruction of the mining camp - owned by a subsidiary of
Mitsubishi Industries of Japan - with a twinge of remorse.
"The work we had back then was hard and dangerous, and I didn't
like it," he said. "But the pay was three times the normal
rate. The jobs were backbreaking, mostly tied to hauling rock
and equipment up and down the mountain slope. Sludgy black
water, mixed with chemicals, gurgled up from exploratory drilling
holes and found its way into the river. (He left out that
had the project gone ahead, lead, arsenic, chrome, copper
and cadmium, would have been added to the area's rivers.)
More alarming, an environmental impact study by the Japanese
government suggested that the river would have to be dammed
and many families relocated. (The real figure is 100 families
from four communities. The author was made aware of this,
and other impacts detailed in the environmental impacts study,
why did he leave them out?)
At least as the story is now told, about 60 villagers entered
the mining camp on a day when it was deserted in 1997. To
avoid being accused of theft, they took all the equipment
on mules to municipal authorities. (The real figure here
is approximately 200 villagers from seven communities; the
camp was not deserted, it was being watched by a paid employee
at the time.) They then set fire to the tents and shelters,
jubilantly declaring their intention to find healthier sources
of economic growth. Mitsubishi, which was evaluating the reserves
of copper and molybdenum but had not begun active mining,
decided to flee rather than fight. (Sorry, there were no
tents at the time; but there was the mining camp, fully equipped
-- not just "shelters.") Decoin, a local environmental
group founded by a Cuban expatriate named Carlos Zorilla,
raised money from American and European environmentalists
to enable the community to buy about 5,000 acres of land and
set up an environmental preserve.
Mr. Zorilla also organized a "fair trade" coffee-growing
association that markets coffee at above-market prices to
consumers in the United States and Europe who want to support
small farmers. But progress has been slow, hampered by a lack
of money to buy basic equipment and by plunging world coffee
prices. (First off, he misspells my name; Second, I am
Cuban born, but a U.S. citizen; Third, I did not "found" Decoin,
I am one of its founders; and, fourth, progress has, in fact,
been too fast, and there is much more demand for our coffee
than there is current supply -- mostly due to the interest
the struggle against mining has generated and people's interest
in helping the community fight this monster.)
A much bigger problem is the absence of good roads, a huge
obstacle for farmers trying to get their products to market.
Junín's inaccessibility is also a problem for promoters
of ecotourism. At least eight punishing hours outside of Quito,
Junín can attract only a trickle of hardened travelers,
people who are not picky about amenities like running water
and electricity. But new roads would most likely attract more
settlers and more clear-cutting for farms and businesses,
diminishing the area's appeal to tourists. (A shameless
assertion. At the time Mr. Edmund L. Andrews visited the lodge,
there was a group of 18 ecoguests staying, part of a overseas
organization that has reserved the cabin for six straight
months!! The same organization will probably rent the cabin
for nine months out of the year. The other three months happen
to lie in the middle of the high tourist season (July, August,
and September), when there is good road accessibility, and
very likely to be occupied -- the real amount of travel time
from Quito is five hours, with a new road they completed six
months ago, by the way.)
Farmers like Mr. Vallejos, on the other hand, are convinced
that mining would bring roads, electricity and new opportunities.
(This is true. But it will also bring all the "other" undesirable
aspects, such as: prostitution, increase in crime, contamination,
massive deforestation, and social upheaval which inevitably
accompanies mega mining projects. The Environmental Impact
Study also predicted that the deforestation would lead to
"local climatic changes", meaning, less rainfall. Less rainfall
would impact the livelihood of thousands of small farmers,
and cause untold hardships. If this wasn't enough, the forests
lying above the copper-molybdenum deposits are the home for
dozens of mammals and birds facing extinction, including;
Jaguars, Spectacled Bears, two species of monkeys, and the
critically endangered Mountain Toucan, plus the Plate-billed
Mountain Toucan -- the list runs to 28 species according to
our investigation. Why was none of this reported?)
"There is nothing wrong with ecotourism, but it isn't enough,"
he said. "The average worker here earns about $3 a day, and
many of those people have to support families with six or
even 10 children. I wish the ecologists would come and work
for me for $3 a day, and see how much they like it." (The
over reliance of the author of using this one source of information,
is troubling, especially when he talked to so many voices
in favor of the tourism project, and villagers. One of the
principal ideas for the two alternative development project
cited, is to increase the people's income, in such a way that
it won't disrupt their way of life or destroy the environment.
Mr. Vallejos may pay his workers $3.00 per day, but the people
working at the Community Ecolodge earn much more, and they
get the chance to learn new skills.)
*The number is not precise because of the desire of so many
other community members to join the project. A couple of months
ago, there were 42 community members taking part and working
for the project, and there were plans to accept quite a few
new members.
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