Aluminum Smelter in Trinidad - Environmental Dangers, Crime, Industrialization

De-Bhopalising Trinidad
By JULIAN KENNY
Tuesday, January 25th 2005

"A most important development is the establishment of new industrial estates to accommodate the new wave of industrialization that is coming to Trinidad and Tobago"
-Magnum, January 22nd, 2005
Alcoa does not, of course, and cannot easily understand us nor can it our manner of speech. I used the term "Bhopalise", a single word instead of the three words "Direct Foreign Investment", which I explained is investment where energy is cheap, labour is cheap and where environmental standards are minimal or not enforced. I now add another term-to de-Bhopalise. A country might be de-Bhopalised where investment is in conservation of energy and other resources for future generations, where salaries and wages are comparable with those in the developed world, where environmental standards are the same as apply in the United States of America, and where investors not taxpayers are liable for the inevitable victims. Remember Demerara Road and the Soodeen family?
I used the Bhopal incident, admittedly an extreme example of an industrial disaster, not so much to draw attention to the nature of the disaster, but to the level of compensation of the victims and their relatives. Had it been possible for them to sue in an American court I wonder what they might have been awarded. But then we know that the developed world values human life differently. An innocent Iraqi's life is accounted but a minute fraction of an innocent American's.
I used the word to attract attention and while I am sure that those in charge locally do not read what I write on environmental matters, persons abroad do read the electronic version of the Express. Indeed, I received a call from somebody whose name I did not record, purporting to be from Alcoa in New York asking many things about my Tuesday column, which he thought was a letter to the Editor. I was rather puzzled at his observations and certain questions. You are so well informed, he suggested. Strange. Many of us actually can read. Are you a lawyer? What is the population of your country?
Having noted in my commentary the wastes produced in production of alumina from bauxite (red mud, in vast quantities) and pot linings (which as noted in the Sunday Express "It is too early for us to know at this stage how we will deal with spent pot lining"), he did not explain where the red mud would go. He also accepted my view that I did not regard the aluminium industry as potentially as dangerous as other types of existing industrial developments, such as refineries and gas pipelines, storage of flammables, fertilisers, and shipping in which there is risk, however tiny, of accident, and very vulnerable to terrorist attack, given the demonstrated incompetence of our security services. He suggested to me that Alcoa was very aware of the latter concern.
I am sure that most citizens understand, and some possibly share, the concern expressed in my opening paragraph last week. Now let me be blunt. Parliament is being bypassed by its executive committee-Cabinet. It would be like the Board of Guardian Holdings establishing a committee to develop a particular project and that committee calling a press conference to describe the launch of the product, with the Board reading about the matter in the media. An issue such as the industrialisation of the country is of immense national importance and properly any communication on the broad issue must first be to the fount of Cabinet's authority and powers-Parliament.
Parliament is not simply the majority elected in the House of Representatives or the compliant Government Senators. As I noted last week, proposed industrialisation development should first be communicated where it constitutionally belongs. When it is communicated otherwise it can be divisive and deceptive. When it is communicated properly that demonstrates transparent good sense, as well as good manners.
Had a proper statement been made by a Minister in the Senate, I can imagine a member of the Independent Bench rising and saying "Madame President, on a matter of clarification .I thank the Hon. Minister for graciously giving way; can the Hon Minister assure the Senate that the environmental standards to be applied are no less than those applied by the EPA in the United States?" If the minister really cared about future generations I would expect that she/he would on behalf of the Government give a firm assurance. A little later I expect another Independent Senator would rise and politely repeat the procedure and ask-"is the planned expansion of industrialisation to be incorporated into a broader plan for the region and the CSME?"
Depending on the answers to the questions I imagine that one or the other of the Independent Senators might wish to raise a matter on the adjournment of the Senate. Fifteen minutes is permitted the lone senator. The matter? Exactly what is the status of the National Physical Development Plan passed by this Parliament in 1984? Presumably the Hon Minister of Planning and Development will give the fully allotted 15-minute, far-ranging reply stating in three words-it is irrelevant. Cabinet reigns! As it did with the illegal paving of the Queen's Park Savannah and the Chacachacare offer to Trump.
The Environmental Management Authority is now almost ten years old. It was a conditionality of a World Bank Business Expansion Loan. Ten years on it has simply been unable to have any impact on air quality, vehicle emissions, effluents or solid wastes. It has cost many many millions of dollars and has pretty offices. Its main thrust seems to be noise, sensitive areas and species. It will soon declare the Aripo Savannah a sensitive area, yet another appellation for part of a legally declared Forest Reserve, part of which is the existing Scientific Reserve declared by Parliament 20 years ago, but effectively abandoned by all administrations.
Perhaps the greatest worry that citizens may have about the future of their heritage is a major defect in the EMA Act, the wretched Section 5 that permits the minister to give special directives to the Authority, challengeable only in the Environmental Commission and the High Court.
As noted journalist Mark Meredith observed recently, one Ministry is charging ahead with a scheme to reforest the fire climaxes of the western Northern Range at the same time that another is planning to carve up these very hills to accommodate further gridlock in Port of Spain, while yet another is planning an "eco-highway" to continue beyond the landslide devastated North Coast Road through comparable geological formations to Matelot, and the three to four hundred million dollar Green Fund Levy is now entombed in political permafrost.
Let us hope, however, that while the government chants the mantra of sustainable development, the future generation sort of thing and 20-20, as it rapidly depletes the non-renewable resource of petroleum and natural gas, the incoming wave is not a tsunami of further unmanaged environmental degradation and pollution, to be paid for by future generations. Only a proper and democratically functioning Parliament can reassure me. Rubber stamps and puppets cannot.