The Southern Peoples' Ecological Debt Creditors' Alliance

In Prague, at the City Library, during the Public Forum on 25th September (the day before the big successful demonstration against World Bank and IMF), there 

was a public meeting at which a promoters' group decided to launch publicly this Alliance, in order to ask for recognition of the Ecological Debt the North owes to the South. The main speakers were Aurora Donoso (Acción Ecológica, Ecuador), Ricardo Navarro (President, Friends of the Earth International), Sathyu Sarangi (of the movement in Bhopal which demands responsibilities of Union Carbide), Emmy Hafield (of Wahli, Indonesia), Lorenzo Muelas (Colombia) and Toribio Aguinda (Ecuador) as representatives of indigenous peoples, Chris Albertyn (from Ground Work, South Africa), Noble Wadzah (from Ghana), Jose Augusto Padua (from Brazil), Alejandro Bendaña (from Jubilee South), Grazia Francescano (from the Italian Greens). 

This public meeting followed a workshop on Saturday 23 in the INPEG programme, on concrete cases of Ecological Debt (biopiracy of human genes in Latin America, mining cases such as FreeportMcMoRan in West Papua, toxic waste cases such as Thor Chemicals in South Africa, oil extraction cases such as the U'Wa in Colombia). 

John Dillon, of the Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, Canada, presented a new paper, Ecological Debt: South tells North "Time to Pay Up" (vol. XI, n. 3 of Economic Justice Report, Sept. 2000, available at www.ecej.org or).