I come from the other side of the ocean. Of this same Pacific Ocean that unites us. Now that we are face to face we can share the experiences of our struggles in the defense of life, and common strategies for defending our livelihoods, cultures, diversity and sustainability.

Together we can reflect and evaluate on what has happened over these last 10 years since the Earth Summit. We can clearly see that pollution and environmental destruction, and the appropriation and control of our natural resources continues to increase rapidly, and with it exploitation, impoverishment, migration, and the destruction of the sustainability of local and national communities.

We know that those who appropriate life, and those that are robbed, have names. Some are the debtors and others the creditors of the Ecological Debt.

Ecological Debt is the responsibility that industrialised countries, their institutions, banks, political economic and corporations have for the gradual appropiation and control of world natural resources and the destruction of the planet caused by their patterns of production and consumption, typical of the development model which they hope to globalize, and which threatens local sustainability and perdurability. Ecological Debt also includes the appropriation of the planet’s absorption capacity and of the atmosphere, by polluting it with the emission of greenhouse effect gases.

Ecological Debt is the obligation and responsibility that Northern industrialized countries and their institutions and their allies in the Southern countries have to the countries and peoples of the Third World, for the looting and use of its natural goods: petroleum, minerals, forests, biodiversity, marine and genetic assets; at the cost of the human energy, displacement of peoples and for the destruction, devastation, and pollution of its natural heritage, culture, and sources of sustenance.

Ecological Debt began in the colonial period and has continued increasing until the present time by means of:

Thanks to the work of local organizations and international networks such as Oilwatch, World Rainforest Movement, Third World Network, Minewatch, FOEI, JATAM, ETC Group and others, we have valuable information on cases of Ecological Debt where the debtors, the ecological creditors and the magnitude of the debt are identified.

There are numerous cases of Ecological Debt, including:

Around 65 percent of patents are the property of U.S. companies, while 15% belong to European companies. These companies are linked to economic groups that include banks, oil companies, food companies, etc.

These are some examples of cases of ecological debt, many more exist and the bigger the companies and corporations, the greater their ecological debt.

Those who help these corporations to appropriate, exploit and market the wealth of the planet are also ecological debtors. They cause the destruction of the sources of life and of the cultures of local and national populations and put the planet in general at risk.

They are institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the bilateral and commercial banks, the governments of the North and their allies in the South that promote neoliberal policies of "free trade", and that grant credits for foreign investment, the privatization of the land, the water, and electric power, changes in national laws and the building of infrastructure to facilitate the appropriation, extraction and trade of natural resources.

In 1991, the Word Bank supported mining actives privatization as part of 71 structural adjustment programs.

The WB also promoted a mining deregulation strategy. For this strategy, they asked mining corporations what changes they would need. In 1996, WB loaned US$643 billion to mining projects.

Asian Development Bank through its Reform of the Water Enterprises project gives a loan to the gol to encourage PDAM Company in Indonesia to become an interesting company for investors.

There are institutions that live off the looting of natural resources, cheap labour and the usurious interest payments charged to the South, by demanding the payment of the illegitimate, inhuman and immoral foreign debt.

There is in fact a policy of global impoverishment whose purpose is to promote the displacement of the people that live in areas rich in biodiversity, water and natural resources, especially those located in the so called "poor countries". In this way, on the one hand, natural resources and biodiversity can be freely exploited without the problem of local resistance, and on the other hand cheap labour will be available in the cities where "maquila" assembly plants and facilities are established for international trade.

The answer to the problems of social impoverishment and environmental appropiation and degradation will never come from those who generate them.

The solution will only be possible when we identify those responsible for this destruction and when we stop them, when we promote equity and justice, when we put limits on wealth so that no one will lack on an abundant planet.

It is impossible a sustainable development in the midst of large scale exploitation, the concentration of wealth and the generation of poverty.

The concept of "sustainable development" was questioned from the beginning. Leonardo Boff, the famous Brazilian theologian, proposes to defend "ecologically sustainable societies" because what should be sustained or maintained should be societies and nature and not "development".

The SOUTHERN PEOPLES ECOLOGICAL DEBT CREDITORS ALLIANCE is being promoted with the aim of bringing us together to stop the destruction of the cultures, livelihood and sustainability of our peoples and countries.

Given that the main cause of the impoverishment of Third World countries and peoples is the appropiation, control of our countries’ wealth and its concentration in the North through the imposition of a world economy promoted by its governments, institutions and corporations,

Therefore, in order to eradicate poverty, we must:

On Ecological Debt, the demands are:

We are not willing to accept as recognition for the Ecological Debt:

We know that all these proposals which originate from powerful groups are no more than a means to open new business which displace local communities and generate poverty.

We want to take care of her and to feed her, because we are earth, air, water, fire, we are part of her, on her depends our life and that of our children. We seek self-reliance, autonomy and sovereignty over our lives and decisions. We demand respect for our culture and our land.

We call for a stop to the impunity of the transnational corporations for their social and environmental destruction.

We call for a struggle against the appropriation and concentration of wealth and the systems and institutions that promote it.

We call for resistance, civil disobedience, non - collaboration with the ecologically indebted corporations and with this neoliberal system of death and destruction.

We call for the rescue and valuing of our cultures, our livelihoods, our tecnologies, our knowledge, our natural medicines, our agricultural and wild biodiversity, the respect and care of our earth.

We call for the defense and promotion of food and energy sovereignty.

It is the moment to say NO to the transnational corporations and the whole system of globalizing poverty.

It is outrageous that the United Nations seeks to hand over the responsibility for sustainable development to those mainly responsible for the impoverishment of our peoples, for the destruction of the environment and the sustainability of our countries and the planet!

We can not permit the big transnational corporations, precisely those that generate destruction and poverty in our peoples, to now administer sustainable development in our countries through the so called Type II Initiatives that they expected to promote with the help of the United Nations at the next Environmental Summit in Johannesburg.

The big corporations, who are the ecological debtors of the countries of the South, now hope to present themselves as part of the solution to environmental destruction by using million dollar campaigns to greenwash their image on the basis of the false premise that they are the ones that exploit natural resources in a sustainable way.

They make themselves into judge and jury, as they will be the ones that take decisions in our countries on the environmental policies to be followed. In other words, there will be no national body capable of controlling them, and they will therefore be able to exploit wherever they want, under the protection of free trade agreements like the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

When conflicts of interests arise between lifestyle and the sustainability of the local people, those who will exercise the power of decision will formally be the transnational corporations as they will have control over environmental policies.

What is really being sought is to sustain the power and control of these immense corporations, of the international financial institutions, the commercial banks, the governments of the North and their allies in the South, at the cost of the impoverishment of the peoples of the South.

In other words these Type II initiatives promoted by the United Nations will increase the ecological debt because they constitute a new threat to the ecological sustainability of the peoples of the South.

The concept is cynical because it implicitly indicates that there is no an authentic political decision to address the real causes of poverty, which are mainly the accumulation of wealth and the systems that promote it.

The proposals of the official organisms to alleviate poverty are, amongst others: debt swaps for social and environmental investment; foreign investment; privatizations of land, water, of the service infrastructure of nation states, development aid, free trade policies, loans for infrastructure, etc.

These proposals for poverty relief are no more than other mechanisms for control, for the accumulation of wealth and paradoxically, the generation of poverty, contamination and environmental destruction. They are proposals that increase the ecological debt.

These programs contain conditionalities that in one way or another benefit the donating countries.

On the pretext of alleviating poverty through the creation of work, foreign investment has been promoted in order to extend the frontiers of oil, mining, timber exploitation, shrimp production, forest and agricultural monocultures, and the over exploitation of fisheries. In the last 10 years more than a hundred countries have initiated oil activities. Every day 77 million barrels of oil are consumed which emits 6.000 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, thus provoking the serious impacts that the countries of the South in particular have been suffering due to climate change.

To reduce poverty, the IMF and the World Bank promote the privatization of water and electric power. They propose that with the adjustment of the rates to reflect real prices the cost of the service and the invested capital can be recovered, which will allow these services to be offered to those who presently do not have them. As part of this logic those who cannot pay the "real" electricity and water rates, will simply not have access to these rights.

A random review of IMF loan policies in 40 countries reveals that, in 2000, IMF loan agreements with 12 borrowing countries included conditions imposing water privatization or cost recovery requirements.

Development aid, debt swaps for social and environmental investment, as well as concessional loans, are usually conditional on the purchase of technologies, services, the use of consultants from those countries where the "aid" originates, the opening of markets in the countries receiving the aid, where for example, agricultural surpluses can be placed, many of them genetically modified, or obsolete technology sold. They result in subsidies to those producing the food sent in the form of "aid", the generation of revenues for transnational corporations connected to the "aid", such as maritime transport, in the privatization of natural areas, and the inclusion of campesino and indigenous communities in the logic of the market.

The loans for road infrastructure and services that supposedly help distant communities are planned mainly to favor the extraction and trade interests of the big national and transnational companies. However, payment of these loans and their interest is made by the entire population, especially the most impoverished, who are the majority.