The Perito Moreno glacier in southern Argentina. Credit: Photo Stock

Accents
Frustration Over Veto to Protect Argentina's Glaciers
By Marcela Valente

The Argentine government's total veto of a law aimed at protecting protect the country's glaciers has frustrated the scientists who helped draft the policy.

BUENOS AIRES, Nov 24 (Tierramérica).- The decision by the Cristina Fernández government to veto a law to protect Argentina's glaciers -- important reserves of freshwater -- has caused deep concern among scientists and environmentalists who participated in writing the legislation.

"We had worked closely with the legislators to get this law passed," said a disappointed Ricardo Villalba, geoscientist and director of the Argentine government's institute for snow and glacier research, IANIGLA.

"It's difficult to understand what happened. The scientific community doesn't want to slow economic development, but rather preserve freshwater sources in a region where the provinces rely on those reserves for their consumption and for irrigation," Villalba, a member of the 2007 Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told Tierramérica.

The Law of Minimum Budgets for the Protection of Glaciers and Periglacial Environment, approved Oct. 22 with a heavy majority in both legislative houses, established basic standards aimed at "preserving them as strategic reserves of hydric resources and water supplies."

The bill also prohibited activities that would affect the function of the glaciers as water supplies and the periglacial environment, defined in the text as the high mountain areas "with frozen soils that act as a regulator of water resources."

The bill's second article stated that a glacier is a "mass of perennial ice, stable or which flows slowly, with or without interstitial water, formed by the refreezing of snow, located in various ecosystems, whatever their form, dimension or state of conservation." Among the activities banned in those areas were mining or petroleum exploration and exploitation, construction of buildings or infrastructure, and the release of contaminating substances, chemic products or any type of waste.

Under advisement from the Secretariat of Mines, President Fernández vetoed the bill on Nov. 11, stating that "the prohibition is excessive" and gives "preeminence to environmental aspects over activities that could be developed in perfect care of the environment."

In justifying the veto, the president admitted that the governors of the affected provinces "had expressed their concern" about the bill because "it would have negative repercussions in the economic development and investment" in those provinces.

The law would have affected projects like the one in Pascua Lama, which the Canadian mining company Barrick Gold is pursuing in the Andes in a border area between the western Argentine province of San Juan and the Chilean region of Atacama, to mine gold, silver and copper over the next 20 years.

Barrick's investment in the project would be about 2.4 billion dollars, according to the latest estimates, and annually would produce some 615,000 ounces of gold and 30 million ounces of silver, plus 5,000 tons of copper concentrate through leaching with cyanide to separate the metal from the ore.

The Barrick project has already been approved by both Chile and Argentina, despite the harm it would cause area glaciers and despite the strong resistance from residents on both sides of the border -- who have been campaigning for years against mining and in favor of preserving the freshwater reserves.

A similar situation is found in the northwestern province of La Rioja, where residents are protesting Barrick's mining plans in the Famatina mountains, which is the source of several rivers. But the mining projects -- though with obstacles -- continue to advance slowly.

Faced with this scenario, approval of the glacier law had been celebrated as a victory by the activists and residents who worked to preserve the freshwater source. But the party lasted less than a month -- then came the veto.

"The mountain range is huge and there is a place for everyone," said IANAGLA's Villalba.

"The law didn't say that there could be no projects. What it said was that areas should be delineated. That is why it called for an inventory of glaciers and periglaciers, to monitor and protect them," he said, and it was to be entrusted to IANIGLA.

"What should not have been touched (according to the bill) were the areas that supply water," he said.

Norberto Ovando, vice-president of the Friends of the National Parks of Argentina Association, told Tierramérica that even when "mining exploitation takes place in periglacial zones, the explosions cause the release and dispersal of substances that, in addition to polluting, warm the glacier area much more rapidly."

"The activities that the vetoed law prohibited are going to accelerate the melting," said Ovando, member of the Global Protected Area Network.

According to IANIGLA, in southern Patagonia the glaciers have shrunk 10 to 14 percent in the past 20 years as a result of warming global temperatures.

"For us, water is more valuable than gold and has no substitute," Ovando stated.

Although Barrick executives had to step back from their initial plan to "move" three glaciers on the Chilean side of the border, and then pledged not to alter the glaciers, "the scientists don't believe much in the mining company," said Ovando. The law was a tool to ensure Barrick's compliance with its commitments.

Biologist Raúl Montenegro, with the Foundation for the Defense of the Environment, said in a Tierramérica interview that it was "a mistake" for the president to veto a "sensible and intelligent" law that also protected the high-altitude watersheds in general and the semi-arid economies that exist thanks to the water supplied from the glaciers.

In Argentina, the western provinces of San Juan, Mendoza and La Rioja rely on water supplies from the glaciers for human consumption, farming and livestock.

* IPS correspondent.