Necessity and Neglect: Making Multinationals Accountable for What Matters

The enforcement of strict environmental standards in fragile ecosystems such as Peru's Amazon is the obligation of the consumer. After all, multinational companies would not commit to the largest industrial project ever undertaken in Peru if they could not count on consumers to purchase the petroleum resources they exploit at great cost to their own coffers and at greater cost to the livelihood of local peoples and ecosystems.

In crying foul at the poor environmental and social performance of oil companies in the Amazon what are we really objecting to? The vast majority of us are not objecting to meeting energy needs at the pump and the power plant. We can no more deny Peruvians the right to develop their own energy resources than we can deny our own need for electricity and transport fuel. We may rail at an exploitative and unjust economic order that allows multinational companies to trample on the rights of innocent bystanders, but in doing so we dodge the uncomfortable truth that this reviled order operates under that tacit approval of consumers like you and me.

An oil development in West Texas will have a hard time becoming a poster-child for the environmental movement. Why is that, when the West Texas well involves the same fundamental process and objectives that underpin petroleum development in the Amazon? It is the imbalance of power, and the perceived injustice of the Amazon development that strikes us as fundamentally wrong, and with good reason. The Inter-American Development Bank estimates that $1.6 billion of natural gas lies beneath Amazonian rainforest, yet this figure is meaningless to previously undisturbed indigenous communities residing within the Camisea petroleum concessions.

We recoil at that collision of economic behemoths like the Hunt Oil Company and isolated tribes in the Amazon because Hunt has the capacity to radically transform the lives of Camisea residents while those residents have virtually no power to stop the environmental degradation, spread of disease, and social disruption that follow the drilling rigs. It's just not a fair fight, and it seems little can be done to affect the behavior of the multinational villain.

To a certain degree this is true. The project defies international and American law, and is being carried out under the auspices of the Inter-American Development Bank, indicating that safeguards have failed

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