"Water is More Precious than Gold"

On Thursday, March 19, Salvadoran and international activists came together outside of the World Bank in Washington, D.C. to stand up for clean water and environmental justice in El Salvador. Activists are protesting the ongoing World Bank case involving OcenanaGold against the people of El Salvador. OceanaGold, an Australian mining company, purchased Canadian Pacific Rim Mining company in late 2013. The Pacific Rim Mining Company, and thus OceanaGold, is suing the government of El Salvador for over $300 million, all because the government refused a permit which would allow for the building of a harmful, dangerous mine that would destroy the country’s water supply.

 

The decision by the Salvadoran government to refuse to issue Pacific Rim Mining Company a mining permit was motivated in large part by concerns about access to clean drinking water. Independent assessments of Pacific Rim’s proposed project found that OceanaGold had vastly understated the amount of water that would be used by the mine, as well as ignored the potential dangers of cyanide contamination in the nearby Lempa River. Nearly 90 percent of El Salvador’s surface water is contaminated already, and it has been described as the “most water-stressed country in Central America,” with around one fifth of the rural population lacking access to an improved water source. This mine would only make the problem worse.

 

Sounds bad right? We certainly think so. So Sierra Club stood with partners on March 19, chanting “¡Agua es vida, el oro no se come! (Water is life, gold can’t be eaten!).” The rally brought together people from all walks of life. Included in the group were Salvadoran, U.S., and international human rights activists, environmental groups, faith groups, and individual community representatives. Along with speakers at the rally, like Vidalina Morales from the Salvadoran National Roundtable Against Mining and Cathy Feingold of the AFL-CIO, there were representatives from Oxfam America, CASA, the Institute for Policy Studies, and more.

 

The purpose of the event was to call for the case to be dropped, as well as to draw attention to the dangers of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) – also known as “corporate sovereignty” – provisions in trade deals such as this one. These provisions would allow multinational corporations to use international tribunals, such as the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) where the protest was held, to challenge government laws that they claim threaten their expected profits. For instance, in this case, the Pacific Rim Mining Company and OceanaGold would be able to completely ignore the Salvadoran government’s refusal to grant the permit and their concerns about the mine, just because the end result could mean a loss of profit.  

 

As we’ve seen earlier this month through leaked texts, ISDS clauses are a major part of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is a trade deal being negotiated with 12 Pacific Rim countries that is being debated in Congress as you read this. Combined with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a trade deal in the works with the EU, these two deals would be the largest in U.S. history. It’s a scary thought that some of the biggest corporations in the world will have the opportunity to disregard our safeguards without even looking at the harmful effects of their actions, since doing so could harm their profits. Basically, with the TPP and the TTIP, corporations would have more rights and a louder voice than we do.

 

As Senator Elizabeth Warren recently noted in an op-ed for the Washington Post, ISDS allows international corporations to challenge a country’s laws in tribunals dominated by corporate lawyers from the big businesses themselves, and are often plagued by conflicts-of-interest and a general lack of transparency or oversight. These tribunals have no accountability to democratically elected governments or legislatures, and a loss in one cannot be appealed. Since the 1990s, the number of these types of cases has exploded, and corporations have regularly abused the ISDS system to attempt to block or undermine public interests, including Philip Morris’s attempts to undermine cigarette plain packaging laws in Australia, Lone Pine Resources’s efforts to block a fracking moratorium in Quebec, and Vattenfall’ssuits in response to Germany’s phaseout of nuclear energy. Together, the amount sought by corporations in these three cases is upward of $5 billion.

 

As the Salvadoran cases and these others show, ISDS is a dangerous tool for big corporations to undermine environmental and health safeguards. And we’re not the only ones that are worried. Even legal experts have also expressed concern that arbitration language included in the TPP and TTIP could limit governments’ ability to mitigate climate disruption in the future. Worse still, some Members of Congress and the corporations themselves are pushing this deal to be “fast tracked” through Congress. That means that the TPP would be put to a simple “yes-or-no” vote, with limited debate and no amendments.  

 

That’s why activists like ourselves and entire communities are standing up and urging their members of Congress to deny “fast track,” flawed trade deals, and the ISDS clauses they would entail.  You can help the Sierra Club fight this assault on democratic control by calling or writing your Members of Congress.


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