QUITO, (Reuters) – Ecuador’s top electoral court has opened up a route for a referendum to ban oil drilling in the Yasuni National Park, an environmental group said yesterday, a move which could disrupt government plans to boost its crude production.
Electoral authorities had repeatedly denied calls for a vote on whether oil in the Yasuni reserve, one of the planet’s most species-diverse rainforests, should be kept underground indefinitely.
Former President Rafael Correa had in 2007 proposed to leave the oil reserves untouched if wealthy countries contributed $3.6 billion dollars to offset lost revenue, but later abandoned the plan due to lack of international support.
The current administration of conservative ex-banker President Guillermo Lasso now hopes to more than double the country’s oil output to one million barrels per day – but is facing opposition from environmental and indigenous groups.
Ecuador’s electoral court on Monday finally ordered the validation of over 750,000 signatures campaign group Yasunidos collected eight years ago for a referendum. Once these are validated, the country’s Constitutional Court must then approve a referendum.
“The oil must be kept underground, oil exploitation in the Yasuni must be stopped since it is the territory of isolated peoples,” Yasunidos spokesman Pedro Bermeo told reporters.
The sprawling swath of equatorial rainforest, which was declared a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO in 1989, is home to some of the world’s only peoples living in voluntary isolation, as well as a vast variety of flora and fauna.
State oil firm Petroecuador currently exploits two blocks near the reserve, where it extracts about 52,000 barrels per day. In April, it said it had begun production in the Ishpingo field, inside Yasuni, with high environmental control standards.
Petroecuador did not immediately comment on the ruling.
Earlier this week, indigenous communities from Ecuador’s Amazon had demanded the Constitutional Court force the government to comply with rulings from 2018 and 2019 to protect thousands of hectares of tropical jungle from oil and mining projects.