Inter-American Development Bank President, Enrique V. Iglesias, and the Secretary General of the Organization  of the Treaty for Amazonian Cooperation, Rosalía Arteaga Serrano, signed today a technical cooperation agreement to foster a program for the conservation and sustainable use of the Amazonian biodiversity.

OTAC will receive a $1,900,000 IDB grant to support joint action by countries that share the Amazonian basin to improve knowledge and information about biodiversity and to generate local and regional benefits from environmental goods and services associated with biodiversity.

“The purpose of the program is to foster and coordinate knowledge about biodiversity in the Amazon and its potential uses, to avoid that individual efforts of the countries are wasted in the absence of a concerted action,” said Iglesias. “The IDB wishes to support conservation and sustainable development actions that require cooperation beyond borders and will benefit all countries in the Amazon basin.”

“The signing of this agreement between the IDB and the OTAC is of crucial importance to the Amazon region, because biodiversity is an strategic issue,” said Arteaga Serrano. “With this program, the Amazonian countries will have for the first time a specific action plan for biodiversity in the region, one of the richest in the planet.”

The program will be developed in the context of the Treaty for Amazonian Cooperation adopted by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Perú, Surinam and Venezuela. This operation also complements and strengthens links and mechanisms of coordination with actions taken by the Andean Community in the implementation of its Biodiversity Regional Strategy for the Andean Tropic Countries.

The initiative includes proposals to support the management of transnational ecological corridors, the strengthening of regional applied information and research systems and the generation of innovative mechanisms for financial and institutional management to guarantee sustainability.

The Amazonian Basin

Amazonia covers 758 million hectares in nine countries – including French Guyana. It is considered the region with the greatest biological diversity on the planet, and it represents 56 per cent of all the tropical forests in the world.

A consequence of the accelerated destruction of forests in Amazonia is that many resources are lost before they can be studied or their potential in pharmeceutical, genetical, agricultural or other uses are identified.

Even though countries in the Amazon basin are signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, it is estimated that  they suffer losses of over $2.5 billion annually due to the so-called “biopiracy”, for lack of close coordination to prevent this type of crime in their common borders.

Also better knowledge and research are required to prevent and mitigate the possible impact on biodiversity of the construction of regional integration infrastructure.

The Organization of the Treaty for Amazonian Cooperation headquarters are in Brasilia. The treaty was signed by the eight Amazonian countries in South America in 1978, and its main authority   – foreign ministers of the signing countries – ratified in a 2004 meeting the need to deepen scientific and technological research.

Regional Public Goods

The program signed today is one of the first to benefit from a new innovative IDB mechanism that promotes regional public goods for a regional and more effective solution to common problems of Latin American and Caribbean countries. Under this mechanism the IDB receives and selects proposals from the countries to approach problems in which a joint solution will offer comparative advantages as opposed to individual solutions.

In its first stage, this regional support line approved $8.8 million in financing for projects that include more than 15 countries in areas such as environment, education, modernization of the state, financial markets and social development.

The IDB is the first multilateral institution to create an operative instrument for the promotion of regional public goods.