Praful Bidwai

NEW DELHI, Jan 13 2006 (IPS) – Environmentalists who oppose the dumping of toxic waste by the industrialised North upon underdeveloped Southern countries are locked in an epic battle over a discarded French aircraft- carrier, the Clemenceau , being tugged to India to be dismantled.
Interestingly, the battle is taking place on shifting waters between India and France. When the asbestos-laden Clemenceau approached the Suez Canal, on Thursday, Egyptian authorities challenged it. The next day, the ship changed course, raising suspicions.

The battle-lines cut across the North-South divide. Arrayed on one side are the governments of France and India, which support the global network of shadowy but powerful companies trading in hazardous wastes and assorted environmental poisons.

On the other side stand the forces of international law and environmental justice, which hold that the Clemenceau not only contains tonnes of asbestos, but is itself toxic waste whose export for final disposal is banned by the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal.

The Basel treaty prohibits such exports from the developed to developing countries.

At stake in this confrontation is the fate of one of the world dirtiest industries, shipbreaking, the future of global environmental standards and controls, and the fortunes of the world s largest shipbreaking business, at Alang port in western Gujarat state.
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If the Clemenceau is allowed to be scrapped at Alang, that beach would soon become the world s largest graveyard of warships. It is already the biggest dump for merchant vessels.

The tug pulling the Clemenceau changed course after the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency demanded official letters from special authorities in the French and Indian governments certifying that the ship s movement conforms to the Basel convention. Failure to do so would attract punishment and the ship would be sent back to France.

It is unclear if the Clemenceau s owners (Panama-registered SDIC), who bought the ship from the French government have such letters.

The French government might give them one, based on its astounding claim that the Basel convention does not apply to war material including battleships. (The text of the convention makes no exception for military or any other material.)

However, the Indian government would face a serious dilemma. Its environment ministry favours toxic waste imports, including condemned ships which contain hazardous material such as asbestos, contaminated oils and plastics, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), heavy metals like lead and mercury, lead-acid batteries, bilge, and gases like ammonia.

New Delhi would probably be inclined to certify that the Clemenceau conforms to Basel norms going by the confidence of its shadowy importers.

But toxic-waste imports are already controversial in India. To scrutinise them, India s supreme court set up a monitoring committee which recommended on Jan. 6 that the Clemenceau must not be permitted into India s waters.

The court s committee based this recommendation on the fact that nobody has accurately determined the amount of asbestos on board the Clemenceau. Technopure, the company hired to remove a limited quantity of asbestos from the ship before it left French shores, says that 500 to 1,000 tonnes still remains in the vessel. The French government places the residual amount at 45 tonnes.

Experts hold that even a few kg of asbestos is too much , says Madhumita Datta of the non-government organisation (NGO), Corporate Accountability Desk. Any significant quantity of this cancer-causing material would violate the Basel convention. Besides, the ship itself is a toxic waste, whose export for scrapping is banned under the Basel convention .

Adds Datta: If the Indian government has any respect for international law and the Basel treaty which it itself signed, and if it cares for its citizens whose health is liable to be harmed by the junking of the Clemenceau, it should clearly state that the ship s export violates the Basel convention .

In the past, India has repeatedly caved in to pressure from the waste lobby, especially the shipbreakers of Alang who run their operations in ways even more wretched than the nightmarish conditions described by Charles Dickens in early industrial England.

Alang s viability is rooted in the rapacious exploitation of poor, semi-literate and undernourished workers , says Nityanand Jayaraman, a Chennai-based independent consultant who studies toxic-waste issues. The shipbreaking yard with its 180-odd plots is a sight straight out of hell, with grossly insanitary conditions, no mechanical equipment, and constant exposure to extreme hazards.

Alang s shipbreaking is essentially manual conducted with crude hacksaws, blow-torches and hammers. Groups of workers literally rip up ships, risking the fall of heavy plates, boilers and decks upon their bodies.

They use no protective equipment such as helmets, gasmasks and heavy boots. Many sustain serious injuries, including broken bones and severe burns.

During its peak activity, Alang employed 40,000 workers and annually handled three million tonnes of scrap. The tonnage is now down to around 600,000 and the number of workers only about one-tenth the original figure. Bangladesh has emerged as a major competitor.

But Alang s shipbreakers now want their business to grow through a niche for scrapping condemned warships. The world over, there are hundreds of such ships. The U.S. alone has 170.

Clemenceau is a test case. If India allows it to be dismantled, Alang could attract many other warships too.

The Indian government has used numerous rationalisations to keep the waste trade profitable- at enormous costs to Indian workers health and the public well-being. These are compromised when contaminated scrap is recycled into spoons, forks and miscellaneous containers.

Besides inviting harm upon its own citizens from abroad, the Indian government breaches the Basel convention by allowing ships to be scrapped on its beaches. Earlier, it could cite as justification the convention s silence on the issue of ships.

But in Oct. 2004, the seventh conference of the parties to the convention clarified that a ship destined for scrapping is both a maritime vessel, and a hazardous waste banned under Basel.

India s apex court, in Oct. 2003, stipulated many guidelines for handling ship wastes. No ship can beach unless its owner has proper consent from the concerned authority that it does not contain any hazardous waste or radioactive substances . The ship should be properly decontaminated à prior to the breaking.

These conditions are routinely violated. So is the Basel rule that if an exporting country defines something as waste, it must be treated as such by the importer. Last year, a Danish ship Konig Frederick-II illegally came to India to evade Denmark s decontamination orders, and changed its name to Ricky .

Denmark s environment ministry wrote to the Indian government, calling for joint action against the ship so that it could be sent back. Instead, the Indian government allowed the ship to be scrapped at Alang.

The significance of the Clemenceau case goes far beyond India. If the message goes out that the Basel convention can be easily violated, all progress towards regulation of environment practices, including hazardous waste management and carbon dioxide emissions, stand to get slowed down, say environment groups.

For one thing, the global shipping industry will be freed of the pressure to observe the principle, keep your own waste . If a big country like India capitulates to the waste trade lobby, the fate of smaller developing countries can only be worse.

+ Contaminated Ship Headed for India (https://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp? idnews31652)