Peru's history has shown many times that extractive "industries" have not been very keen in supporting sustainalbe development. Whether in terms of human and colective rights, or environmental protections, the existence of this enterprises has been posible not only because of the needs of the world's newly born market, but because of the abscence of coherent legislation. One good example of this was the rubber fever around the first decades of last century (about one hundred years ago). This material was needed for the car industry, so in many countries such as Peru, this industries settled down and started extracting rubber trees from our jungle.

The impact was huge, for not only biodiversity was in danger but also native communities rights (well, around that time no rights were implemented, not even thought). According to our school books of history, trees were logged indicriminatedly and very soon rubber bussinesmen gained a very bad image for native comunities. They were evil-bearers because they were contaminated with their diseases, like tifus and malaria. For this, and brutal working conditions (natives were punished severly if they didn't collected at the end of the day the stablished amount of rubber, and work in slavery conditions -they were not retributed for their work in any way), around 40 thousand natives died while the rubber fever lasted. On the other hand, just in the year 1884 around 540,529 kilos of rubber were exported, and in 1905 this amount increased to 2 million kilos. And then, the era stopped, because rubber was transplanted in India and Ceilan, brittish bussinesmen lesser production costs, and so everybody started buying from them.

So, there are some lessons that we could learn form this historical episode:

a) Never relly blindly on extractive industries, without protecting your natural heritage. This, on the economic side, is not profitable because eventually all will be gone, and on the environmental side is conter-productive because it threatens biodiversity, reducing (or extinguishing it) to very minimum amounts. Making of sustainable plans would be the best alternative.

b) Never work without the proper legislation. Otherwise, we will be vulnerating and endangering human and environmental life contidions.

c) But also, make sure that is FAIR legislation. Pitfully, we have seen later on that sometimes legislation protects intererests of the powerfull and forget the ones from the people.