Seven years ago, Ecuador decided to not to exploit the oilfields under the rainforest. In order to do so, it asked the international community to compensate it for the loss of profit by creating a fund that would collect almost half of the expected revenue over twelve years. Six years later, the initiative resulted in such a failure that on 15 August 2013, President Correo announced that they would start drilling for oil in the Yasuní National Park. "The land grabbing issue can be easily explained: multinational corporations from the wealthiest nations are buying or leasing enormous pieces of land in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and so on; their purpose is to exploit the soil for intensive farming or to extract precious materials like gold or oil. But this is actually happening in these lands is the destruction of local ecosystems and the extinction of indigenous nations for which the rainforest represents their ancestral home."
