Ecological debt - 
external debt

Economic and political crises linked to external debt have been taking place since the very independence of Latin America. At particular moments these crises were serious enough that they lead to foreign military intervention. The present External Debt crisis, measured for example by the percentage of the GNP or export income which External Debt payments form, has even greater importance for the continent as a whole than the crises had in past eras. On the other hand, the discussion about the quantification and demand for the Ecological Debt is quite recent, beginning barely ten years ago. The present External Debt, accumulated during the nineteen seventies and eighties, continues to exercise a determining influence in the political economy of Latin America, despite the application of diverse schemes to reduce it. The payments already made are greater than the amount owed and yet, the total External Debt has continued to grow, in 1997 reaching more than $600,000 million for Latin America as a whole. While the External Debt, is an acknowledged problem, the Ecological Debt is a new idea which will be analysed in this article. 

Any Latin American audience is easily impressed by the dollar amount which a child of that continent owes when born, but it is more difficult to awaken interest in the theoretical position of creditor,  which that same infant occupies in the Ecological Debt department. It is worth asking why, despite the historical sense of destruction and pillage of natural resources common in Latin American (something expressed by both past and present authors from Jose Bonifacio or Mariano de Rivero to Eduardo Galeano), the idea of the Ecological Debt is new. Ecological history is beginning to help with detailed research in this area, but notwithstanding this, curiously enough, in politics more importance has been paid to financial issues than to the loss of natural heritage. The idea of an Ecological Debt has had no political echo up until the present time. 

What is the relationship between the External Debt and the Ecological Debt?  The relationship has two principal aspects. The first is the claim for the Ecological Debt, on account of both exports undervalued (as their price does not include the various local and global social and environmental costs) and environmental services provided free. For example, the oil which Mexico exports to the United States (a country which has become a large scale oil importer) is undervalued as it does not account for the pollution caused in extraction zones located in the tropical rainforests of Tobasco and Campeche, because it includes no additional cost for negative effects related to Global Climate Change, and finally, because it does not respect future Mexican demand. 

Knowledge of agricultural or wild genetic resources (la CHINCHONA OFFICINALIS, the potato, corn etc.) has also been exported from Latin America at zero cost, or at best very cheaply, while absorption of carbon dioxide by new vegetation or by the oceans has been provided free of charge. And in a way, it is as if we the rich of the world, had assumed property rights over all the Carbon Dioxide sinks: the oceans, the new vegetation and the atmosphere. An Ecological debt, of the North to the South, can therefore be claimed, and that it exists despite the difficulty in quantifying it in purely financial terms, and that this debt can be see as a counterweight to the External Debt. Whatever the case, to place the claim to an Ecological Debt on the international political order of the day, is in itself the best contribution that the South could make to moving the economies of the North towards ecological sustainability. 

The second aspect of the relationship between the External Debt and the Ecological Debt has already been studied in greater detail. In what way does the obligation to pay the External Debt and its interest lead to a depredation of the environment (and as such increase the Ecological Debt). In effect, in order to pay the External Debt and its interest it is necessary to produce a surplus (i.e. production has to be greater than consumption). This surplus might come in part from a genuine increase in productivity (more production per hour worked) but also comes from the impoverishment of the people in the debtor countries and the abuse of nature. While debts grow through interest, the natural world is not able to grow at an interest rate of four or five per cent annually. Non-renewable resources such as oil, are not actually produced, but were produced many years ago, and are now extracted and burnt, thus producing a variety of negative effects. Renewable resources meanwhile, have biological growth rates which are slower than the economic pace imposed from outside. 

If the interest rates are high and the weight of the External Debt is large, the future is undervalued, and environmental questions are disregarded in favour of the present. If on the other hand, we give little present value to future problems of resource scarcity, to loss of biodiversity, and to an increase in the greenhouse effect, the level of exploitation of nature increases. These considerations are relevant for the ecology of the debtor countries, as Frederick Soddy, the ecological economist and Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, pointed out almost eighty years ago. In contrast to real wealth, which is subject to the laws of thermodynamics, money debts (that is to say financial wealth or as Soddy expressed it, “virtual wealth”) does no decay entropically  with time, but in fact, grows according to compound interest.1 Of course, the human economy is fortunately open to the entry of energy and materials, and is “anti-entropic” in the sense that it achieves growing levels of complexity and organisation. But real production cannot be confused with destruction or degradation. It is not worth paying a debt which grows at compound interest, with the sacrifice of humans and the natural world which must also continually grow at compound interest rates. 

Ecologically unequal trade 

A long history of the pillaging of nature, something not due to the pressure of population on natural resources, but the pressure of exports. More and more is exported in order to be able to pay the External Debt, so much so that, paying no attention to the ecologically unsustainable nature of the exports, it is normal to measure the importance of the External Debt in terms of the ratio between the debt service payments and export income, thus concluding that the External debt losses importance when that quotient diminishes. 

In the present wave of neo-liberalism  - which recalls other eras in the history of Republican Latin America - the old issue of unequal trade reappears. More and more is exported, and finally resources are used up, yet the debt is greater than at the beginning, as happened to Peru in the Guano era between 1840 and 1880. How to establish an alternative to development, or an alternative to development that is not based on abusive and unsustainable trade? Although a quantitative export index (that is the number of tonnes exported) does not reveal effects such as the toxicity of materials nor the disappearance of biodiversity, it does in a certain way indicate the impact that these export economies have on the environment. In which case, from the statistics of recent years we can show that the quantitative export index (in tonnes) has grown considerably (table 1). The value of the exports increased, above all on the basis of increased quantities, rather than exporting products or services at a better price. 

It is true that the participation, on a percentage basis, of Latin America in world exports (measured in monetary terms), which is only of the order of five percent of the total, has been dropping slightly over the last decade, due to the enormous increase in the value of Asian exports. However, it is a ecologically deceptive monetary indicator, as the financial amount of Latin American exports has increased some 245% in fifteen years (table 1), and the pace of growth in the nineteen nineties has been increasing at an annual rate of 10%. 
 

TABLE 1  
Index of Quantum of Latin American goods (1990 = 100) and the monetary value of exports FOB (at constant 1990 dollars, millions)  
 

This  Latin American data, which is part of a general tendency to a quantitative increase in world trade, tend to refute the hypothesis of a “dematerialisation” of the world economy which some studies of the “industrial metabolism” of the rich economies have prematurely believed to have discovered. Apart from the index of tonnes exported which shows a tendency to growth, it would be useful to create another Quantum index (which still does exist even in official figures and which would certainly show even more growth)  to indicate all the material processed, destroyed, or moved, in order to reach these export levels. For example, in order to export a tonne of aluminium, major inputs of bauxite are necessary, and in order to extract and move the bauxite it is necessary to move a great deal more material and destroy vegetation. Yet these impacts are independent of the price of aluminium on the market. In order to export a diminutive gram of gold, a great deal of vegetation is destroyed, much earth is moved and water polluted. The cultivation of coffee has been carried out at times at the cost of the original forest and the erosion of the soil, as has occurred in Brazil. In order to export cocaine a lot of earth is eroded  (growing coca leaf on slopes and in precarious conditions) and rivers are polluted by its production  inputs. That is to say that even high priced and low volume products can involve large environmental impacts. It could, for example, appear to be a good idea to export paper or at least paper pulp, instead of exporting chips or logs (such as Brazil compared to Chile) as this supposes less volume at a higher price, and supposes a greater “added value” in economic terms. But from the ecological point of view the impacts are not necessarily less. While the volume of exports may be less,  the destruction of a primary forest or the impacts of eucalyptus or pine plantations will be the same in one case or another, and in addition, there are greater externalities in the industrial process (organochlorides, greater use of energy in production, although less in transportation). 

Let us think back to the Latin American theory of the worsening of the terms of trade, developed by the Argentinean economist Prebisch, and by CEPAL, beginning in 1949. That theory explains that increases in productivity in the primary material export sector (greater production per worker thanks to technological change) are translated into lower prices as there are many international competitors who export the same primary materials (despite the attempts to form cartels). The export workers were also poor and sold their labour cheaply, while the price of imports manufactured products did not drop in proportion to increases in productivity, as the market structure had more of an oligopolistic nature, and the workers, unionised and without major financial problems as they were well paid, were able to raise their salaries at least in proportion to the increase in productivity. 

That theory is open to distinct objections. For example, in some periods economies can grow on the basis of the export of primary materials, and these open economies can create significant urban and industrial bases (as the history of Buenos Aires until 1925, shows) . This has been called the staple theory of growth , the theory of economic growth based on the export of primary materials, and applied to countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Scandinavian countries. Another objection is that industrial products and services are subject to commercial pressures which lower their prices, as has occurred with cars and information technology. However, the theory of the deterioration of the terms of trade (which laid the basis for the Latin American policy of “import substitution”) is again relevant given the present neoliberal export wave. 

The economic thinking of CEPAL in the years between 1950 and 1973 did not incorporate ecological aspects to the Latin American agenda3. In its creative era, the thinkers of CEPAL  were unorthodox economists, but still economists. Now, the new doctrine of ecologically unequal trade has recovered these old unorthodox Latin American ideas and complemented them with an ecological economics analysis, even though this debate will not be heard within institutions such as CEPAL. The discussion on unequal trade will reappear as part of the ecological debate, in NGOs and academic magazines, and in universities, and perhaps in some political groups and governments. It will reappear not only because there are periods in which there is a real deterioration in the price of exports compared to imports (as Prebisch and CEPAL showed), and not only because many hours of badly paid work are exported in exchange for a few well paid hours (as the Marxist economists had warned), but also because the exchange is ecologically unequal. Products are exported without including in the prices the environmental damage produced both locally and globally, in fact without even counting them. And to these environmental damages we must add damage to human health. Meanwhile, products which the natural world has taken a great deal of time to produce are exported and exchanged for rapidly manufactured products or services. 

At times there are products which appear to be ecologically sustainable but are not. The Guano of Peru was a renewable resource  which was exported at rate faster than that of its renewal. Guano is the same resource (even though in a later stage of the food chain) as fish meal, which was also exported from Peru at a non-sustainable rate in the 1960s and 1970s. In the export of Eucalyptus, the price does not include the loss of soil fertility nor the effects on the availability of water. It also appears that the export of agricultural products is sustainable activity supported by the photosynthesis of solar energy, but these exports carry nutrients with them (for example the potassium in bananas) which are not paid for in the price of the exports. Such is the paradox which appeared a long time ago, that Argentina appeared together Haiti, amongst the Latin American countries which use the least fertiliser per hectare, as it relied on the natural fertility - which is not eternal - of the Pampa. Apart from this problem agricultural exports also normally cause a simplification of bio-diversity. 

The Latin American economies depend to a considerable degree on an increase in exports of oil, gas, minerals such as iron, copper and gold, as well as wood and foodstuffs such as soya and fishmeal. A “re-primarisation” of these economies is being spoken of, but this is not new, it is an economic Deja Vue which has more serious environmental consequences than in the preceding export waves. Even the so called “non-traditional exports” such as flowers or shrimp, are all primary material exports with some processing. It is clear that some areas of Latin America, such as Sao Paolo, are escaping the tendency to  reprimarisation (on the contrary, they are areas which import energy and materials and export industrial goods, such as cars, and services). In contrast to Sao Paolo, another part of Brazil, the North, is being turned into a region of enormous new mineral extraction projects with rail lines directly to the coast, in accordance with the old model of extractive “enclaves”,  which have few links to the regional economy.  The Matto Grosso region to the South West of Brazil, close to Paraguay and Eastern Bolivia, is also quickly readying itself to become a great agricultural export zone, perhaps by way of  the Paraguay-Paraná waterway, a project which has generated a great deal of environmentally controversy. Other areas of Latin America are “falsely” industrialised, such as the Mexican frontier, with its  imports of intermediate inputs for the Maquila. Even countries already well industrialised such as Argentina and Chile are “reprimarising”. So with good reason, Rayen Quiroga and his co-workers at the Institute of Political Ecology of Santiago have described the Chilean economy as a “the Tiger without a Jungle”, as part of the Chilean economic growth is based on the accelerated export of minerals, fish products, and wood from primary forests (such as larch, for example, made into chips for export to Japan; the larches have taken hundreds of years to grow).4 

The recent attempts to organise “Fair trade” networks by means of co-operation of the North with the South (consumers, who, for example, are willing to pay a higher price for imported “organic” coffee) stem from the willingness to incorporate certain social and environmental costs in the price. Stated in an inverse way, those costs are not “internalised” in the prices which apply in normal production and marketing. These attempts at “Fair Trade” are a sign of the consciousness that is being born in a number of minority sectors of the North; that international prices do not cover such costs and that in order to allow exported products be produced in ecologically and socially sustainable processes, it is necessary to pay more. 

Ecologically unequal trade is born, therefore, from two causes. In the first place, the strength necessary to incorporate negative local externalities in export prices, is often lacking in the South. Poverty induces the local environment and health to be sold cheaply, even though this does not signify a lack of environmental awareness, but simply a lack of economic and social power to defend both health and the environment. In the second place, the natural time necessary to produce the goods exported from the South is frequently longer than the time required to produce the imported manufactured goods and services. As the North has made use of an ecologically unequal trade, this is one of the elements which needs to be accounted for in the Ecological Debt. 

Ecological conditionality and “adjustments”: 
rephrasing the question 

The fishing industries of the countries subjected to the embargo, supported by public opinion, maintain that the embargo is simply a disguise for the protectionist commercial interests of the United States fishing industry and its Asian partners  . But the death of dolphins is, and has been clear, cruel and unnecessary. Not only Northern but also Southern environmental organisations have denounced the dolphin killing. What is in fact surprising, is the blindness which exists in the United States ( both in public opinion and in environmental organisations) with respect to the local environmental impacts of other imports such as cheap mining and oil products, imported precisely from Venezuela, Mexico, and now Colombia. 

When Austria attempted to impose an obligatory seal on imports of tropical wood in 1992  in order to guarantee their origin in sustainably managed forests, it was confronted by a protest laid the Malaysian and Indonesian governments under the GATT,  and was not able to find any local allies in those countries . However, there have been cases which have achieved a harmonious and effective collaboration between Northern and Southern NGOs aimed at stopping the export of cheap and environmentally damaging products from the South. This occurred in 1997 with the victory over the Trillium logging company in the south of Chile, whose logging concession was legally cancelled, much to the satisfaction of the Chilean ecologists and to the irritation of the Frei government. Trillium was already well known for its pillaging practices in the North West United States  . 

Hopefully we can advance down the road of co-operation between civil society organisations, for example to sustain a boycott in the North on imports of shrimp which involve destruction of the mangrove and the sustainable ways of life based on it. Co-operation would help in other cases in getting a higher price that will recover the costs of sustainable management, or at least will allow the costs of mitigation of the damages, caused by the export production processes, to be paid. So instead of protesting against the limits on tuna imports, instead of becoming indignant at the supposed “environmental protectionism” of the North (added to the normal protection against sugar or wheat or bananas from the South) it would be more coherent for the South to emphasise the local environmental damages (local and global) that the increase in international trade in oil, gas, minerals, paper and wood pulp, are producing, and to also emphasise the benefits that the importers have enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, by not paying for those damages, benefits which are part of their growing Ecological Debt. 

The fact is, that the conditionality , be it in the financial or environmental field, is always imposed by the hegemonic states, while the peripheral states, or those of the South, are never the ones to impose them. That explains the habitual popular rejection of conditionality in those countries. But at times, for example when international co-operation is conditional on the respect for human rights, it can happen that the civil society of the countries subjected to the conditionality, despite being conscious of the political asymmetry, and the moral double standard applied, are pragmatically in favour of the conditionality in order to defend themselves from their own governments. Although this should clearly  not make them forget the human rights violations both within and without their borders committed by  those very states which impose the conditionality 

“Conditionality” is a concept which generally refers, not so much to the environment or human rights, but to the conditions which are imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund before making a loan or re-negotiating the External Debt. It is a concept which was used, and is still used, more in the context of financial “adjustment” policies than in an ecological or human rights concept. When such stabilisation programs are imposed, the idea is not only to slow inflation (a good idea in principle) at times brutally suppressing subsidies and freezing income, but also to lower internal consumption in the countries under adjustment, and to increase exports in order to pay part of the External Debt and subsequently obtain new loans with which to re-finance the rest. 

These stabilisation programs can bring about distinct social and environmental consequences, all of which are interlinked. Popular reaction against the freezing of income and the price increases on various basic goods can be seen, and consequently repression, such as the massacre in Venezuela in 1989. It is possible to try to ameliorate the situation of the poorest people through special programs. Other special programs can deal with the environmental damage, as the increase in poverty can aggravate some environmental impacts. (the use of firewood for cooking in arid areas, lack of water for cleaning). But the stabilisation plan can in itself be the cause of environmental degradation, given the need to produce a surplus in order to find equilibrium in the exterior balance of payments, including the debt and its interest. 

This surplus can obtained through lowering internal salaries; or by means of improbable improvements in the external exchange rate; or by an increase in technical efficiency which does not raise the energy and material flows in the economy; or finally,  - and here is where the environmental question enters directly - through a more intense exploitation of the environment. That is, externalising costs and undervaluing the future. These factors are inter-related. In order to escape from the poverty that the “adjustment” plan imposes, while at the same time paying the External Debt, one can increase the export of natural resources.  This helps explain the increase in exports of oil from Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela, and the present general large scale expansion of mining and logging in Latin America, which both degrades the environment and also worsens the terms of trade. 

Let us suppose that the South needs lessons from the International Monetary fund and the World Bank (lessons based on the so called “Washington Consensus”), regarding the financial stabilisation of its inflationary economies, and let us also suppose that the social and environmental costs of such “adjustments” could be avoided. Should the South now also accept that the North should impose an “environmental conditionality” on its loans or on access to Northern markets. 

There are two distinct ways to reject this “environmental conditionality”. The first is somewhat foolish but quite common: “Here come the Gringos again messing around in our business, stopping our bananas, or our tuna or our tropical wood or flowers or strawberries from entering their markets, because they say the production methods are anti-environmental, and to boot they say that will not make loans or re-negotiate the External Debt unless each investment project has this stupidity or lunacy of an environmental impact study”. The second line of rejection of “environmental conditionality” is based on the confirmation of the fact that there is an “environmentalism” particular to the South, an “ecology of the poor”, which is hidden to many as it frequently expresses itself in non environmental language. 

It should be understood in the South that the greatest threat to the environment is over-consumption in the North. An over-consumption encouraged by an ecologically unequal trade and by the free use of unilaterally appropriated environmental services, and which has given rise to an Ecological Debt. And so, rather than unilaterally imposing its “environmental conditionality” on the South, the North ought to pay its Ecological Debt, and should “adjust”  its own productive economy, which is, in fact, most destructive and polluting of its own environmental space. But the question remains, Who will put the “environmental conditionality” bell on the cat of the rich economies ? And who will refuse to finance the deficits (exterior and budgetary) of the United States for ecological reasons?  The only way to impose an “ecological adjustment” on the North would be by means of higher priced oil and other primary materials, and by the South stopping providing free environmental services, and more generally perhaps, international regulation controlled by a  more ecological and democratic United Nations. 

From popular environmentalism to an alternative globalisation 

However, Latin America contains the highest levels of biodiversity in the world and is, all of it, deeply involved in the greenhouse effect, due not only to the increasing extraction of oil and gas, but also because of the considerable amounts of carbon sinks found there. How to explain the lack of debate regarding those two central issues (the greenhouse effect and bio-diversity, each one of which were subject to an agreement in the 1992 Rio de Janeiro conference) in international environmental discussions. Perhaps it is a matter of problems felt to be distant from the “real” issues of Latin America, those such as liberalisation, the privatisation of state property, corruption, commercial integration, the drug trade, poverty, inequality, machismo, the External Debt. Are ecological concerns in general then, really alien to Latin American daily life and thinking ? 

The present day neo-liberalism predominant in Latin America, the previous developmentism based on “import substitution”, and the Marxist left, still impenetrable to environmentalism (take note of the deliberate absence of an environmental focus in the in the programs of the parties attending the Sao Paolo forum), have seen ecology or environmentalism as a luxury of the rich more than a necessity of the poor. When one has everything, one can be concerned about species in danger of extinction. When the family has one or two cars, it might occur to them to go bicycling on Sundays. This is the common reasoning. The poor are too poor to be green . Against this opinion, I would like to present something written by Hugo Blanco, an old time campesino leader in Peru, who was a Senator when he wrote them, phrases which bring together in colloquial language my theory of the “ecology of the poor”. 

“ At first sight the ecologists or conservationists are people who are a little crazy, who fight to preserve the little panda bears or the blue whales. Although they may appear cute to the common people, these think that there are more important things with which to occupy themselves, for example, how to get bread every day. Some don’t take them as so crazy but as sharp customers, who with a story about the survival of some species, have formed “non-governmental organisations” in order to squeeze juicy quantities of cash from the exterior (...) These opinions could be right up to a certain point, however, in Peru there are great masses of people who are active ecologists (of course if you were to tell these people “you are an ecologist” they would reply “ your mother wears army boots ..” or something similar). Let’s see: Is not the community of Bambamarca, which more than once struggled valiantly against the pollution of its water by a mine, perhaps ecologist?. Are the people of Ilo and of the other valleys which are being affected by Southern not ecologists? Is the community of Tambo Grande which rose in Piura as a single fist and is willing to die to stop the opening of a mine in its village, not ecologist ? The people of the Mantaro valley who have seen the sheep, the market gardens, the soil, die from the mine tailings and the smoke from the smelter at La Oroya, are also ecologists. They, the people who inhabit the Amazon forests and who die defending them against their destroyers, are complete ecologists. The poor people of Lima who protest about being forced to bathe in the polluted beaches are also ecologists” 

What the economists call externalities, that is, the negative impacts not included in the market price, at times give rise to resistance movements which use distinct social languages  They are movements which rarely call themselves ecologists, but which in reality are. For example, they can be spontaneous social movements such as those in a number of Indian cities which have burned cars, and buses which have run over worker cyclists, poor people who go work by bicycle in order to save the public transport fare. Another example is somewhat better known: Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper’s union leader for ten years in Acre, in the western corner of the Brazilian Amazon, close to the frontier with Bolivia. Mendez was linked to the PT, which arose from the workers movement in Sao Paolo during the dictatorship years  and also with the “liberation theology” movement. He  learned to read in the forest with the help of a communist refugee, and only knew that he was an ecologist a couple of years before he was murdered in 1988, even though he had been all his life,  opposing the privatisation and depredation of the Amazon lead by logging and cattle companies. Not far from Acre, in the Bolivian areas of Beni and Santa Cruz, angry protests by indigenous communities (such as the Guarayos, Chiquitanos and Ayoreos) have taken place against the concession of forest to logging companies, protests which use a vocabulary of territorial rights and not necessarily an explicitly ecological vocabulary. 

These social movements are ecological movements which do not present themselves as such. In some cases they are movements for access to water in urban areas  (the water barely reaches poor barrios), or in others conflicts over water between the city and the country such as arose in the Cochabamba valley in Peru, where wells were drilled for the provision of water to the city. The wells lowered the water table level and the crops were lost. In another case in Venezuela in 1997, native organisations (the Pemones) were allied with ecological organisations (such as Amigransa) and with anthropologists and sociologists and even Parliamentary deputies in the defence of the great forest reserve of Imataca, which takes in three million hectares. The  groups which employed distinct social languages in the same cause, from the protests in the streets of Caracas to Supreme Court action  were fighting against Decree 1850 which allowed the foreign concession holders (the majority Canadian) to exploit gold in the reserve. In still other cases they are movements for the defence of the mangrove, and their livelihood which depends on it, against the shrimp exporting companies. Movements that on the Pacific Coast (from Honduras to the south of Ecuador and the north of Peru) use a language of defence of indigenous or  black cultures. 

We could take a journey around Latin America, and discover case after case of the “ecology of the poor”, many of them born out of resistance to the present boom in mining, oil and wood  - that I emphasise, seem to refute in deeds, the tendency to de-materialisation not only of the Latin American economy but also the global economy. There are ecological resistance movements around the globe which link the local with the global and that once they realise they are ecologists, join each other or form networks. This  is a type of globalisation which opposes the globalisation of the capitalist economy and the culture of the United States, although it does use some of its arms, such as the Internet. It is an alternative type of globalisation to that of the trans-national companies and governments. And consequently there are conflicts in various parts of the world against plantations of pine and eucalyptus for export by the pulp and paper industry, because, as the world movement in defence of the forests says “plantations are not forests”. 

Until recently the trade in wood and wood pulp was carried out exclusively to and from the North (from countries such as Canada, the United States, Russia and Finland) but today the increase in consumption has taken the paper industry to the South, to Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, and when the primary forests are done, the industry turns to “monocultures” of pine, eucalyptus or Acacia . Those who defend the programs of industrial tree plantations try to justify them because they help to “counterbalance the greenhouse effect, by serving as carbon sinks or by alleviating the pressure on the native forests thus helping to preserve them as carbon deposits” . And so the local opposition to such plantations then finds itself involved in a global discussion over the greenhouse effect. 

Another global question, the preservation and valuation of biodiversity, is also linked to growing local conflicts. For instance, there is a general awareness amongst Indigenous groups in various corners of the Amazon of the “bio-piracy” of knowledge, made clear in litigation over patents or attempts to patent attributes of plants such as Ayahuasca, Sangre de Drago, Jaborandi, or Uña de Gato, a parallel to the anger that was seen in India a few years ago over attempts to patent a number of properties of Neem. There are international networks which provide information on what is happening and support resistance in such cases. 

There also exists, as an example of popular ecology, a certain amount of pride in Andean agro-ecology, expressed at times by leaders of Aymara and Quechua indigenous organisations which are aware of the virtues of traditional agriculture, with its work of selection and adaptation of species and varieties of plants through thousands of years in the climate and difficult geography of the Andes. These leaders  no longer use the language of “modernisation”. They are capable of mentally confronting the false competition of the agricultural exports of the United States and they feel themselves worthy of the work of conservation and in situ innovation carried out by their people. They feel cheated because, never having charged for their seeds and knowledge, they now see how intellectual property is granted to people and institutions in the United States on varieties of quinoa and other plants. There is awareness in Mexico of the ecological wisdom of the Milpa agriculture, threatened today by imports of corn from the United States under the NAFTA (hybrid corn, produced with free mezo-american genetic resources and possibly with cheap Mexican oil) 

When the workers who have become sterile due to the use of the nematocide DBCP in the banana plantations of Costa Rica, Honduras and Ecuador,  file suite in the United States courts against Dow Chemical and other companies, they are also bringing the local and the global together, implicitly supporting the international movement against pesticides and in favour of an agriculture directed more to local food security than to cheap exports  . The same thing applies to the protests of workers hurt by the production of flowers for export. 

There are also protests of those displaced by large hydroelectric dams, who are connected in international resistance networks. It is not a matter of defending only pure nature, as took place in the opposition to dams in the Grand Canyon in Colorado and in other places in the United States and Europe (the Danube for example), but to defend people and nature at the same time. Those who feel they are affected oppose (the ATINGIDOS PELAS BARRAGENS in Brazil)  whenever they can protest, given a certain level of political democracy (such as with the defence of the Narmada in India) and not, when there is a dictatorship (as happened in numerous cases in the ex-USSR and China, and today with the gigantic Three Gorges dam on the Yangtse)   At times the dams are built to facilitate new exports (the case with the Tucurui dam in Brazil and almost certainly with the Bio-Bio in Chile), and at others (as with the Three Gorges) for the development of the national economy, although with juicy contracts for trans-national construction companies. 

The Oilwatch Network is another example of alternative globalisation. This international network was recently created at the end of 1995, thanks to the efforts of the Ecuadorian organisation Accion Ecologica, which has been involved in the defence of the Ecuadorian Amazon against oil companies. The exploitation of oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon, which began around 1970, and which announced to the world another frontier for the oil business, is now reaching the supposèd National Parks of Yasuni and Cuyabeno, and occupying the whole of the state’s Amazonian territory. In Peru and Colombia the oil and gas frontier is also advancing rapidly towards the centre of the Amazon territories. The environmental costs of the extraction of oil and gas in such areas are inestimable. Seismic prospecting alone representing an unprecedented impact. In Ecuador, one of the strongest  resistance efforts was carried out by  the Huaorani,  a group weakened since the nineteen fifties by contact with Evangelical groups, which later worked for the U.S. oil company Maxus in the nineteen nineties (for example the Reverend Rachel Saint). This struggle is finally being won by officials of a Latin American and Catholic company, YPF of Argentina  The social asymmetry and the enormous power inequality allows oil companies to corrupt some of the leaders of these Amazonian indigenous groups, which have survived some 500 years of danger with great difficulty. They are groups of a few hundred, or at most a few thousand, people, not forgetting the novel role which some anthropologists openly play in the service of the oil companies 

The Oilwatch network brings together in a global movement, the defence of local peoples and environments in the tropics threatened by the extraction of oil and gas. As cases are launched against Texaco or Elf or Occidental, and also YPF and Perez Compac of Argentina or Pemex or PDVSA, for the damages they produce in tropical or other areas ( such as Neuquen in Argentina) the local is  linked to the global, emphasising that all the cheap oil produces more carbon dioxide when it is burned in the places which import it, as well as when the extraction gas is burned at the well head  . If Oilwatch denounces Shell for its actions against the Ogoni people in Nigeria, it does not forget to denounce them for their conduct in Peru which lead indirectly to a large part of the Nahua, and in this way Oilwatch, a recent network, offers a tropical complement, and is more internationalist than Greenpeace, whose valiant campaigns against the oil industry have up until now been focused on the damage caused in the North Sea, the North Atlantic and Alaska. 

There is a growing wave of complaints on local issues with global implications (where the global ecological discourse supports the local), that the large trans-national mining companies (RioTinto Zinc, Placer Dome, Mitsubishi, etc.) can not evade, as neither can they evade the protests of the local mining companies (whose production of course is bound for export) such as Codelco in Chile (which is a state concern and which has interests not only in Chile but also in other countries such as Ecuador) or Comsur in Bolivia (in the department of Potosi) which is private, and which contaminates rivers by dumping its wastes without being bothered by the damage this causes to the families which live by agriculture and which use theses water courses for irrigation. 

The groups which protest and act against the mining companies can find support in international networks such as Minewatch whose raison d’etre is precisely the proliferation of these types of conflicts. One of the possible avenues is to launch a case in the country of legal residence of the trans-national companies, for damages caused somewhere else. A case has been launched against the Southern Peru Copper Corporation in the United States court, for the terrible pollution suffered in Ilo and also against Freeport McMoran for its activities in Irian Jaya. It is normal that governments (as in India in the case of Union Carbide and Bhopal, Ecuador in the case of Texaco, and Peru with Southern) insist that such cases be heard under national jurisdiction, but this type of nationalism does not promote either social or environmental justice. 

Such attempts to obtain indemnification for “international externalities” are interesting ingredients in the calculation of “environmental liabilities”, the sum of which gives an element with which to calculate the Ecological Debt. 

Ecological taxes: turning the question around 

Let us examine the question of the BTU-tax or the eco-tax from the point of view of the oil, gas or coal exporting countries, many of them poorer than the United States, Western Europe or Japan. Such taxes are seen negatively, due to their distributive impact. By lowering the demand somewhat through an increase in taxes, exporters would be forced either export the same at a lower price or less in order to maintain the price, but in whatever way, their income would be lower. An international tax system could be designed  in such a way as to recycle the ecological taxes to the oil, gas or coal exporting countries in order to improve their social situation (of those that are poor) and energy efficiency (in all). Or something more radical could be proposed ; that the fossil fuel exporting countries themselves,  instead of opposing and even boycotting, as they have up until now, any negotiations on the greenhouse effect, should impose an ecological tax at source which would increase its price. That is, to export less at a higher price (while maintaining cooking gas subsidies) and thus contributing to a reduction in the greenhouse effect. 

Naturally, in order to implement such a tax there would be the need for a collective agreement, within the framework of OPEC or another similar group. However, for the governments, and perhaps public opinion, in the gas, coal, and oil exporting countries, it has been more convenient not to confront the North and to deny the increase in the greenhouse phenomenon, and lamentably divide the countries of the South  This division of the South facilitates inaction in the North, even though a number of Southern countries such as Bangladesh or the small Islands of the Maldives, will be in grave danger as a consequence of climate change, and are therefore subject to real external aggression against their environmental security, while others such as India will have a lot to gain with an immediate equal distribution amongst all humans of rights to carbon sinks together with commitment to emission reduction from the countries which produce the most per person. 

There are dilemmas which ought to be emphasised. In Ecuador it is proposed to increase the capacity of the oil pipeline from the Amazon to the Coast, and even to construct a new pipeline for heavy crude, to increase the rate of extraction from around 350,000 barrels a day to 500,000. These actions would, through deforestation in the Amazon and the burning of petroleum in the importing countries, contribute to climate change,  which will involve a small increase in sea levels, possibly having quite negative repercussions in the already difficult life of Guayaquil, the country’s major port and largest city. In Brazil,  whose competent diplomacy could play an important role in the negotiations on climate change, a defensive attitude has been predominant with regard to international complaints over Amazon deforestation. This attitude has been assumed rather than emphasising the role which Brazil could play as a carbon sink, conserving primary forests and encouraging the growth of permanent secondary forests. The country also has a role in the growing of sugar cane in order to produce a fuel substitute for petroleum, and in the oceanic absorption of Carbon Dioxide which it would be responsible for (that, of course, would be quite clear if the latter were proportional to territory or population, but up until now it has been freely appropriated by the North). While the social and political perception in Latin America regarding the increase in the greenhouse effect does not change, while those who influence the political agenda do not see global ecological issues from the perspective of a popular ecology, it will be difficult to put the issue of the Ecological Debt on the international discussion table. 

Quantifying and claiming the ecological debt

Let us look in more detail at the negotiation on Climate Change as it is presently posed. Carbon Dioxide is the main greenhouse gas, and present emissions greatly exceed the absorption capacity of the oceans and new vegetation, with the result that the concentration of C02 in the atmosphere has increased from 280 ppm to 360 ppm at present. The decision of the European community, to be discussed at Kyoto in December 1997,  is to allow concentrations to rise to 550 ppm, which would possibly involve a two degree rise in temperature (with a lot of uncertainty attached, and even more regarding local effects)  The emissions per person per year in the United States, are of the order of 5 tonnes of Carbon, in Europe the figure is half of that, while in India emissions do not even reach 0.3 tonnes. The global average is around 1 tonne of carbon per person per year, and economic growth will undoubtedly increase this.  The total volume of emissions will also rise with the rise in population. For the negotiations at Kyoto, Europe has proposed a slight reduction in European emissions with respect to 1990, while the United States has not even managed this. 

It can be argued, before making a commitment to C02 emission reductions, that it is necessary to explore the reduction of other greenhouse gases in more detail (such as CFCs, which have been emitted mainly by the rich countries, but which are now diminishing as they are now prohibited due to their effect on the Ozone layer, or methane, which, at least the portion coming from garbage dumps, could be cheaply recycled through combustion, thus greatly diminishing the direct effect that it has as a greenhouse gas). In the experimental cases of “joint implementation” which are designed to reduce carbon emissions or to produce additional absorption of C02 (that is payment for absorption or emission reduction in other countries, while crediting this reduction of carbon emissions to the country or company which finances it, such as is the case with FACE Holland and its plantations of pine and eucalyptus in Ecuador), the costs per tonne of carbon is estimated at a few dollars, but these are the cheapest present options. Despite these policies, C02 emissions are already excessive and will increase, and their concentration in the atmosphere will therefore become greater. Sinks such as the oceans and new vegetation, do not absorb fixed quantities, there is for example what is known as the “fertilisation with C02” effect, a metaphor which describes the greater plant growth in the case of increased levels of C02 in the atmosphere, plus adequate temperature and humidity. 

The consensus represented by the IPCC (the International Panel on Climate Change) is that present trajectories are leading to a large increase in C02 in the atmosphere, at least double. If the objective of reduction was, for instance, to maintain present concentrations of atmospheric C02 (which would signify an annual reduction of approximately 3,000 million tonnes of Carbon, with respect to actual emissions, i.e. a reduction by half) then the marginal cost of the reduction achieved thanks to technological changes or an economic  decrease  (or the cost of additional absorption by new vegetation) would be much higher than in the present “joint implementation” experiments. Costa Rica has already considered issuing  C02 absorption bonds, which would be bought by cement or electricity companies or other foreign companies forced to reduce C02 emissions or which could also be bought by Northern governments in name of their citizens. However, the supply of such additional sinks could be much greater than the present demand when countries bigger than Costa Rica are included, and the price would be low given the lack of commitment to reduce emissions. But if there were considerable reductions required at the global level, a plausible price of such bonds would be in the area of $20 per tonne of Carbon. By not reducing the emissions and exposing the rest of the world to the impacts of an increase in the greenhouse effect, and by exercising de facto property rights over all the carbon sinks, we, the citizens of the rich countries, have been saving money whose amount can be more or less calculated; this is a part of our Ecological Debt. 

Other environmental services, nutrient recycling, soil formation, defence of coastal zones, evaporation of water, purification of water in wetlands etc., have also been outside the market, and, fortunately, have been free. But not all humans have equal access to these services. This lack of equity has been evident in terms of access to the genetic resources of the South (where the original centres of agricultural diversity are found and where there is also greater “wild” diversity). The South’s unpaid support to the mercantile value of agriculture and medicine could actually be calculated, even though in this case the greater value is still in the future, and therefore the actualisation or discount rate, applied in order to calculate the present value of options which will be lost in the future due to present “genetic erosion”, becomes an issue in the calculation. The claim for Plant Breeders Rights (recognised by FAO, although without practical effect) that is,  the compensation of farmers and traditional farmers for their work in conservation and innovation as improvers of plants through the centuries, is part of the Ecological Debt (since nothing, or virtually nothing, has ever been paid for the seeds – and the knowledge about them – developed in traditional agriculture, and later used for the development of commercial seeds). Neither has anything, or almost nothing, been paid for the knowledge of medicinal plants. 

But the handing over, voluntarily or other wise gratis, of knowledge which is not later used commercially, should not imply rights. For example, no claim would be made for the use of Yuca from the Americas in the feeding of Africans, but the use of rubber and cocoa in British colonial plantations is another matter. Given the international transfer of plants and domestic animals, and also the knowledge about them, after 1492, it could appear at first glance that it is not worth establishing accounts of debts and credits. However, the distribution of biodiversity in the world makes one suspect that the flow of free information has been more from South to North than the reverse, while the commercialised information (“improved” seeds, patented medicines) is on the other hand from North to South. To put it in present terms, there is almost certainly a considerable Ecological Debt due to TRIPS, and patents which could have existed, and were not paid. 

The components of the Ecological Debt expressed in money terms are he following: 
Regarding ecologically unequal trade: 

• The costs of reproduction, or maintenance, or sustainable management, of the exported renewable natural resources (which have not been paid). For example, the replacement of the nutrients incorporated into agricultural exports 
• The actualised costs of the future lack of availability of destroyed natural resources. For example the oil no longer available, or the bio-diversity destroyed. This is a difficult figure to calculate. 
• The costs of reclamation (not paid) of the local damage produced by exports (for example the sulphur dioxide of the copper smelters, the mine tailings, the health effects of flower exports, the pollution of water by mercury in gold mining) or when no reclamation is possible, the actualised value of the damage (what is sometimes known as “environmental liabilities”) 

• The costs (not paid) of reclamation of the impacts caused by importing solid or liquid toxic wastes 
• The value of the gaseous residues absorbed without cost in the atmosphere up until the present (mainly C02), supposing equal rights to the worlds carbon sinks. This can be calculated according to the costs of necessary reductions not carried out, or alternatively with a calculation of the present value of the damage that would be produced (this being a more difficult calculation). If the necessary annual reduction is estimated to be around 3,000 million tonnes of carbon (in order not to continue increasing the level of carbon in the atmosphere), and if the average costs of the reduction is estimated at only $20 per tonne then a figure of approximately $60,000 million is obtained (a tenth of the External Debt of Latin America). An amount that the countries which produce excess C02 owe to the rest of the world each year. 
• The value (not paid until now) of the information and knowledge on genetic resources given freely, when commercial use has been made of it. 

Amongst these languages, that of Ecological Justice (employed in the United States in the struggle against the disproportionate amount of pollution in areas occupied by minority and low income people) is beginning to appear. The U.S. movement for environmental justice, and against “environmental racism”, was even able to get President Clinton to sign an executive order, 12898 of February 11 1994, which ordered federal agencies to take into account and achieve “environmental justice” in their programs and activities within the territory of the United States and its possessions. The disproportionate emission of C02, or cases of “bio-piracy” are obvious examples of “environmental injustice” on the international level, but President Clinton has not made any statements in that regard. Other social actors have already established links between the U.S. movement for Environmental Justice and Global Environmental Justice. As Sunita Narain explained, there are the beginnings of a relationship between those in India who have laid global claim to equal rights to carbon sinks, and those in the United States who, locally and nationally, fight against “environmental racism”. 

“Having worked for environmental justice at the local level, this group of United States activists and academics feel themselves attracted to the concepts which we presented in our book, demanding justice in global ecological management” 

Another language might be that of Ecological Security. A term used not in the military sense, but in a sense similar to that of food security, which is used to describe an agricultural policy that would assure food for the whole world through the use of local human and agricultural resources. Ecological Security refers to guaranteed access to natural resources and environmental services for all, not just the rich and powerful. In fact, the life that historical injuries suffered over geographic limits have in Latin America, and the effort that some countries put into defending or claiming their territorial heritage, is surprising, especially compared to the lack of awareness with which those countries cede their natural heritage (and also their cultural heritage, frequently linked to the natural heritage). This continuous surrender could be interpreted as a threat to security itself. And so the South can argue that the North has produced, and produces, a disproportionate amount of pollution (including the greenhouse gases), and that they take a disproportionate amount of natural resources, which is counter to environmental justice, and puts the Ecological Security of the South at risk . 

However, although these languages of Environmental Justice and Environmental Security can be effective in forcing an ecological adjustment in the North, they are compatible with, and are reinforced by, the claim to an Ecological Debt. One advantage to the presentation of the Ecological Debt is that it is present in the language of economic accounting, a language that the North certainly better understands, the language of money, the language of the bottom line. The claim for the payment of the Ecological Debt, expressed in this economic language, could help the South give major momentum to making the North put its economy on the road to greater sustainability. In the North, while well intentioned voices, with studies of industrial ecology, recommend a reduction in the use of materials by a factor of 4 or even 10, there is no clear sign of the “de-materialisation” of the rich economies  (neither relative to the GNP nor, even less, in absolute terms). The pillage of the South therefore continues to grow, and with it, an economically quantifiable Ecological Debt. 

If it were also possible to achieve cancellation of the External Debt on account of the Ecological Debt, this could diminish the pressure on natural resources, at the same time as improving the situation of the poor. But the issue which should be placed on the agenda of the Latin America countries themselves, and included in international political discussions, is not only one of how to help the Latin American environment but also how to use the claim for the Ecological Debt that North owes to the South in order to force the North to put into practice its “ecological adjustment”. 

References

1. Frederick Soddy  Cartesian Economics, Henderson, London 1922, pamphlet translated by J. Martinez Alier, ed. The Principles of Ecological Economy, Argentina-Visor, Madrid, 1996
2. The first column, the quantitative export index, is calculated based on the second column, the monetary value of each year’s exports, presuming a constant price level. CEPAL has supplied export statistics directly in tonnes. Compare these statistics with those presented by S. Bunker in his article in Ecología Política. n 12, 1996. Where he also argues against a ”dematerialisation” of the global economy. 
3. The first noted ecological contribution from CEPAL were the excellent volumes compiled by Oswaldo Sunkel and Nicolo Gligo., Development Styles in Latin America, Cultural Economy Fund, Mexico 1980. In the 1980s and 1990s, Axel Dourojeanni and Nicolo Gligo have unfruitfully tried to drag CEPAL toward ecological economy, something difficult in these years of the growing domination of the orthodox liberal economy. This orthodoxy is not simply an imported product, but has deep Latin American roots, with memories of the golden ages of exports in some countries until the decade of the nineteen twenties
4. Rayen Quiroga, Tigre Sin Selva, Environmental consequences of the economic transformation of Chile : 1974-93 Instituto de Ecología Politíca Ecology, Santiago de Chile, 1994
5. El Nacional, (Caracas), 1st August 1997.
6. Jordi Roca - Globalización Económica, Mercado Único Europeo y Problemática Ecológica. De Serbal Barcelona 1997, p 48 cf. T.Lang and C. Hines, The new Protectionism, Ariel Barcelona 1993.
7. Jonathan Friedland “Chile leads the region with a new environmental movement” The Wall Street Journal Americas, 26 March 1997, reproduced in a number of Lastin American dailies ; The article echoed the alliance between Chilean environmental groups which represent popular environmentalism (such as RENACE,  La Red de Accion Ecologica)  and Douglas Tompkins , a U.S. multi-millionaire  founder of the clothing chain Esprit de Corps,  and who now lives in Chile where he practices his beliefs in Deep Ecology, having bought and protected a huge forest property in the South. To this alliance was added the support of groups in the United States.
8. ... Leon Moncayo “ the context of conditionality” , the Latin American Institute for Alternative Legal Services. ¿Does conditionality in international relations serve to protect human rights ?Bogota 1996, p25.
9.   La Republica Lima, 6th April 1991.
10. Enrique Leff, Ecologia y Capital, Siglo XXI, Mexico, 1986 2nd “del analysis marginalistade las externalidades a la ac.... de los grupos ambientlistas marginados”
11. Los Tiempos (Cochabamba) 1 August 1997, p A12.
12. See for example the Economist 12th July 1997, p 30 and El Universo, Caracas 3rd of August 1997, p 1-2. According to the Nullity Plea lodged by the Environmental Commission of the Venezuelan Chamber of Deputies, the initial cost of the reclamation of a hectare of plant cover affected by gold mining, is estimated to be between 3 and 10 million bolivars, i.e. between 7 and 23 thousand U.S. dollars , a useful piece of information for the calculation of the environmental liabilities which are already present in so many places.
13. Ricardo Carrere and Larry Lohman. Pulping the South, Industrial Tree Plantations and the World Paper Economy, Zed Books and the World Rainforest Movement, London 1996.
14. Shell International Petroleum Co. And the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). Tree Plantation Review, London 1993, cit by Carrere and Lohman, Pulping the South. Op cit.
15. Anamaria Varea et al. Ecologismo Ecuatorial (3 vols) Abya Yala, Quito 1997
16. Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers, The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams, Zed boks in association with The Ecologist and the International Rivers Network, London 1996
17. Hoy Quito 1 August 1997 p 7A
18. As a symptom of the North’s bad conscience, there is a pathetic program in the Amazon region of Ecuador supported by the European Commission (Petramaz) of .... ten million ECU to calculate and mitigate the environmental impacts and to greenwash European companies such as Elf which are working there.
19. To obtain the Oilwatch Bulletin “Tegantai” write to oilwatch -uio.satnet.net or to the postal address : Oilwatch, Accion Ecologica, Alejandro de Valdez 24 -33 y La Gasca, Quito Ecuador.
20. European Environment Agency, Environment Taxes, Copenhagen 1996
21. See the interview with Anil Agarwal in Ecología Política n 5, 1993
22. Following the proposal of Thomas Lovejoy “Aid Debtor Nations Ecology” The New York Times 4th Oct 1984
23. Chrisitian Azar and Henning Rodhe “targets for stabilisation of Atmospheric C02” Science ,276, 20th June 1997 p 1818-9.
24. At time the figures are given in tonnes of C02 . The relation between C02 and Carbon is 3.7
25. Notebook, information pamphlet of the Centre for Science and Environment, New Dehli, n 5 April-June 1996, p9
26. Norman Myers, Ultimate Security, the Environmental Basis of Political Stability , Island Press, Washingotn D.C.  1996 and the work of ..... Dixon and Peter Gleick. An article of the latter on international conflicts over water has been published in Spanish in Ecología Política n 8, 1994. Ecología Política No 8 also contains a general introduction to the issue of Ecological Security by Rafael Grasa. The Northern countries can also find their own security affected by the ecological changes produced by humans . For example, the increase in the Greenhouse effect and climate change could produce an alteration in the Gulf Stream  and a considerable lowering of temperature in North Eastern Europe. But here there is not a clear international differentiation between between the “guilty” and the “victims” or between aggressors and aggressed, as with the predictable increase in inundations of some of the Southern countries.
27. See the studies of the Wupperthal Institute, published by Horst von Weizaecker and Schmidt-Bleek, and also the so called Carnoules Declaration, the articles of Robert Ayers, “Limits to Growth”, Ecological Economics, p 19 (1996) pgs 117-134 and of ..... and Opschoor, “Developments in the throughput-income relationship” Ecological Economics, 20 (1997) pgs 255-268, and the report of the World Resource Institute, Wuppertal Institute and other Institutions titled, Resource Flows 1997. 

The first version of this article was written for the meeting on The External Debt and the End of the Millennium, organised in July 1997 in Caracas by the Latin American parliament. I am thankful for the invitation made through Gilberto Buenaño of CEAMB of the Central University of Venezuela and the ideas and information of Alberto Acosta, Elizabeth Bravo, Carlos Larrea, and Hector Sejenóvich. The discussion on the Ecological Debt was begun around 1990 by a  number of Latin American authors such as M.L. Robleto and Wilfred Marcelo, Deuda Ecológica, Ecological Policy Institute, Santiago de Chile, 1992, and J.M. Borrero, Deuda Ecológica Testimonio de una Reflexión, FIPMA, Cali 1994. The present text seeks to stimulate this debate.