For decades, western companies have sought to export products to the developing world that either are no longer used in their own domestic markets, or have simply been banned outright. Though prohibited in the developed world, such hazardous materials can still be shipped to countries in regions like Latin America and Asia – seemingly without impunity – as companies cash in on the back of large consumer markets, lax regulatory enforcement, and a customer base that is unaware of the risks inherent in the goods they are buying.
Mass sales of pesticides are a case in point. Since many countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America do not have the necessary capabilities to mass produce widely-used pesticides without infringing patent rights in their manufacture, they import cheaper or older variants that are no longer used in more developed countries. For example, as part of its long bid for EU membership, Turkey announced in August 2009 that 74 pesticides are off limits because they are poisonous and feature on an EU list of 135 illegal chemicals. Another six will get the axe this year.
While Turkish agricultural officials say that the first 74 chemicals are relatively unimportant and are not often used in Turkish agriculture, the government admits that the remaining 55 will be harder to eliminate because they are some of the most crucial pesticides to local farmers. A board member of the country’s Adana Chamber of Agriculture believes that the European demands may be unrealistic: “Some of these pesticides are not needed in the EU as the products for which they are used are not widespread or there are other alternatives.
However, Turkey has continued to sell them because it could not develop any alternatives,” he said.
The grim and perverse reality of western corporate marketing practices has not been lost on campaign groups. Zeina Al-hajj, head of campaign group Greenpeace’s agriculture and toxics unit, says that the organisation has been working to expose what it calls companies’ “double standards” for some time. “We are sure that companies have double standards with regards to their production and marketing practices,” says Al-hajj.
“Legal duties and enforcement action in developing countries is often not as stringent as in the European Union and the US, which means that companies can legally market products that are less safe – or unsafe – in some places that would be unthinkable in developed countries,” she says.
Perhaps one of the most controversial exports is that of chrysotile (white) asbestos. Exposure to blue, brown and white asbestos has been linked with lung and other cancers for over a hundred years and an estimated 90,000 people die from asbestos-related illnesses every year, according the World Health Organization. While Russia and countries from the former Soviet Union are among the chief exporters of this carcinogenic substance, Canada is also a key culprit in its continued sale.
The country is the world’s fifth largest exporter of chrysotile asbestos. Two mines in the province of Quebec account for all its production. In 2009 Canada produced 180,000 tonnes of asbestos, 96 percent of which was exported to 80 countries around the world, with Asia being the primary market, according to the US Geological Survey. However, asbestos is strictly regulated in Canada under the Hazardous Products Act and the Environmental Protection Act.
But campaigners in Canada are becoming more vociferous about the continued mining and sale of the substance. On 30 June this year the Canadian Medical Association (CMA), the Canadian Public Health Association and the National Specialty Society for Community Medicine demanded that provincial and federal governments stop funding the asbestos industry and promoting Canadian asbestos abroad.
Jeffrey Turnbull, president-elect of the CMA, says that the Canadian government does not require exported asbestos to bear a hazardous material label. “It’s a challenge to understand why in Canada we restrict asbestos as a hazardous product,” says Turnbull. “Yet we then will export asbestos to other settings across the world where there is not the same degree of health protections in place.”
In response to such criticisms, the Canadian government, in a legal document on the website of the auditor general, says that it “encouraged” countries that import Canadian asbestos to follow the 1986 Geneva conventions on asbestos use and regulation.
The government also shows no signs of changing its stance. Asbestos, Quebec is awaiting the provincial government’s approval of a C$58m ($54.7m) loan guarantee to revive the privately owned Jeffrey Asbestos mine, one of the world’s largest open-pit asbestos operations. The loan, combined with a labour deal to establish a C$10 million reserve fund from workers salaries, will provide cash to expand underground operations at the 130-year-old mine. The expansion will create an estimated 400 direct jobs in Asbestos, a town of 6,800 located 150 km east of Montreal, and will enable the mine to produce enough asbestos to keep Canada in the market for the next 25 years. How many deaths it will cause worldwide over the following century has not been established.
Most of this asbestos will head to Asia. India is one of the world’s major users of chrysotile and knowledge of how the material should be used and what health and safety precautions should be undertaken is alarmingly low. Nearly all of the country’s asbestos is mixed with cement to form roofing sheets, which is often easily damaged. Once broken, the substance is no longer safe and potentially lethal fibres are released into the atmosphere.
According to a report published this February in leading international medical journal The Lancet, between 2000 – 2007 India’s asbestos usage rose from roughly 125,000 metric tonnes to about 300,000. Bolstered by asbestos import tariffs that have been reduced from 78 percent in the mid-1990s to 15 percent by 2004, the country’s asbestos-cement industry is increasing by roughly 10 percent every year, employing in excess of 100,000 people. Furthermore, since 2003, companies no longer require a special licence to import chrysotile asbestos. It is estimated that since 1960, India has incorporated about seven million tonnes of asbestos into its buildings.
Asbestos cement is even used to make moulds of Indian gods for parades and festivals. Last year I photographed children making statues of Ganesh – the elephant-headed deity – with sacks of the stuff. None wore safety masks. None were aware of the associated health risks. More astonishing still, an Indian news channel reported that in 2007 that asbestos was being used in parts of the country to help bleach rice to make it more “attractive” as “extra white” basmati, and charging a premium for it.
Yet despite such reporting, the overall impression among Indians is that asbestos usage is safe. Late last year, the Times of India ran an advertorial on behalf of the asbestos industry. Entitled “Blast those Myths about Asbestos”, readers were assured that “only safe white fibre is used in manufacturing of asbestos cement products in India” and that the “problems” other countries have encountered “are not relevant in the Indian context”. Yet the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) position is very clear – “all types of asbestos are carcinogenic,” says its director of public health and environment Maria Neira.
There are no official figures for the number of people killed in India due to asbestos-related diseases. This is because there is no centralised system to record industrial accidents or deaths, and there are very few physicians with any training in occupational health.
Dr Sudhakar Ramchandra Kamat, formerly head of the department of pulmonary medicine at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, says that he saw his first Indian asbestosis patient back in 1968 – a 35-year old railway engineering factory worker from Madras (now Chennai). But he warns that there has been little effort to change the working conditions that have caused such diseases, with no effective enforcement of health and safety legislation to protect workers, and no real recognition of the scale of the health risks surrounding the use of asbestos since then. Worse still, he says, companies and health officials simply lie and mis-report the actual numbers of people affected by asbestos use.
“Medical tests on sick employees are usually carried out by the employers’ own medical staff. It is in the best interests of the company for the doctor to find that the employee’s breathlessness is due to tuberculosis or smoking, rather than any work-related cause. As a result, there are very few formally recognised asbestosis sufferers in India, and hardly any recorded mesothelioma cases, though there is no doubt that thousands exist,” he says.
In the past decade there have been international attempts to limit the practice of selling potentially lethal products to the developing and underdeveloped worlds. For example, the United Nations’ (UN) Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, agreed in 1998 and which came into force in 2004, is a multilateral treaty to promote shared responsibilities in relation to importation of hazardous chemicals.
Under the Convention, extremely hazardous chemicals and pesticides that have already been banned or severely restricted in various parts of the world are put on a special list. Countries must then first obtain “Prior Informed Consent” before they can export these hazardous products to another country. In other words, the Convention requires that intended recipient countries be informed of the hazards and have the right to refuse entry of the hazardous chemical, if they believe they are not able to handle it safely.
However, not all dangerous substances have been added to the list. Kathleen Ruff, senior adviser in human rights at the Rideau Institute, a Canadian foreign policy research consultancy, says that Canada has “consistently stalled” the inclusion of chrysotile (white) asbestos from being added to the list (which it still mines, exports and terms “safe”) despite a review by the UN’s own clinical review committee which recommended that it should have been included. Ruff says that under the terms of the Convention, there needs to be the universal consensus of all members before a substance can be banned, “so it is easy for countries that have a vested interest against hindering the activities of its own industries to thwart the entire process”. She adds: “Such actions are grossly irresponsible and should amount to criminal negligence.”
The Canadian government states that it has had “A Memorandum of Understanding” between it and the country’s asbestos producers since 1997. It insists that to this day, the chrysotile industry still does not export to companies that do not use chrysotile in a manner that is consistent with Canada’s controlled-use approach.”
But Ruff says that “in actual fact, this Memorandum of Understanding is meaningless, because the government and the industry do nothing to enforce it. In the face of indisputable evidence that asbestos use in the developing world is uncontrolled, the Memorandum of Understanding lacks credibility”. Other experts are equally damning. “Anyone who says there’s controlled use of asbestos in the Third World is either a liar or a fool,” says Dr. Barry Castleman, an independent consultant and asbestos expert.
Anti-asbestos campaigners in India are exploring ways of bringing a case against Canada and its asbestos producers for deaths caused by its usage throughout India. Anthony Menezes, an asbestos victims support campaigner based in Mumbai, says that “we are finding new cases of people suffering from asbestosis and breathing difficulties nearly every week because they were working with asbestos directly or in factories where it was used to lag pipes and boilers. Not one of them was ever given any kind of instruction about the dangers of the substances they were handling, or even provided with dust masks. Now most of these factories have closed down and there is no possibility to try to bring a case against them. Since Canada exported these chemicals, it can take responsibility for the deaths that they have caused.”
Raghunath Manwar, general secretary of the Occupational Health and Safety Association in Ahmedabad, India, says that “if you look around you, almost everything in this city is made from asbestos cement, and dangerous fibres are released if the material is cracked, which most of it is. It is shameful that a product whose dangers were known over 100 years ago in the west is still being exported to poorer countries. The only ways to stop this are to get the substance banned internationally, and to try to take legal action against the Canadian government and the asbestos producers that are based there.”
Similar cases have been successful in the past, though the number is low. In February 1992, twenty South African workers who had contracted mercury poisoning at mercury-based chemicals manufacturer Thor brought compensation claims against the parent company and its chairman in the English High Court. The claims alleged that the English parent company was liable because of its negligent design, transfer, set-up, operation, supervision, and monitoring of an intrinsically hazardous process, particularly since the company’s UK operations had been criticised for its poor health and safety standards prior to establishing the factory in South Africa. In 1997 the claim was settled for £1.3m.
In December 2001 a £21m settlement was signed for around 7,500 South African claimants who were suffering – or had died from – asbestos-related diseases while working for asbestos mining company Cape Plc in South Africa. This came about following a landmark decision in July 2000 when all five Law Lords held that the case should be allowed to continue in the English High Court and that a case of such magnitude required expert legal representation and experts on technical and medical issues, none of which could be funded in South Africa.
John Sherman, senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in Boston, Massachusetts, says that companies can – and should – be held liable for dangerous products that they market to countries that either are not aware of the dangers inherent in the product, or which have low levels of health and safety legislation and enforcement to protect those people that may come into contact with it. He says that a key way to do this is to make organisations more accountable for the actions of their supply chains.
In June 2008, the UN Human Rights Council welcomed the “Protect, Respect, Remedy” (PRR) policy framework put forward by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Business and Human Rights (SRSG), Professor John Ruggie. While not legally binding, the Council underlined the state’s duty to protect people from abuses by or involving non-state actors, including business. It also affirmed that business has a responsibility to respect all human rights. Furthermore, it stressed the need for access to appropriate and effective judicial and non-judicial remedies for those whose human rights are impacted by corporate activities.
In a UN report put before the UN General Assembly on 22 April 2009, the special rapporteur said that “the State duty to protect is a standard of conduct, and not a standard of result. That is, States are not held responsible for corporate-related human rights abuse per se, but may be considered in breach of their obligations where they fail to take appropriate steps to prevent it and to investigate, punish and redress it when it occurs”.
Yet some companies have been applauded for their efforts in trying to keep tighter control on the use and sale of their products. One example is General Electric (GE) which changed the way its GE ultrasound machines are sold, marketed and distributed to urban and rural customers in India after allegations surfaced that its ultrasound technology was being misused to facilitate female sex-selective abortions.
India’s Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994 prohibits the use of equipment or techniques for the purpose of detecting the sex of an unborn child. The Act was amended in 2003 to explicitly recognise the responsibility of manufacturers and distributors to protect against female feticide. Under the legislation, manufacturers must confirm that their customers have valid PNDT certificates and have signed affidavits stating that the equipment shall not be used for sex determination. They must also provide the government with a quarterly report disclosing to whom the equipment has been sold.
Since 2000, GE Healthcare India has worked to increase the stringency of the sales review process through a combination of training programmes, amendments to legal contracts, regular auditing, and rigorous sales screening and tracking. At present, a single sale of GE ultrasound equipment goes through up to five internal checks — from the initial sales contact to equipment installation — to verify that the customer has a valid PNDT registration certificate. Machines are also labelled with a sticker that warns that “fetal sex determination is illegal and punishable by law.”
Sales people are trained on how to advise end users of the equipment on the implications of the PNDT Act and to escalate any concerns about observed or suspected non-compliance to their managers. They are also encouraged to prevent sales if they suspect that the equipment may end up in the hands of unscrupulous or unlicensed practitioners. This screening process does not end after the equipment’s sale. A practitioner must also present a valid PNDT registration certificate before having the equipment serviced by GE Healthcare India or purchasing updated accessories.
“There should be more scrutiny surrounding the business activities of those companies that produce dangerous products,” says Sherman. “They should be held more accountable for how their products are sold, where they are sold, and how they are used. I can see no reason why such concepts are not extended to companies producing and selling substances that are clearly known to be hazardous to health and I think that this is an area that is ripe for negligence claims.”
