Foreign affairs panel to mark up ‘debt-for-nature’ bill
Posted on September 10th, 2007By Allison Winter
E&E News: A bill that would let foreign countries pay off some of their debt by protecting coral reefs and tropical forests is up for a vote tomorrow in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The bill, S. 2020, would reauthorize a current “debt-for-nature” program for rain forests and expand the act to allow countries to do the same for coral reefs for the first time. It is one of a dozen items on the committee’s agenda for tomorrow afternoon.
Sens. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) and Joe Biden (D-Del.) introduced the bill last week. It would reauthorize the 1998 “Tropical Rain Forest Conservation Act” for three years and add coral reefs to the mix.
Biden and Lugar — the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee — want to expand the act to allow the State Department to pursue agreements with Brazil and Indonesia and protect their threatened coral reefs.
Debt-for-nature programs first started in the late 1980s, when environmental groups saw an opportunity in developing countries with extensive debt and degrading natural resources. Groups started offering to buy off a portion of a developing country’s debt, as long as the country would use a percentage of the proceeds to develop conservation programs. The groups usually paid debts owed to commercial banks.
The U.S. government got involved in 1998, when the first tropical rain forest conservation act allowed the government to relieve some public debt owed to the United States in exchange for support of local tropical forest conservation activities.
Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Conservation Society and Conservation International are still involved. They match funds to contribute to the program. The groups have invested more than $9.6 million to debt-for-nature swaps.
Twelve countries currently have forest conservation agreements: Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Costa Rica, Jamaica, El Salvador, Panama, Peru, Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay and the Philippines. The deals will generate more than $137 million for tropical forest conservation over the life of the agreements, according to the State Department.
Schedule: The markup is set for 2:15 p.m. tomorrow in S-116 of the Capitol.
