West’s Waste Dumping Stirs Africa Controversy

In what may indicate a new irritant in relations between the industrialized and developing world, several African countries have erupted in scandal over deals to dump hazardous industrial wastes from Europe and the United States within their borders.

Among the nations involved are Nigeria, which has threatened to execute the importers, Guinea, which apparently was paid a fraction of the U.S. price for dumping 15,000 tons of Philadelphia incinerator ash, and Congo, which discovered that three of its top officials stood to make $4 million each from a dumping deal.

Other countries, including Benin and Guinea-Bissau, said they had been considering accepting European wastes but had withdrawn their offers after the other West African controversies arose.

Nonetheless, international environmental officials say, pressure on the Third World to accept hazardous waste is likely to increase sharply as disposal regulations become more restrictive in the West.

“In the Netherlands, you virtually can’t put anything anywhere, because it’s hard to dispose of it without bringing it in contact with the water table,” said Jan Huismans, director of the International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals, an arm of the U.N. Environmental Program. “France, the United Kingdom and (West) Germany have stringent regulations, and Denmark and Sweden require very detailed technology.”

As a result, he said in a telephone interview from his Geneva office, industrialized countries are attempting to ship wastes to areas “suffering economic hardship and which have large areas of land. Several of the West African countries fall into that category.”

To keep shipping expenses low, European industries tend to seek West African dumping grounds, while American businesses have moved to ship their wastes to the Caribbean and Latin America.

In the most prominent case, Nigerian officials have threatened to execute those responsible for importing as much as 4,000 metric tons of chemical, and possibly radioactive, waste from Italy. Nigeria recalled its ambassador from Rome over the incident, detained an Italian shipping vessel docked at Lagos, the Nigerian capital, on an apparently unrelated mission, and undertook a rhetorical attack on the industrialized world.

“It is insulting and humiliating to the African countries, coming after several decades of exploitation in the colonial era,” one Nigerian official remarked at a recent U.N. meeting in New York.

Guinea, meanwhile, revealed that it had accepted the Philadelphia incinerator ash--required to be disposed of in special landfills within the United States--at a fraction of the price that would be paid in the West. Guinea says it has arrested the Norwegian consul general in its capital, Conakry, for having acted as a middleman in the import of the shipment.

And Congolese authorities last week arrested three top government officials and two other people for having agreed to import 1 million tons of industrial waste in a deal in which each would have made $4 million over three years.

The uproar in Africa has come just as international lawyers working for the U.N. Environmental Program, based in Nairobi, have begun to write regulations for the cross-border shipment of toxic and hazardous waste. The regulations and a draft treaty will not be ready for at least six months, however, according to one lawyer working on the draft.

Environmental officials say there is little point in trying to halt all shipments of industrial waste from the developed world to the Third World. For one thing, many developing countries consider the business to have great financial potential.

But officials are concerned that Third World countries may be victimized by industrial waste producers in several ways. Developing countries’ hunger for scarce hard currency leads to bargain-basement contracts. Guinea importers were paid about $40 per ton of the Philadelphia waste, which might have cost $1,000 per ton to dispose of in compliance with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

Third World countries seldom have access to the best technology for waste disposal, meaning that chemical compounds that could be disposed of innocuously in the industrialized world present a greater health hazard in the developing world.

Guinea’s cache of industrial ash, for example, is not strictly considered hazardous waste under U.S. regulations, although the U.S. government does insist on specially constructed landfills for the material. In any event, reports from Guinea indicate the ash has killed vegetation on the island where it was dumped near Conakry.

Professionals working on the U.N. Environmental Program’s draft regulations, known as a “convention,” say they will try to include provisions financing the transfer to the Third World of newly developed technology for industrial waste disposal.

Another important provision will be to define the appropriate regulatory authority in each importing country.

The Congo scandal arose, for example, after a Rotterdam newspaper disclosed that Brazzaville officials had agreed to an $84-million dumping contract. The government responded by saying it had reached no such agreement and subsequently arrested the director of the environment and the director of foreign commerce for arranging the deal.