Wastebasket of th West

[valerie]

The Issue

During the Somali civil war hazardous waste was dumped in this

African nation by industrialized countries. The alleged

perpetrators were Italian and Swiss firms who supposedly entered

into a contract with the Somali government to dump waste in the war

ravaged African nation.

 

Description

In the fall of 1992 reports began to appear in the

international media concerning unnamed European firms that were

illegally dumping waste in Somalia. By most reports, several

thousand tons of waste, mostly processed industrial waste, had

already been dumped there. It was also reported that waste was

seen being dumped off the Somali coast into the Indian Ocean. To

further compound the country's environmental problems, a storage

facility in northern Somalia filled with pesticides had been

destroyed during the war. The spilt chemicals and resulting fire

poisoned one of the few sources of drinking water in the famine

ravaged country.

 

The primary cause of this is cost. It has been estimated that it costs

as little as $2.50 per ton to dump hazardous waste in Africa as

opposed to $250 per ton in Europe.

 

Due to the chaotic state of the Somali Republic, no trade

protection measures are effective at this time. It is also worth

reiterating that Somalia has still not signed the Basel Convention

or the Bamako Convention, which bans the import of hazardous waste

in African States.

 

The dumping of this waste threatened human health and

therefore human rights.

 

The issue of dumping in Somalia is two

fold in that it is both a legal question and a moral question.

First, is there a violation of international treaties in the

export of hazardous waste to Somalia. Second, is it ethically

questionable to negotiate a hazardous waste disposal contract with

a country in the midst of a protracted civil war and with a

government that can best be described as tenuous and factionalized?