The Independent Advisory Panel on Development Issues in South-Central Peru (The Panel) was formally established at the end of 2009 in the context of the Peru LNG Project. The Panel is an independent and ad-honorem Panel established to advise the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank), and other interested parties, on the environmental and social effects of development in south-central Peru. The panel is based in Lima.
Panel Members:
GONZALO CASTRO DE LA MATA
Ecologist
Chairman, Ecosystem Services LLC
The Panel is chaired by Dr. Gonzalo Castro de la Mata. Dr. Castro de la Mata V. is a recognized international figure in the environmental field with senior experience leading international organizations and scientific and environmental processes. He has extensive experience worldwide, with emphasis in the Latin American region.
He is the Chairman and a founder of Ecosystem Services LLC. He has been Managing Director and Executive Vice-President for the Americas with Sustainable Forestry Management Ltd., where he was responsible for investments that generated the first forestry carbon credits in Latin America. Previously, he served as the Head of the Biodiversity Unit at the Global Environment Facility (GEF), where he was responsible for a portfolio of over 500 projects with a combined value above US$4 Billion. He has also served as the Principal Environmental Specialist at the World Bank, where he led processes to incorporate environmental issues within its regular lending portfolio with a combined value of over US$ 2 billion. At the World Bank, he was also a key player in the establishment of the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund. He has also served as Director and Vice-President of WWF's Latin American and Caribbean Program in Washington, and founded Wetlands for the Americas, and international environmental NGO.
He has published over one hundred and twenty scientific and popular articles in journals, magazines and books. Dr. Castro obtained a Ph.D. in Ecology and Population Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1988, B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biology and Biophysics from Cayetano Heredia University in Lima, Peru in 1983.
RICHARD CHASE SMITH
Anthropologist
Executive Director, Instituto del Bien Común
Dr. Richard Smith has lived and worked among the Yanesha as well as among other indigenous and non-indigenous residents of the Andean Amazon since the late 1960’s. His research has focused on: the historical links between Andean and Amazonian peoples, the music, cosmology and oral history of the Yanesha people (Peru), the politics of land and resource tenure for Amazonian peoples, natural resource management in Amazonian communities, and the relationship between indigenous peoples and natural protected areas. He has published several dozen books and articles on these themes over the past 3 decades.
He has a doctorate in Anthropology and Linguistics from Cornell University, was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University and has taught in the Graduate School at both the National Agrarian University at La Molina and the University of San Marcos in Lima. Dr. Smith is a founder and current Director of the Instituto del Bien Común with offices in Lima, Iquitos, Pucallpa and Oxapampa, Peru. He is the recent winner of the Pekka Soini Prize for Research Contribution to Biodiversity Conservation in Perú awarded by the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute (IIAP).
For the past 8 years he has been mapping the cultural-historical space of the Yánesha people based on collective memory and oral history, working with dozens of elders in the process. To date there are 5000 mapped elements within a very large transect of the central Peruvian Andes that stretches from the Pacific coast to the upper Amazon region. The results are raising new questions about the origins of civilization on the central coast of Peru. He has recently produced a collection of four videos on the mapping process and its results, one of which was a selection of the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival in Great Britain (2008).
Instituto del Bien Común
Avda. Petit Thouars 4381
Miraflores, Lima 18, Perú
Tel: (511) 440-0006, 421-7579
Fax: (511) 440-6688
PATRICIA MAJLUF CHIOK
Biologist
Director, Center for Environmental Sustainability of the Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH)
Dr. Patricia Majluf, Peruvian, is the Founder and current Director of the Center for Environmental Sustainability of the Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH) in Lima, Peru. She obtained her degree in Biology at the UPCH (1980) and PhD in Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK (1988). Since 1982, she has directed the longest running research program in coastal Peru, studying the impacts of El Niño and fisheries on marine wildlife populations. From 1996 she has led marine conservation efforts in Peru, promoting the establishment of marine protected areas and developing public awareness of the ecosystemic and socio-economic impacts of the industrial anchoveta (Engraulis ringens) fisheries, as part of an ongoing effort to develop the necessary enabling conditions for the implementation of ecosystem-based management for the Humboldt Upwelling Ecosystem. Her most successful initiative has recently led to a nation-wide increase in direct consumption of Anchovetas, the keystone species in this ecosystem, which is massively extracted and is mostly reduced and exported as feed for aquaculture and industrial animal production systems. From 2003 – 2008 Dr. Majluf was part of the leadership of a coalition of national and international conservation institutions and professionals working to reduce the environmental impacts of the Camisea Natural Gas development megaproject, particularly on the Paracas Marine Reserve. For her work in marine conservation she has obtained the Charlotte Wyman Award for Women in Conservation, the Lindbergh Award, the Whitley Gold Award, A Guggenheim Fellowship and recently, the St. Louis Zoo Marlin Perkins’ Conservation Award.
Center for Environmental Sustainability
Cayetano Heredia University (UPCH)
Armendáriz 445
Miraflores, Lima 18, Perú
Tel: (511) 626-9401, 626-9402
GLENN H. SHEPARD JR.
Anthropologist
Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi
Dr. Glenn Shepard, fluent in several languages of indigenous people of the Amazon forest, is a researcher and curator of ethnology in the Department of Anthropology at the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belem, Brazil.
Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi
Av. Perimetral 1901
Terra Firme - Belém de Pará, PA
66077-830 Brazil
- Member Emeritus Dr. Richard Korswagen, who recently retired as director of the Environmental Studies Institute for the Universidad Católica in Lima.