Toxic backlash to Thai-Japan
FTA By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - A highly anticipated
Thailand-Japan free-trade agreement (FTA) has hit
an unexpected environmental snag, as Thai
activists protest a provision in the draft
agreement that would allow Japan to export to and
dump in Thailand unlimited amounts of the
hazardous and toxic waste it generates.
Thailand's embattled government had hoped
that quick passage of the highly anticipated pact
would encourage new Japanese investments and
reaffirm its free-trade credentials in global
markets, which have taken a beating after a series
of controversial economic- and financial-policy
decisions, including the imposition
of
capital controls last December on certain types of
foreign investments.
The anti-FTA protests
gathered momentum last week as members of
Thailand's military-appointed National Legislative
Assembly met to debate the proposed pact.
Officials from Thailand's Foreign Ministry
have confirmed to environmentalists the range of
waste the FTA designates Thailand would have to
accept, including slag, residues from incinerated
municipal waste, residue from chemical and allied
industries, and hospital waste.
"We will
be victimized by these trade policies pushed by
industrialized countries," said Penchom Saetang,
coordinator of the Campaign for Alternative
Industry Network (CAIN), a Bangkok-based
non-governmental organization that is opposing the
Thailand-Japan FTA.
Even without a new
FTA, Japan is currently the largest foreign
investor in Thailand, with more than 1,100
Japanese-owned companies with operations in the
Southeast Asian country. A large number of those
companies are involved in electronics
manufacturing, which are known to produce large
amounts of hazardous waste. And while Thailand has
some of the toughest environmental regulations on
the books, on the ground the laws are seldom
strictly enforced.
As of 2001, according
to industry monitors, less than 10% of the
estimated 1 million tons of hazardous waste
produced in the country was properly stabilized,
processed and disposed of. The rest was dumped
either into rivers, into open dumps or unregulated
private properties, or at sea. The 25%-state-owned
General Environmental Conservation Public Co, or
Genco, has long held a local monopoly on
industrial-waste disposal - but until recently
only had the capacity to handle a mere 20% of
Thailand's annually produced toxic waste,
according to industry experts.
At the same
time, Thailand has nonetheless imported growing
quantities of hazardous waste. In 2002, it
accepted 54 tonnes of waste from Japan, which
increased to 334,000 tonnes in 2003, and 350,000
tonnes in 2004, according to Thailand's Customs
Department. "Yet we don't know what happened to
the waste, where it was sent to in the country,"
said CAIN's Penchom. "That information is
described as a trade secret. This mystery is a
problem to us."
Toxic
disclosures Japan's first 2002 shipment to
Thailand coincided with mounting pressures on
Tokyo to find a quick outlet for a growing
waste-management crisis at home. Japan has been
gradually running out of space for new landfill
sites, and the cost of waste management and waste
disposal was eroding industrial competitiveness.
Meanwhile, affected local communities were
beginning to file expensive lawsuits against
waste-producing companies and recycling firms.
For instance, people in Saitama prefecture
north of Tokyo were outraged to discover that
their local-government leaders had concealed
information about the high level of dioxins found
in the air and the soil in their communities. The
pollution was later traced to nearby incinerators
run by privately owned waste-recycling companies.
To be sure, Japan is only one of many
industrialized countries that have been exporting
waste to Southeast Asian countries, including
Indonesia. Others that have done so under
prevailing loopholes that permit some forms of
waste being shipped for recycling include the
United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, New
Zealand, Canada and South Korea.
The
growing pressure on developing countries to accept
harmful waste from industrialized nations violates
the Basel Convention, environmentalists contend.
Adopted in 1989 and brought into force in 1992,
the convention broadly bans all forms of hazardous
waste being shipped from the industrialized world
to the developing world.
Nonetheless,
various studies since have shown that the
international agreement adopted has wholly failed
to stop the toxic exports. The UK, for instance,
exported nearly 23,000 tonnes of electronic waste
"illegally" in 2003 to parts of Southeast Asia,
India and China, according to international
environmental lobby group Greenpeace.
FTAs, such as the one under negotiation
between Thailand and Japan, threaten to increase
those toxic flows, environmental groups say. The
deal must not be ratified unless "all nuclear- and
toxic-waste dumping provisions are scrapped", said
one Greenpeace activist. "It is highly immoral and
unjust for a rich country like Japan to dump its
dangerous wastes on countries which neither have
the means nor the resources to manage their own
waste problems."
Anti-FTA activists in
Thailand say their opposition to the agreement's
provisions on waste imports will not be easy to
sidestep, since it is reportedly one of only two
pivotal clauses where Thai negotiators feel they
have more to lose than gain from the bilateral
deal. There is also local opposition to provisions
in the proposed deal over patent protection on
domestic biotechnology products.
Tokyo's
quest for regional waste-disposal sites in
economically weaker Southeast Asian countries is
also included in a proposed FTA between Japan and
the Philippines, which was recently sent for
approval to the Philippine Senate. Bilateral deals
with both the Philippines and Thailand could,
however, lead to badly needed Japanese investments
in both countries' overstretched
hazardous-waste-disposal sectors.
But
Bangkok is also under pressure from Japanese
negotiators to give up its right to stop any
incoming shipment of hazardous waste, according to
Witoon Liancharoon, spokesman for FTA Watch, a
lobby group in Thailand campaigning against all
bilateral free-trade deals.
"The
investment charter of the Thai-Japan FTA has many
clauses protecting the Japanese investor involved
in recycling hazardous waste," said Witoon.
"Thailand won't be able to use any protections
guaranteed under existing multilateral environment
agreements if a problem occurs."
(Inter
Press Service with additional reporting by Asia
Times Online)
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