Face the Facts! 7 - US Tax Dollars Fund Environmental and Social Destruction Around the World
How the Global Economy Harms People and the Environment
#7, Wednesday April 21,1999
U.S. Tax Dollars Fund Environmental and Social Destruction around the World
- Export-Import Bank of the U.S. (Ex-Im) is financing a destructive pulp mill in Indonesia.
- Ex-Im supports Indonesia’s Indah Kiat pulp mill, projected to consume 200 square kilometers of old growth forest per year until its plantations "mature." In 1993, the mill was fined $1.4 million for the utilization of illegally felled timber. To supply land for its pulp plantation program, the operation seized and clear-cut over 3,000 hectares of indigenous peoples’ land. Local communities have noted and suffered health problems because of pollution from the mill.
- Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) is considering funding a pipeline through the Amazon Basin.
- OPIC wants to finance a natural gas pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil that will cut through the world’s largest tract of primary tropical dry forest, as well as the headwaters of the Pantanal—the world’s largest wetland. In spite of its own environmental policies, OPIC seeks to fund this destructive project.
- World Bank is considering backing Exxon and Shell’s plans to construct an oil pipeline through Chad and Cameroon.
- The proposed Chad-Cameroon pipeline will be the largest ever investment in Africa. Both countries are known for their corruption and instability: a study by Transparency International named Cameroon the most corrupt country in the world, and Chad's social situation is so precarious that the Peace Corps suspended its operations there in 1998 due to security concerns *1. Noting the environmental and human rights disaster caused by oil development in Nigeria, activists worry that the Chad-Cameroon pipeline will benefit large corporations, not alleviate poverty.
*1 US Department of State. Consular Information Sheet—Chad, 1/25/99
For more information contact:
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