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A rough passage for Lake Victoria
By Evelyn Kiapi Matsamura
Kampala, Uganda, Oct. 25 (IPS) — Lake Victoria, the world’s
second-largest fresh water lake, and the largest in Africa, stretches
out endlessly -- rippled by the breeze that characteristically blows
over the lake.
Up to 30 million people live along Victoria’s 2,175 miles shoreline,
which is shared by Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. They depend for their
livelihood on a plethora of activities that take place on and around
the lake — everything from fishing and tourism to the generation
of hydro-electric power.
However, alarm bells are being sounded about the effect that these activities
are having on Lake Victoria.
According to the Lake Victoria Environmental Management Project (LVEMP),
which monitors both the quality and quantity of water in the lake, commercial
activity and population growth are leading to increased pollution of
Victoria through the deposit of human waste and effluent. (LVEMP is
jointly managed by Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.)
Agriculture is also encroaching on the wetlands that serve as catchment
areas for the lake, posing an added threat to its future.
“As I talk now, the water quality is not very bad. But if we don’t
do anything about it, it may get worse,” Faustino Orach-Meza, head
of LVEMP’s national secretariat in Uganda, told IPS.
“Right now it’s relatively clean, although we are facing the
plankton problem... Those are signs that there is something wrong with
the water quality,” he adds. Runoff from activities around the
lake has resulted in high levels of algae within its waters, which cause
taste and odor problems that have to be treated at great cost.
Orach-Meza’s concerns are echoed by the latest edition of a study
conducted every two years, “The State of the Environment Report
for Uganda,” that was released last month.
“The quality of surface water has been deteriorating. Lake Victoria
is being heavily polluted by both domestic and industrial discharge
and by agricultural runoff,” says the document.
An understanding of the problems that ail the lake does not necessarily
translate into quick solutions, however.
Poverty and a lack of education on the part of people living around
Lake Victoria are proving formidable obstacles in the drive to ensure
that development of the area is sustainable.
At present, LVEMP works with farmers in several districts to inform
them about the importance of using practices that conserve water and
prevent the soil erosion that results from deforestation.
“One of the issues right from the beginning has been deforestation.
We looked into what can be done to reduce this,” says Orach-Meza.
But, “Few people adopt the suitable methods,” he notes, adding
“Others continue with their traditional methods of farming, and
that can really be a headache. There are some who are not bothered about
reforestation and better farming methods.”
Locals also continue to harvest reeds from catchment areas to make mats,
for sale. Certain brick-makers are wedded to the use of wetland soil.
Orach-Meza is not without hope, however, noting that there are instances
where farmers have used sustainable practices: “When the farmers
and peasants benefit and see that their crops are growing better with
this practice, they get encouraged.”
In addition, a company that has long been the target of environmentalists’
complaints, Uganda Breweries, now appears to be heeding concerns about
Lake Victoria.
The firm is in the final stages of building a four-million-dollar plant
to treat waste produced in the manufacturing of beer, that is currently
discharged into the lake. It has also set up a center to educate staff
about the threats facing Lake Victoria.
“Right now we are discharging (effluent) under permit,” Agnes
Okuuny Acom, the brewery’s quality assurance manager, told IPS.
“We hope to have 90 percent reduction by end of November and full
reduction by March.”
Treated waste from the company will be sold to farmers as fertilizer.
Uganda Breweries has been in existence on the lakeshore for over 50
years.
Also on a positive note, the water hyacinth — which once posed
an enormous problem on Lake Victoria — has been dealt a blow.
This floating plant, originally from South America, had managed to cover
substantial portions of the lake by the late 1990s. Hyacinth plants
formed a mat on the surface of the water that prevented fishermen from
going about their business -- and disrupted the passage of ferries across
the lake.
Intriguingly, the scourge was not brought under control by chemical
means. Instead, weevils from South America that only eat water hyacinths
were introduced into the lake (a weevil is a type of beetle).
Now, “We have suppressed it [the hyacinth] so much that it may
not be able to come up again. The communities are sensitized and are
able to get rid of weed using weevils,” says Orach-Meza.
Much remains to be done, however.
“We now feel a little more comfortable that we have the capacity
for research and for teaching. But we still need more,” observes
Orach-Meza.
While effluent flowing into Lake Victoria is receiving attention, the
problems posed by solid waste remain largely unaddressed.
Rwanda and Burundi, which pollute the Kagera river that eventually flows
into Lake Victoria, also have to be included in sustainable development
policies.
“We are trying to bring them into our activities so that their
input into... Kagera is reduced,” says Orach-Meza.
Chemical industry fights regulation
By Julio Godoy
Paris, France, Oct. 29 (Tierramérica) — The industrial
lobby is putting the brakes on European Parliament debate of a bill
for regulating and ultimately eliminating certain toxic chemicals. The
US government also opposes the initiative.
More than seven years of debate within the European Union has not been
enough to produce rules for the gradual elimination of the chemical
products that cause the most harm to the environment and human health.
Discussion began in 1997, and in 2001 the European Commission —
the EU executive body — presented a report on “Registration,
Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals” (REACH), to identify
and eliminate the most harmful synthetic chemicals. This was followed
by a draft legislative bill for the bloc in 2003.
The bill was expected to pass the European Parliament this year and
obtain approval from the bloc’s council of ministers of environment
and industry, but pressure from the private sector and from governments,
including the United States, put the process on hold.
Now, the presidency of the EU, in the hands of the Netherlands until
Dec. 31, says a new consensus text likely will be put forth in mid-2005,
and come up for a vote by the European Parliament at the end of next
year.
The World Wildlife Fund (or Worldwide Fund for Nature, WWF) studied
blood samples from 33 people of three different generations (nine-year-olds,
their parents and grandparents), in England, Wales and Scotland, and
found contamination involving 80 different chemical products.
The report, “Contaminated: The Next Generation,” was published
Oct. 8, and stated that the scientists found an average of 75 toxins
in the blood samples of the children, a similar number in their parents’
blood, and an average of 56 in their grandparents’ blood.
Another blood study conducted in late 2003, also by WWF, involved 39
deputies from the European Parliament itself, and found 76 toxic industrial
chemicals known to accumulate in human and animal tissue, and associated
with hereditary metabolic deformities.
Among the substances is the insecticide DDT (dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane),
a known carcinogen. Production and use of DDT has been banned in Europe
since 1970.
WWF campaign director Anthony Field told Tierramérica that existing
European legislation permits the use of chemicals patented before 1980
without new tests to determine if they are toxic. But “all those
patented after that year must undergo numerous tests, which makes the
development of new products very costly and impedes innovation,”
he said.
REACH would speed up substitution of the older products, which are also
the most harmful, Field added.
However, the president of the European Parliament’s environmental
committee, Karl Heinz Florenz, said in comments to journalists that
the REACH debate seeks to balance environmental and health concerns
with those of the chemical industry. He called on the European authorities
to “listen to the United States.”
In April 2003, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in a cable sent
to the US embassies in Europe — a copy of which was obtained by
Tierramérica — that his government was concerned that REACH
would be “a costly, burdensome and complex regulatory system, which
could prove difficult, if not unworkable, in its implementation.”
“US exports [to Europe] in most industrial sectors — totaling
tens of billions of dollars — could be impacted by the new policy,”
said Powell.
As such, he added, US agencies “believe it is important to reiterate
to the European Commission and EU member states our general concerns,
before the Commission finalizes its formal proposal in early May [2003].”
According to European sources, the German chemical industry has been
at the helm of the lobbying efforts against REACH within the EU, and,
they said, its influence has led to an exaggeration of the potential
costs of the new regulations, minimizing their likely positive impacts
on health, the environment and even innovation in the chemical industry
itself.
The private consultancy Arthur D. Little, which since 2001 has maintained
contractual ties with the powerful German Industrial Association, said
in a study released this month that REACH would cost 2.7 percent of
the EU’s gross domestic product. The European Commission estimated
costs one thousand times less.
Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, along with British Prime
Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac, used almost
the same words as Powell in a letter sent in September 2003 to the European
Commission: “We consider the envisaged registration procedure to
be too bureaucratic and unnecessarily complicated.”
The three national leaders asked that REACH not be allowed to “disadvantage
legitimate EU business interests in the global market by imposing requirements
which are not pertinent to protecting health and environment.”
REACH’s original purpose was to create a central European agency
to monitor chemicals whose production surpasses one ton annually. The
registration phase is to be followed by an evaluation phase, and finally
the elimination of the most dangerous substances in a period of three
to 11 years, depending on the seriousness of the chemical’s impacts
and the volume produced.
The companies affected by the measure would have the opportunity to
propose methods for controlling health and environmental risks, or to
use evidence to support arguments that the socio-economic value of their
products outweighs such risks.
Meanwhile, thousands of European citizens are left without protections
from chemical toxins.
In the blood samples, the WWF study found harmful chemicals that are
used in computers, carpets and rugs, clothing and kitchen items. Some
are considered carcinogenic, while others can cause mutations or hormonal
changes that affect the body’s development or lead to behavioral
problems.
“The massive presence of chemical products in the immediate surroundings
of humans is intimately related to the increase of all kinds of cancers,”
oncologist Dominique Belpomme, of the French health monitoring agency,
Institut de Veille Sanitaire, told Tierramérica.
Genevieve Barbier, another French cancer expert, explained that the
chemicals identified in the blood samples cause “profound disturbances
in our cellular functions, and contribute to the development of degenerative
diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, as
well as alterations in fertility and development.”
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