Aluminum Smelter in Trinidad - Environmental Dangers, Crime, Industrialization

Display of dismay
Super Size Us - Part 7
Mark Meredith

Flashback: Residents of the Cedros south western peninsula protest on the Brian Lara Promenade, Port of Spain, against the smelter plant to be built in their area.

IT IS five months since Professor Julian Kenny and I were shooting the breeze on Yvonne Ashby's Chatham verandah. On that sunny day, the 74-year-old chairperson of a newly-formed, small group of Chatham and Cap de Ville residents opposed to the Alcoa aluminium smelter and the National Energy Company's (NEC) 2,000-acre industrial estate proposed for their communities, asked us: "You think we'll give this up, just so?"

Looking out over the idyllic landscape, we knew they would not. But what none of us knew was that the ominous winds of change blowing from the north would so soon be challenged by a beneficial breeze from the south-west.

On June 22, this invigorating breeze blew into Port of Spain's Woodford Square accompanied by sheets of life-enhancing rain. Yvonne Ashby's original group has grown beyond recognition. Today, they form part of Cedros Peninsula United, a coalition of 12 villages in Cedros opposed to the Government's force-fed industrial diet.

Incessant showers did not dampen the spirit of the red-clad hundreds gathered from Cap de Ville, Chatham, Union Village, Point Coco, Granville, Coromandel, Lime Field, Bamboo, Bois Bourg, Bonasse, Fullerton, Los Gallos or Icacos.

Cedros's united display of dismay at Government-imposed plans for their future is not the only significant development since February.

Local issues have broadened to national ones, with growing support from diverse sectors of civil society that now include Rosemond Montano, wife of Government minister Danny Montano, and Dr Asad Mohammed, chair of the National Physical Planning Commission from 1997 to 2005.

"I am against the process of rushed and unplanned industrial development that is taking place, and support the rights of citizens and communities to have a say in the development that takes place nationally and around them," Mohammed told me.

Mrs Montano has declined comment on her presence in the protest.

But Wendy Lee Yuen, the normally placid president of the Agricultural Society, now incensed by plans for paving Caroni and 'smelting' Cedros, was more forthright: "We are not going to allow 15 idiots, the Cabinet, to dictate to 1.3 million people," she promised angrily.

"No!" roared representatives of the peninsula and their new allies, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and NGOs (FITUN), the UWI Biological Society, National Food Crop Farmers Association, Association of Professional Beekeepers, T&T Youth Council, Junior Environmentalists of T&T, Fishermen and Friends of the Sea, T&T Field Naturalists Club and the Fondes Amandes Reforestation Project.

The Carenage Protection Committee were there too, represented by Augustine Noel, the only community in Trinidad to have lived next to Alcoa. They have been in dispute, on and off, with the company's Tembladora alumina transfer station since the 1980s.

Some months ago I visited residents of Seaview Road, which is dwarfed by the complex opposite. They told me they had suffered Alcoa's dust for years; that it settled on their cars, getting into their homes, making them ill.

Noel showed me a 1985 medical report on his son Brent, which showed he had regularly been in and out of hospital with bronchitis, upper respiratory infections, and broncho pneumonia. He also suffered conjunctivitis and gastroenteritis.

A 1989 air-monitoring report by Cariri, commissioned by the Carenage group, showed Alcoa exceeded US emissions standards for residential areas at three monitoring sites in Carenage on each of the five days of monitoring.

Imposition of aluminium smelters and giant industrial estates of heavy, gas-based, "world scale" chemical processing plants in the rural south-west are the primary winds funneling this current vortex of discontent. And, now, Government has stepped in to send the thermometer soaring.

Its proposed unravelling of the Judicial Review Act 2000 - a public interest law - will, say critics, prevent people of Cedros, or any other private party or organisation, from challenging the decisions of the executive - Cabinet. FITUN says this undermines society's role to act as a watchdog. Julian Kenny described the move as "sinister".

FITUN president David Abdulah, who sits on the EMA board, has said there are also plans to alter the Environmental Management (EM) Act by removing the independent, professional process of approvals, giving the Minister rather than the EMA power to grant certificates of environmental clearance (CECs) This is "a deliberate move" to facilitate projects like the two smelters, says FITUN. FITUN also "understands" that proposed amendments to the EM Act will result in "removal" of the public consultation process from the requirements of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). No denials have come from Government to date.

Kenny noted that Cabinet's "contempt of Parliament" by changing land use plans laid down in law by the 1984 National Physical Development Plan (NPDP) without parliamentary approval, and granting approvals and CECs in such circumstances was providing further fuel for critics.

A major source of anger is what Independent Senator Professor Ken Ramchand called the "deliberate neglect" of laws and drafted legislation: Air Pollution Rules, Water Pollution Rules, Solid and Hazardous Waste Rules, the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2003, the Green Fund, the Beverage Container Disposal Bill, and the big daddy of all recent planning legislation, the lapsed Planning and Development of Land Bill (PDLB).

Asad Mohammed, responsible for ensuring the PDLB was passed in Parliament in the UNC term, told the Sunday Express that the PDLB "should be reintroduced with priority". He praised the "robust" public dialogue which had led to important amendments being made to the bill by the Senate. These limited the power of the Minister to overrule decisions of the EMA and Town and Country Planning Division.

He was scornful of Government's performance in the field of planning: "What planning?" he asked. "If it is taking place it is a well-hidden secret. To my knowledge the process of planning reform, institutional strengthening and devolution that was well on track has stalled if not stopped in the last three years."

His National Physical Planning Commission was unceremoniously disbanded by the Government in April, with no reason given.

Beyond Government's legislative plans and inaction, other winds driving this storm are being felt and easily understood by ordinary people: the alienation of agricultural land for built development and a 27 per cent rise in food prices over the last year.

Chairman of the Coconut Growers Association, Philippe Agostini, warned the smelter plant was "too overwhelming" for Cedros and would destroy "whatever was left" of agriculture there.

Senator Ramchand, born and raised in Cedros, laments that the advent of the industrial plans will result in the break-up of the communities, stressing the importance of "social capital" to the country and the negative effects a break-down in community life would have: "crime, kidnapping and banditry". It was time "to recover the governance of the country", he said.

It is a central message this strengthening breeze is bringing: democracy and civic participation protecting the rule of law and our own self-determination. What Julian Kenny called "people power".

Not since citizens of Toco descended on Port of Spain in 2000 to successfully protest against the industrial coup planned for their community by a private consortium backed by the UNC government, has the capital city seen such a united display against Government plans. That wet Wednesday, several hundred noisy citizens were intent on disturbing the peace of Woodford Square and, more specifically, those sitting in the Red House opposite.They had been told their request to march from Brian Lara Promenade around the streets had been denied, but were given no reason. They wanted to know why.

So they borrowed a leaf out of Government's book and disregarded the law, marching in a flowing red column of hoisted placards to Woodford Square from the promenade. The placards said it all:

"Manning-Did you leave your heart in Cuba?; Save rural culture; Industrialisation is a dead end; No chemical plants for Chatham/Cap de Ville-only living green plants; Keep polluters out of the peninsula; Manning and Alcoa-weapons of mass destruction."

What of Alcoa and the Government in the last five months?

The Government has been virtually silent - to the puzzlement of Alcoa. Publicly, any information coming from Government has had to be squeezed out like an aluminium ingot. The only statement by Prime Minister Patrick Manning has been that he "cannot interfere" in the concerns of thousands of his subjects in Cedros.

This writer has been in fairly regular touch with the giant multinational. In April, I spent a day watching Brian Lara score 150 against South Africa in the company of Alcoa's Australian spokesperson and cricket fan, Wade Hughes. Brian's brilliance was about the only thing we saw eye to eye on.

In May, I sent Alcoa "Bottom of the heap", the Sunday Express article on the 2005 Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) which showed Trinidad and Tobago has the worst percentage of negative land impacts of 146 countries. I put it to Alcoa that their plans for Chatham were unsustainable and something the country could not afford.

Hughes told me: "This is a challenge that should be put to citizens and policy makers in your country. We can only respond to sites that we are offered."

That Wednesday citizens took up the challenge.

On Friday, Hughes told me Alcoa has been "dismayed" at the "outright lies" being peddled in the T&T media regarding the health effects of aluminium smelters - this newspaper excepted.

The week of the protest, I put it to Alcoa that their President of Primary Metals Development, Randy Overbey, had stated that they would take "full note" of the wishes of Chatham/Cap de Ville communities, and that the protest clearly demonstrated Alcoa were not wanted. I asked the company if they would therefore withdraw their plans for Cedros.

A lengthy response from Overbey sidestepped the direct answer to the direct question. Instead, he put his faith in our threatened EIA process and wide participation by stakeholders. He said Alcoa's "manufacturing facilities are the safest of their kind in the world", cataloguing in detail Alcoa's record in countries which bear no resemblance to our own.

Hughes said he would be inviting me and a "few unnamed" journalists to the vast expanses of Canada and Brazil to view Alcoa's operations there.

Sign me up, mate.