MASSIVE OFFSHORE LAND/WATER-GRABBING FOR HYDROCARBON EXPLOITATIONS IN THE THIRD-WORLD
Dr. Miguel Doblas
Científico Titular del CSIC, Instituto de Geociencias
(CSIC-UCM), Facultad de Medicina (Edificio Entrepabellones 7 y 8),
c/ del Doctor Severo Ochoa 7, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Ciudad Universitaria, 28040 Madrid, España,
Email: doblas@mncn.csic.es
The emerging concept of “Global
Land and Water Grabbing” (GLWG)1 refers to the large-scale
acquisition of huge pieces of land in the Third World countries by foreign investors
for commercial/industrial agricultural purposes related to biofuel production, food/financial
securities, etc. GLWG is a controversial issue having important impacts on the impoverished
“global-south” countries (social, political, legal, human-rights, etc.) and
some authors suggest that many African countries might actually be turning into
“agrofuel republics”2 (70% of these grabbing activities concentrate
in the sub-Saharan regions).
We would like to expand the GLWG concept to
include the massive exploitation of the Third-World offshore continental
shelves by a crowd of First-World petroleum companies. It is well-known that hydrocarbon
exploration/exploitation activities might induce seismicity, generate
landslides, contaminate seawater, and definitely influence the food securities
of these countries by negatively affecting the marine ecosystems of their
territorial waters that are the base of their fishing industries. These circum-continental
low-depth submarine areas share the same type of “continental crust” that the
landmasses they surround, being their geological continuations into the sea. In
the attached world map of the productive offshore basins4, we added a
virtual “Offshore-Oil/Gas Continent (OOGC)”
generated as an idealized puzzle joining together the potential
hydrocarbon-bearing continental shelves of the Third World (the vast majority
of the planet’s reserves). OOGC is definitely a huge “continent” larger than
South America that should not be neglected and should remind us of the
increasing role played by offshore “non-renewable fossil-fuels” extracted from
developing countries to satisfy the needs of the developed ones, despite the many
expectations for a “green energy future”3. We suggest that this type
of low-depth submarine-land and seawater grabbing activities should be
considered in future GLWG projects as they have undeniable economical,
political, social and environmental repercussions on the developing countries
hosting them, further accentuating their “unsustainable underdevelopment” and
the world´s global stability by the inequitable distribution of wealth.
REFERENCES CITED:
1CSO Conference “Grabbing
Development”, 2014, March 25th, Brussels, Belgium.
2Graham, A., Aubry, S.,
Künnemann, R. & Monsalve-Suárez, S., 2011, In: International Conference on
Global Land Grabbing, April 6-8th, Future Agricultures Consortium at
the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK, 32 pp.
3Lohmann, L. & Hildyard, N.,
2013, Energy Alternatives: Surveying the Territory, The Corner House Ed.,
Dorset, UK, 96 pp.
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