28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002 Issue No.575 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Egyptian industry was ordered to clean up its act by 1 March 1998, according to Egypt's first ever environmental law, passed in February 1994. Eight years since the law and four years after the deadline, Al-Ahram Weekly assesses the results
photo: Adel Ahmed
The power to pollute
In both the global and national arenas, those most responsible for trashing our environment are invariably those breathing the cleanest air, writes Fatemah Farag
Sifting through the news reports of environmental problems in Egypt, it is easy to believe that we suffer because of the poor. They behave badly, the argument runs. They throw their garbage on the street and they burn agricultural waste.
"The poor probably suffer more from pollution. The more important question, however, is whether they are responsible for it. The logic seems to be that pollution is dirty, the poor are dirty, therefore the poor are responsible for pollution," Nicholas Hopkins, Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo (AUC), told Al- Ahram Weekly.
It certainly does not help things that, as a people, we can claim a long history of bad refuse management. As Max Rodenbeck painfully reminds us in his Cairo: The City Victorious , "Medieval Cairo suffered scourges we think of as modern. Air pollution was a problem even in the eleventh century, if we are to believe Ibn Ridwan. This respected physician to the Fatimid caliph Al-Mustansir said that the smoke from bathhouse boilers was so thick at Fustat that patients were advised to move to the suburbs."
In an attempt to explain Cairo's infamous history of garbage collection, Rodenbeck adds further on in the book that "Visitors often wonder why Cairo is so dirty. Some say the length of Egypt's history has so wearied its people that they don't see the point in removing detritus when it will only reappear. Others say the experience of the Nile flood, which used to conveniently flush the country clean once a year, remains deeply ingrained -- despite the fact that the High Dam, completed in 1971, stopped it a generation ago."
"For whatever reason, public cleanliness has not improved much since the days when the citizens of Memphis discarded papyri and broken pots in their streets. (The Pharaohs themselves were blasé about trash: excavations at Tel Al-Amarna, an eighteenth dynasty capital 200 miles upstream from Cairo, show that royal cooks dumped their dross right on the doorstep of the palace kitchens)."
Whatever was running through the ancient cooks' minds, the average man on the street today is more than likely contributing to the lack of public cleanliness for no other reason than the lack of a better alternative.
"It is true that the poor throw garbage on the street and that they burn their garbage. This is not good, but then they do not have the means with which to dispose of their garbage otherwise. They make what they think is the best of bad choices," explains Hopkins, who has done extensive research on pollution in four greater Cairo working class districts. With co- authors Sohair Mehanna and Salah El-Haggar, Hopkins wrote People and Pollution: Cultural Constructions and Social Action in Egypt. His argument is that people can only be held accountable for their actions if a nationwide system is in place.
But local accountability also means global accountability. To what extent is the entire world's population -- or to be more precise, that of the world capitalist system that fashions and controls global environmental policy -- being held responsible?
According to the latest United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reports, today's world is plagued by global warming -- caused by the increase in carbon dioxide emissions from industry. Stratospheric ozone depletion, which results from the consumption and release of ozone depleting substances, adds to the woes. A third problem is nitrogen loading, a result of over-fertilising the earth on a global scale through intensive agriculture, fossil fuel combustion and widespread cultivation of leguminous crops. Finally, chemical risks can result from the massive expansion in the availability and use of chemicals, such as pesticides and heavy metals.
As a direct result of all these abuses, the world is now plagued by an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, unusual weather conditions (the El-Nino weather system is a good example) and the degradation of forests, woodlands and grasslands -- something which seriously threatens biodiversity. In addition, we are suffering from global water crises (20 per cent of the world's population currently lacks access to safe drinking water, while 50 per cent lacks access to a safe sanitation system) and the degradation of coastal areas. Last but not least, urban air pollution is reaching crisis dimensions in many cities.
In all of this, the Third World is the hardest hit.
"The modern industrial economies of North America, Europe and parts of East Asia consume immense quantities of energy and raw materials and produce high volumes of wastes and polluting emissions. The magnitude of this economic activity is causing environmental damage on a global scale... often in countries far removed from the site of consumption," the GEO -- 2000 Global Environmental Outlook report, published by UNEP, explains.
The report goes on to predict: "The negative impacts of environmental degradation will fall most heavily (as they do now) on the poorer developing regions. The income gap between rich and poor countries and between the rich and poor within countries will increase for several decades. The ratio of income between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the world population doubled from 30:1 to more than 80:1 between 1960 and 1995 (UNDP 1998). Under a business-as-usual scenario, current inequities in the distribution of the environmental costs and benefits of consumption are likely to grow worse."
On the national level, Egypt's income disparity between rich and poor has increased. According to Nader El-Fergany, head of the independent Almishkat research centre labour's share in the national income has dropped from 44 per cent n 1975 to 25 per cent in 1995, a clear indication that wealth has become extremely polarised.
Further, many environmental problems simply reinforce each other in small, densely populated areas. In Cairo, population density has exceeded internationally accepted levels. According to UNEP, "Air pollution, garbage, hazardous wastes, noise and water contamination turn these areas into environmental hot spots. Children are the most vulnerable to the inevitable health risks. Some 30-60 per cent of the urban population in low- income countries still lack adequate housing with sanitary facilities, drainage systems and piping of clean water."
In Cairo alone, approximately 80 per cent of housing is informal -- at least 40 per cent of that identified as shanty housing. Most of these homes lack proper sanitary facilities.
And there is the rub. While those in poor areas suffer the most from pollution, it is they who remain the targets of popular and official wrath when a pollution scare takes place.
Once such scare was the "black cloud," a smoke cloud which for the past few years has risen over Cairo in November and December. Official statements, dutifully reported by the media, asserted that "the black cloud" was the result of agrarian and urban waste being burned by the poor.
"I think the 'black cloud' was an excellent exercise in blaming someone else," mused Hopkins. "First the farmers were blamed, then the urban poor were blamed because of their garbage burning. Issues like car exhausts and factory emissions were mentioned only incidentally, and mentioned very timidly."
Hopkins went on to note that it was "remarkable" that no release of information pertaining to the content of the "black cloud" had been made. "Either a proper analysis has not been done, which is itself indicative, or it was and not publicised, which is also very indicative," he noted.
These debates rage on while, quietly, factories within the greater Cairo area continue to spew their particulates into the atmosphere. "I remember that on visiting the Tora Cement Factory we were shown the 'filters' in the stacks. When the key was turned on only a little dust came out of the stack. When it was turned off the amount of dust emitted was scary," Hopkins recalled.
The cement factories of Helwan, too, are notorious. On several occasions since Law 4/1994 "came into effect," I had the opportunity of visiting the area's working-class housing districts. On every occasion the story was the same: the filters are rarely used because they are expensive to maintain and because they slow down production.
Short-term profits are being gained at the expense of the health of the factory workers -- and that of their families.
"In our part of town, children are born with chest defects. The baby leaves his mother's womb diseased. From what? From the pollution," a worker at the Portland Cement Factory once told me. And yet he himself works the stacks that cause the trouble. "We need the factory to make a profit because then we get better pay. We do not have the luxury of stopping and thinking about what it is doing to us," he added.
Studies in the United States have shown that environmentally-friendly industry makes more economic sense -- but only in the long run. In the short to medium term, investment in environmentally sound technology is expensive. And while everyone points to the archaic factories of the '60s as the culprit of industrial pollution, the situation in the new industrial satellite cities does not seem to be much better.
According to the latest Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA) report, LE125 million has been spent on installing environmental-friendly technology in the industrial city of Badr, but nevertheless only 31 per cent of factories there are "in the process of compliance with environmental regulations." While the percentage is higher in cities such as 10 Ramadan -- which has reached 94 per cent compliance -- it remains unclear what precise stage within that "process of compliance" these industries have reached.
Sohair Mehanna of AUC's Social Research Centre told the Weekly that the Achilles heal of all environment research in Egypt is the lack of information. "There are all these stations for monitoring air quality, but where are the figures? Without such information it becomes very difficult to make an accurate assessment. Besides, the public has a right to know. Information is the first step along the road towards environmental justice."
Despite all evidence to the contrary, then, we have been led to believe that pollution is a technological, legislative and awareness problem. Develop better technology and better laws, the argument runs, and then -- lo and behold! -- the end to pollution is around the corner. Teach the poor to wash their hands before eating, we are being told, and the garbage on their streets will disappear.
This is hardly the case, according to the experts. "Those who need awareness are the elite, because they are the ones making the key decisions. The poor are aware of pollution and its ramifications but they are not the ones in control," Hopkins insists. After all, ours "is a difficult political context within which to mobilise." Furthermore, Mehanna highlighted that in working class districts such as Kafr Al-Elw in Helwan, "locals have gone to the press, gone to television, to parliament and even have four cases currently in the courts; all efforts to try and improve their environmental lot. All efforts have solved nothing."
The problem, of course, is that it is the elite who enjoy relatively cleaner neighborhoods and, at the end of the working week, these are the people who can walk -- or more likely, drive or fly -- away from it all; perhaps to a private villa on the North Coast, with a garden watered with potable water, which many shanty towns within Cairo are deprived of.
Nevertheless, a more sophisticated approach to broaching the issue of environmental conservation has been slowly developing in Egypt, at least on an institutional level. The EEAA was established in 1982, and by 1994 Egypt's first law for the protection of the environment -- law 4/1994 -- was passed. In 1997, presidential decree no 275 brought into being Egypt's first Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs (MSEA) with the EEAA as its executive arm. In 1999 the government initiated the National Environment Action Plan (NEAP), which culminated only a couple of months ago in issuing plans for an Egyptian Environmental Policy Programme covering the period 2002-2017 (explained in detail by Mahmoud Bakr on page 2 of this supplement).
The year 2000/2001 also saw the development of a five-year action plan for the Ministry of State for Environmental Affairs (MSEA) and EEAA, in conjunction with the NEAP, comprising 14 programmes. The plans, however, have yet to be executed.
Despite all this, the environment does not seem to have gotten much better. In addition to the piles of garbage (sifted through in this supplement by Dena Rashid in Garbage is money and the murky tap water, there is the (quite literally) irritating air quality in the greater Cairo area. According to one USAID report on the latter, "Cairo's lead levels are among the highest in the world and are estimated to cause between 15,000 and 20,000 deaths each year, according to a 1996 report by the EEAA. Further studies have shown that children growing up in Cairo are in danger of losing an average of 4.52 IQ points as a result of lead pollution. In addition to the health risks, it has been estimated that the problems stemming from air pollution cost Egypt $13 billion over the lifetime of Cairo's 12 million residents."
Of course, these statistics are somewhat outdated and, elsewhere in this supplement, Amira El-Noshokati in Clearing the Air goes to some pains to uncover the truth regarding government claims of improved air quality.
Furthermore, whatever headway has been made some of the solutions are themselves controversial. For example, Hopkins points out that MTVE, the chemical used to replace lead in gasoline, is very dangerous if it gets into water. "When you consider that gasoline tanks are not checked regularly and are notorious for having leakage problems and that once MTVE enters water, it is impossible to get it out, you realise that in this business you are trading one threat for another."
And while Hala Sakr (on page 4) shows that it is possible to eat ourselves out of some of the effects pollution can have, ultimately the realisation that pollution is a social problem that can only be solved by those whose lives are at stake is probably the bottom line.
And time is running out.
UNEP's description of the state of the world at the onset of the third millennium is sufficient warning: "The global human ecosystem is threatened by grave imbalances in productivity and in the distribution of goods and services. A significant proportion of humanity still lives in dire poverty, and projected trends are for an increasing divergence between those that benefit from economic and technological development, and those that do not. This unsustainable progression of extremes of wealth and poverty threatens the stability of the whole human system, and with it the global environment."
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