LONDON, (Reuters) - Germany, Spain and France have  expressed interest in a pioneering Ecuadorean plan not to pump  oil from under a tropical forest in return for international  compensation, Ecuadorean officials said yesterday.

Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, on a London visit, called  for support for the Yasuni initiative, under which Ecuador would  leave 850 million barrels of oil, worth $6 billion, underground  as a contribution to countering climate change.

In return for not exploiting the oil in the environmentally  rich area, the OPEC-member country is looking to other countries  to pay it $350 million a year.

“We are proposing to the world that we will leave that oil  underground. That means giving up on $6 billion, but we would  thereby avoid polluting the planet,” Correa said in a speech at  the Chatham House thinktank.