Over the past 20 years, Texaco has assisted the Ecuadoran government in its effort to develop Ecuador's oil industry. The oil company pulled out of the country in 1992, leaving the Ecuadoran government and local communities to deal with a legacy of oil spills, wastewater discharges and hundreds of unlined toxic waste ponds in the rainforest where the company operated. According to Critobal Bonifaz, co-counsel for the indigenous people, "3,500 gallons of oil per day are dumped into the Amazon, and this oil has contaminated all the wetlands and drinking water in the area ... Even the rainwater has been found to be contaminated."
The Rainforest Action Network is a leading group in a coalition calling for an international boycott of Texaco aimed at pressuring the company to take responsibility for the environmental degradation and harm to indigenous peoples resulting from its activities in Ecuador. According to Glen Switkes, spokesperson for the group, "A company that implants a project that extracts billions of dollars worth of oil has both the legal and moral responsibility to ensure that the safety of the people living in the zone where they work is protected when it leaves." Other coalition members include the Indigenous Peoples Organizations of the Amazon Basin, Oxfam and the Environmental Defense Fund.
While the government of Ecuador has sponsored an environmental audit of past oil activity, indigenous and environmental groups were excluded from the audit process and the results of the audit have remained secret.
Texaco denies that it owes anything to Ecuador or its citizens. "Texaco operated under Ecuadoran law and international standards for the industry," according to Dave Dickson, spokesperson for Texaco. "We believe that we have been consistent with the environmental rules and regulations of Ecuador, ... and in the process of assisting Ecuador in developing their natural resources, provided jobs, education, health and other economic benefits to the country."
From 1987 to 1990, Hydro Quebec negotiated "risk-sharing" contracts behind closed doors with aluminum companies. The program was put on hold in 1991 after intense public outrage over the secrecy of the contracts, the cost to consumers of covering the debt of the publicly-owned utility, and the environmental impacts and infringements on native rights of the utility's hydro mega-projects such as James Bay II. The contracts have factored heavily in the James Bay II debate (see The James Bay Disaster," Multinational Monitor, December 1991 ) because the utility has long argued that Quebec will need such projects to provide electricity for its industrial customers.
In September 1993, Greenpeace obtained an internal Hydro-Quebec document showing that the crown corporation will lose $5 billion over the duration of the contracts. Because the risk-sharing contracts linked the price of electricity to market prices for metals, depressed prices in the global metals market mean that Hydro-Quebec is selling the companies electricity below the cost of producing it, and far below what ordinary consumers payed. This confirmed an April 1991 revelation by Norsk Hydro, a magnesium firm that is a party to one of the contracts, that it was paying only half the already discounted industrial rate of 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour.
Hydro Quebec is "built to overcapacity," according to François Tanguay, Greenpeace Quebec's Energy Campaign Coordinator, to a point where "they are selling almost 10 percent of their total output at a loss." He says that the risk-sharing program amounts to "corporate welfare."
Hydro Quebec's chief media officer, Guy Versailles, maintains that the contracts will make money "equivalent to the standard industrial rate." He states that "the contracts were designed to make money over the duration ... we lose money at certain times and make money at others."
The poultry industry's reluctance to embrace irradiation represents a serious setback to Vindicator, which has yet to gain any major food company or supermarket clients and was counting on irradiating poultry to reverse its spiraling losses, according to the Vermont-based group Food & Water. In its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Vindicator stated that unless the company could begin irradiating substantial amounts of poultry, "there are no assurances that continued funding will be available to the company."
Food & Water's executive director Michael Colby applauds Gold Kist and Claxton "for listening to their customers and rejecting the dangerous irradiation technology."
Vindicator spokesperson Sam Whitney calls Food & Water's claims "erroneous," questions the credibility of the group and maintains that Vindicator is a "reputable company." When asked about the cancellation of the poultry irradiation programs however, he declined to comment.
- Aaron Freeman