COLUMN ONE : Pollution Is Price of Asia Boom : Unprecedented industrial growth in the ‘80s brought widespread damage to the water and air. Governments have been slow to deal with the threat.

More than 3,000 demonstrators gathered outside government offices in December in one of the largest protests Taiwan has witnessed in recent years. The protesters were not demanding political reforms, but freedom from pollution in a nation where all 45 rivers are contaminated with toxic wastes and water pumped from an underground well is so polluted it can be set on fire with a match.

In China, air pollution is so bad that the entire city of Benxi regularly disappears from satellite photographs because of the dense smoke billowing from the city’s factories. Two years ago, an estimated 250,000 people died in Shanghai from an epidemic of hepatitis caused by contaminated drinking water.

In Thailand, vehicle exhaust has grown so noxious in Bangkok, where 10,000 new motor vehicles hit the streets every month, that a recent study showed newborn babies have more than twice as much lead in their blood as infants in the United States, raising the prospect of a generation with learning disabilities. A single huge coal-fired power complex being completed near the northern city of Chiang Mai is expected to emit more carbon dioxide than western Germany.

The 1980s were a decade of unprecedented economic boom for Asia, producing double-digit growth in a crescent of fast-developing countries stretching from Taiwan to Indonesia. Belatedly, the people of these countries are realizing that the boom also carried an enormous price in terms of damage to the environment.

“Asia is where America was in the 1950s--there is now widespread air pollution, water pollution, dumping of industrial waste and deforestation,” said Erik Scarsborough, an environmental economist who recently did a pilot study on the region for the United Nations. “Environmental degradation is taking place so fast that it may restrain economic development.”

Although environmental damage is not as great as in the worst areas of Eastern Europe, many more people are at risk from Asia’s pollution. Rapid population growth and continued migration to the cities threaten to intensify environmental pressures.

Asian governments have been slow to act, in part because the top priority is frequently to promote industrial growth and boost employment. “The attractive thing about industry is that it can absorb labor where agriculture cannot. There are only so many guys you can put in a rice field,” said Rezaul Karim, a Bangkok-based U.N. environmental expert. “The philosophy is to develop first and look at pollution later.”

Taiwan, for example, is one of the fastest-growing “little tigers” of the Asian economy, with a per capita gross national product of $8,159. The island has a population of 20 million, and there are 270 cars and motorcycles per square kilometer (.39 square mile), 18 times the concentration in the United States. White gauze face masks are as common in Taiwan as suits and neckties.

Facts about pollution are just beginning to come to light in Taiwan, because martial-law restrictions prohibited criticism of the government until 1987. Chang Kow-lung, a physics professor and head of a committee of scientists in the Taiwan Environmental Protection Union, said his group has found 43 cancer-causing substances in drinking water, including levels of the chemical phenol that are more than 2,000 times higher than the accepted danger level.

Only 2% of homes in Taiwan are connected to a sanitation system; the rest empty wastes into rivers. The country has 8 million pigs, whose wastes are the equivalent of 50 million people. “Taipei’s rivers stink from one end to the other,” said Shih Shin-min of the Environmental Union.

A battle is now being waged in Taiwan to block construction of a huge petrochemical complex in a relatively unspoiled area called Ilan County, located southeast of the capital. The complex, which will have 24 “downstream” petrochemical plants and an oil refinery, is being built by Formosa Plastics Co., which last year was fined $8 million for leakage of toxic wastes from a petrochemical plant in Texas--the largest fine ever levied in the United States for such an offense.

The battle over the petrochemical complex is at the center of a growing national environmental debate as Taiwan seeks to replace labor-intensive industries--which it is fast losing to countries such as Thailand and Indonesia--with capital-intensive export industries such as petrochemicals.

“How is anyone going to develop Taiwan without petrochemicals?” asked Winston Wang, general manager of Formosa Plastics. “The only way this island can survive is with industry.”

Formosa Plastics has promised that technology at the new plant will be far cleaner than that at similar complexes on the island. The company has also said that it has drawn up plans to go ahead with a similar $4-billion project in China, a barely veiled threat that has brought the government out in full support of the Taiwan plant.

Chen Ding-nan, Ilan County’s legislative representative, led more than 3,000 people in demonstrations against the project in December. He asserted that the area could not tolerate the pollution from the proposed plant, saying that Taiwan can no longer “afford to pay such a huge social cost.”

The Taiwan government, flush with the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, is taking some hesitant first steps toward improving the environment, building a mass transit system in Taipei and spending more to monitor pollution. The U.S. government estimates that the market for environmental control equipment in Taiwan will be $33 billion in the next 10 years.

Still, the government has a long way to go to convince the public that extra money should be spent to clean up the environment. “The cultural factor in the Far East is something everybody overlooks,” said Edward Rimberg, an American environmental engineer who lives in Taipei. “In the Confucian ethic, people take care of their own lives and don’t worry about anything else unless it impacts on them. There is no sense of community.”

Thailand can’t match Taiwan’s prosperity, but its economic growth last year was one of the world’s highest, pushing its per-capita gross domestic product to just over $1,000. Although Prime Minister Chatchai Choonhavan said in a New Year’s message that the environment is his No. 1 priority, it is painfully obvious to a pedestrian in Bangkok that much remains to be done.

On a recent weekday, for example, the National Environment Board said the level of particulate matter in the air over central Bangkok--a city of 6 million people--had reached 284 micrograms. The government standard for air considered acceptable is 100.

There are now 2.2 million motor vehicles in Bangkok, emitting an estimated 5 tons of lead each day. Calls for lead-free gasoline, catalytic converters on all vehicles and limits on heavily polluting two-stroke engines in motorcycles have been rejected as uneconomic luxuries for a still-developing economy.

“The doubling and, in many cases, the quadrupling of emissions over the next 10 to 20 years from their already critical levels will have severe health impacts on a population which will at least double in size,” said a report by the Thai Development Research Institute.

A study by Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital said that newborn infants have been found with an average of 18.5 micrograms of lead in their blood, with some cases ranging as high as 33 micrograms, compared to an average in U.S. infants of just 7 micrograms. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers 10 micrograms dangerous in children.

The pollution has already begun to take a dramatic toll. Tourism is declining sharply at seaside resorts where the waters have been fouled by sewage, and the fishing industry now has to sail its boats hundreds of miles out to sea to catch uncontaminated fish. Even the Chao Phraya River, an economic and cultural lifeline that passes through Bangkok, has become fouled with toxic wastes from small noodle factories, electroplating shops, even gas stations. There are no facilities to treat toxic wastes.

“It’s the culture of the Thai people that we live on the water,” said Suraphol Sudara, a professor of marine sciences at Chulalongkorn University. “In the last 10 years, the waters have been polluted and life has become hard in Bangkok. The citizens have not been prepared for this dramatic change.”

Anger has begun to boil over. In one case near the southern island of Phuket, residents fed up with pollution from a factory burned it to the ground.

The forests are a victim too. Thailand was forced to impose a ban on logging in 1988 after heavy flooding killed hundreds of people. The floods were blamed on clear-cutting of forests, a practice that has removed 85% of Thailand’s trees. Now Thai companies are doing the same thing to forests in neighboring Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Cambodia.

Environmental conditions in Thailand could get worse fast. Energy demand for Thailand’s booming new industries is growing at a rate of 15% a year, prompting the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand to develop a huge complex at Mae Mor, 120 miles south of Chiang Mai. The facility, which has nine power plants and is expected eventually to have 21 generators on line, burns high-sulfur lignite coal.

A Western specialist said a study estimated that the project’s carbon dioxide emissions will reach one-half of 1% of the world’s total, more than that of such developed regions as western Germany. Increased levels of carbon dioxide are a cause of global warming, so the Thai complex will have a worldwide impact.

Another concern is sulfur dioxide pollution from the complex, which could cause acid rain to fall hundreds of miles away.

China has its own problems with acid rain, which was found to be the cause of mysterious deaths of herds of sheep. China annually emits 33 pounds of sulfur dioxide for each of its 1.1 billion people. The government estimates 436 of China’s 532 rivers are heavily polluted.

The worst case of pollution in the world is probably Benxi, the northeastern city that frequently disappears from satellite photographs. Crammed into 27 square miles, 420 factories produce 95 billion cubic meters of waste gas, 150,000 tons of industrial dust, 90,000 tons of smoke dust and 100,000 tons of sulfur dioxide a year, according to official Chinese statistics.

China is Asia’s worst polluter, but it is taking steps to reverse the trend. It has a burgeoning reforestation program, for example. But perhaps its most significant initiative is to stabilize population growth.

Along with population growth in Asia has come rapid urbanization, and urbanization has intensified pollution pressures.

In 1950, the region had only five cities with populations of more than 4 million, according to a recent U.N. study. By 1990, there were 21 such cities, and by the year 2000 there are expected to be 28 “mega-cities,” with 45% of Asia’s population living in urban areas.

“For the last couple of decades, the real villain has been migration to the cities,” said economist Scarsborough. “Every person who moves into the city needs transport, electricity, cooking fuel. It (the concentration of pollution) really adds up.”

Nations with large metropolitan areas are slowly beginning rudimentary planning for such steps as relocating pollution-producing industries and building water- and sewage-treatment facilities.

Hong Kong has banned high-sulfur fuel oil and now offers lead-free gasoline. Other countries are expected eventually to follow suit. Indonesia last month announced that it was setting up an environmental protection agency.

“The damage is preventable in that technology exists to do something about it,” Scarsborough said. “But the costs are so great you have to sacrifice something else.”

With population pressures building, a major question is whether Asia will sacrifice its record-setting economic growth of the past and accept somewhat slower growth as the price of a cleaner environment.