Anglo-French Company Nominated For Spoof Friends Of The Earth Award

An Anglo-French company has been nominated for a spoof Friends of the Earth (FoE) award for its billion dollar project in a part of the Amazon inhabited by two of the world’s last uncontacted tribes.

The company, Perenco, is one of four nominees in the human rights category for Friends of the Earth France’s ‘Pinocchio Prize 2009’. The prize is intended to raise awareness of, and condemn, French businesses who ‘perpetrate the most serious human rights violations.’

Perenco has been nominated for its project in the Peruvian Amazon where it plans to drill for millions of barrels of oil on land belonging to uncontacted tribes, according to FoE. In doing so, Perenco is contravening a recent recommendation from the UN to Peru’s government, and is being sued by Peru’s national indigenous peoples’ organisation, AIDESEP. Perenco denies the tribes exist.

FoE says that in June there was a ‘massacre’ following indigenous protests against government plans to open up their land to oil companies without their consent. ‘Peru's president, Alan Garcia, has recognised publicly that the government failed to consult adequately with indigenous people about oil concessions. But Perenco doesn't seem ready to learn from this, and is aggravating what is an extremely tense situation following the massacre,’ says FoE.

Perenco’s chairman, Francois Perrodo, met Alan Garcia earlier this year and promised to invest two billion dollars in the project. At the same time, indigenous people in the Amazon were protesting against the company and preventing their boats from traveling on a major Amazon tributary.

Survival International director, Stephen Corry, said today, ‘This is a major embarrassment for Perenco. One way of guaranteeing they don’t win the Pinocchio prize would be to abandon this project tomorrow.’

Voting for the Pinocchio prize can be done on-line: http://www.prix-pinocchio.org/nomines.php#. The winner will be announced on 24 November.

ENDS