“As a farmer, it’s hard to fight against a big company like Gran Tierra Energy. Nobody will be picking cacao for you while you are protesting, nobody will feed your cows while you are meeting the lawyers to sue the company!” says Doña Melva, a farmer from the region of General Farfan, on the Ecuadorian border with Colombia.
Like most of the inhabitants of this Amazonian region, she makes a living out of cacao and corn plantations. Clean water pipes do not exist here, and people rely on the small tributaries of the Rio San Miguel to address their water needs. “But when you know that a foreign company is threatening your only clean water sources, you don’t think twice before taking part in the resistance," Melva added.
In General Farfan, farmers began uniting against the oil exploitation project of the Canadian company Gran Tierra Energy in 2020, when Don Harry, president of Imbabura, a small farmers community, started alerting his co-villagers about the incoming danger. By reading an extract of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) provided by the company during a socialization event, Don Harry spotted some inaccuracies in the document. He contacted UDAPT (Unión de Afectados por Texaco), a local NGO providing support to communities opposing oil and gas companies, and he asked for help.
What came out was frightening. Several villages, as well as rivers, were not appearing in the EIA, the number of families present in the territory was much lower than in actuality, the impact of gas flares on humans was assessed as “not relevant”, and the number of gas flares was much higher than what was declared during the socialization meetings, for a total of 14 new gas flares.
“There is no doubt that this is all part of the company’s strategy to mask the real impacts of their project: less families means less responsibility and less compensation. This matters when it comes to presenting the study to the Ministry of the Environment to receive the necessary licenses,” explains Jairo Salazar, lawyer of UDAPT.
This story was produced with support from Earth Journalism Network. It was first published in Undisciplined Environments on July 1, 2024. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Banner image: A farmer in General Farfan / Credit: Francesco Torri.
Francesco Torri
