Death sentence for a tropical forest.

• Author: Mastny, Lisa

The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) has agreed to finance a controversial gas pipeline that will cut through the heart of eastern Bolivia's Chiquitano Forest, one of the world's largest remaining and most diverse tropical dry forests. On June 15, the Board of Directors of OPIC - a U.S. government agency that provides loans and risk insurance to American companies seeking to invest overseas - approved $200 million in loans for the project, a joint venture between oil giants Enron and Shell and local Bolivian partners.

Some 60 environmental and public interest groups in 25 countries have opposed the pipeline, on both environmental and legal grounds. The 630-kilometer conduit will transect some of Latin America's most distinctive natural areas, including the Chiquitano and the headwaters of the Pantanal, the world's largest existing wetland. "Given how isolated the region is, the 30-meter pipeline right of way will open up the heart of this pristine region to uncontrolled exploitation, illegal hunting, logging, poaching and colonization," says Atossa Soltani, director of Amazon Watch, a California-based advocacy group monitoring developments in the region. Already, some 34 of the region's unique plant and animal species are threatened with extinction, she notes.

The loan also violates OPIC's own environmental guidelines, which prohibit the agency from funding infrastructure and extractive projects in primary tropical forests, says Soltani. And it breaks a 1997 pledge by U.S. president Bill Clinton to strengthen OPIC's environmental standards, and to prohibit the agency from supporting projects in pristine forests. Clinton's pledge had been considered an important step in the effort to "green" private sector investments in the developing world.

OPIC claims it has broken no rules because it believes the Chiquitano is not "pristine" or "primary" forest, even though a scientific assessment of the site that OPIC itself commissioned identified it as just that. The agency notes that some isolated logging and low-level development has already occurred in the region. But environmentalists argue that this isn't enough to justify its accelerated destruction. "Saying the Chiquitano isn't primary forest is like...