For Immediate Release
April 1, 2008
Washington, D.C.-Over 700 community members and ex-sugarcane workers from the Pacific coast of Nicaragua filed a complaint yesterday with the International Finance Corporation for injuries to their health and environment caused by the operations of Nicaragua Sugar Estates Limited (NSEL). NSEL received a $55 million loan from the IFC in 2006 to increase its sugarcane production and to fund the construction of an ethanol plant. The complaint to the Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, the mechanism established to hold the IFC accountable to communities for violations of environmental and social standards, presents evidence that NSEL activities violated these standards.
Much of the sugarcane produced by this project, like an increasing percentage of the one hundred forty-five million tons of sugar produced each year worldwide, will be used for biofuels. Although the benefits of using biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels are touted, the costs to its use are often significant and overlooked. Sugarcane production for biofuel use, for example, can exact a high toll on the environment and the people who work to produce it. The community complaint details these costs in the Nicaragua project.
The towns of Chichigalpa, Goyena, and Abangasca, in Nicaragua, are surrounded by thousands of hectares of sugarcane. Members of the communities are experiencing respiratory problems caused by the clouds of smoke and ash created when the sugarcane fields are burned prior to harvest. Moreover, many community members believe that the chemicals applied by the company to the sugarcane are the cause of the epidemic of chronic renal insufficiency in the region, prevalent among those who work in NSEL’s fields. The communities also worry that use of significant volumes of water to process the sugarcane will dry up their rivers, threatening their water supply.
“The IFC must ensure that it does not trade one environmental problem for another,” commented Kris Genovese, Staff Attorney for the Center for International Environmental Law, who assisted the communities in the preparation of their complaint. “These communities represent the thousands of unseen victims of biofuel projects that fail to account for their impact on human health and natural resources.”
The complaint filed by the communities outlines how these impacts result from violations of IFC environmental and social standards, including violation of a requirement to ensure that the project has broad community support.
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