http://www.pan-uk.org/press/markint.htm

On 28 June the BBC Radio 4 channel broadcast the following investigative report into the problem of accumulated obsolete pesticides in Africa and the lack of those, particularly in the UK prepared to take responsibility for remedying their past errors.

ANNOUNCER:
Now on BBC Radio 4, the first in a new series of Face the Facts, presented by John Waite.

JOHN WAITE:
This week we travel to Africa, to investigate a toxic legacy bequeathed to some of the poorest nations by Britain and other developed countries. A lethal legacy of poisonous pesticides sold for profit, or given as aid, but which are now rotting away in dump sites from Northern India to South America. Thousands of sites posing a deadly risk, both to those around them and to the global environment. A tragedy that's being largely ignored by the very companies and countries which helped to cause it.

DR PAUL JOHNSTON:
Most of these dump sites are unfenced, so they're uncontrolled, people have free access to them, their animals have free access to them. And they represent, really, nothing more nor less than a toxic time bomb.

JOHN WAITE:
Toxicologist Dr Paul Johnston, principal scientist at the Greenpeace Research Labs at the University of Exeter. The toxic time bomb he talks about is currently ticking away in the hands of some of the poorest people in the world, and what they want is some financial assistance to help defuse it. Not an unreasonable request, according to Gwynn Lyons, a member of the Health & Safety Executive's Advisory Committee on Toxic Substances, and toxics campaigner for the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Rich nations, she says, cannot escape the part they played in helping export the current crisis, 200,000 tons of unstable, dangerous, leaking and often banned pesticides.

GWYNN LYONS:
Make no mistake, some of the chemicals that have been found in these dumps include some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man or beast. Not only are some of them acutely toxic, and they can kill, some of them can build up in body tissues, and they can cause insidious effects like cancer, effects on reproduction, and effects on the immune system.

JOHN WAITE:
None of this was adequately foreseen when huge shipments of pesticides, some for profit, much for aid, were sent all around the world during the past four decades. Now experts recognise that much of the aid was frequently inappropriate and routinely uncoordinated. So nations that could ill afford it, found vast stocks of toxic chemicals quickly pass the two year limit by which time they had to be used, thus making them obsolete.

Worse still, they discovered some of the pesticides donated to them had actually been banned in the West. In other words, according to Dr Alemayu Wodageneh from the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation based in Rome, poor countries were handed a problem which they had little chance of solving, and which may well rebound on the rest of the world.

DR ALEMAYU WODAGENE:
Pesticide donations came from all over, it came from America, it came from UK, from many countries. Now it's kicking back, it's like a boomerang. Those pesticides, they contain pests which are referred to as persistent organic pollutants which, when they're released in countries like, say, in Africa, through the air they travel back and effect northern regions, or northern Pole or southern Pole. These pesticides are real poisons, they kill people instead of killing pests.

JOHN WAITE:
Dr Wodageneh is currently striving to coordinate a project to try to dispose of the stockpiles safely. But it'll be a costly business. To render them safe, the obsolete pesticides would have to be destroyed in special high temperature incinerators, and there's not a single such incinerator in the whole of Africa. Nevertheless, many experts say something must be done and soon, because the pesticides pose an increasing threat, as we've heard, not only to the health of local people, but to the global environment.

Dr Paul Johnston again.

PAUL JOHNSTON:
We're talking here about organochlorine pesticides, things like DDT, D aldrin, aldrin, these things are really toxic, they're very persistent in the environment, they don't break down, and they have this interesting tendency, shall we say, to accumulate in the body tissues of animals and people that are exposed to them.

Then, of course, we have the group of organophosphate pesticides. These pesticides were designed, basically, from chemical weapons design. So they're very, very toxic indeed and can produce some quite long term symptoms in people that are exposed to them over a period of time.

JOHN WAITE:
Dr Johnston is not alone in believing that those who helped create the mess should now help clear it up. So far, though, all too many governments and companies are doing all too little.

Mark Davis works for the UK-based charity, the Pesticides Trust [now PAN UK].

MARK DAVIS:
I am particularly frustrated by the fact that the donor agencies, and the industry who were so enthusiastic to supply these pesticides in such large quantities are now not the ones who are helping to solve the problem. The UK has got major pesticide manufacturers here, the UK development agencies have given pesticides to developing countries in the past. They have done nothing to help solve these problems.

JOHN WAITE:
To see for ourselves the toxic time bomb of decaying chemicals, we travelled to Ethiopia in East Africa, one of the poorest countries in the world, and a nation with the second largest stockpile of obsolete pesticides in the entire continent.

I am standing in one of the busiest road junctions in the heart of the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, five major roads and a main railway line meet here. It's choked, as you can hear, with cars, taxis, buses, donkey carts, a flock of goats have just wandered across the intersection, there are workyards all around here crowded with trades people. In between them, the corrugated shacks of people's homes where families live, and eat, and sleep.

Towering behind me, several gleaming metallic grain silos because this happens to be the site of Ethiopia's biggest grain silo, thousands of tons are stored near here of wheat, barley, sorghum and teff. But, just a short distance down this road, a little track off to the left, is another rather more ominous building. It's a special compound, it's locked and protected by guards.

In this ramshackle, single-storey building 30 metres long, its corrugated roof buckled and warped, the windows in its breeze block sides long gone, is housed Addis Ababa's main store of obsolete pesticides. In the country as a whole, there are more than 400 such stores.

As a group of workers struggle to open the rusting door, our guide for our trip across Ethiopia, Yibreh Tetemke, a scientist and expert on pesticides with the country's Ministry of Agriculture, advises us we must don protective clothing.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Okay come and join me. This is one of the pesticide stores which we have in the country which is the biggest store, we have put 80 tons, in the middle of the city of Addis, the capital city. But this is very serious one, because that is very close to residences. A fire hazard, or anything, or leakage, is going to affect the whole population of Addis. And you can see the different types, about 60 types of different pesticides in this store alone.

JOHN WAITE:
But the first thing that strikes me, Yibreh, is the... is the smell in here.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
The smell is very terrible. It's now it's a bit cold, but during midday you can smell it even one kilometre away from there.

JOHN WAITE:
So what we've got is a giant warehouse, sorry, I'm gagging a bit because of the smell, and it's floor to ceiling canisters - what are these?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Drums.

JOHN WAITE:
Great drums, and here's a... here's a drum that's just lying on its side, and, of course, it's leaked. As you go further in, in fact it gets - doesn't it? - the smell, even worse. Sacks now, sacks which have burst. What are in these?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
These are mixed pesticides, we have got lindane, DDT, aldrin, heptachlor, they're mixed up and you can do... you cannot do anything.

JOHN WAITE:
And how...

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
This is about... about 30 tons of mixed pesticide which we have here.

JOHN WAITE:
And many of them are banned these days, they're so toxic.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Most of them belong to aldrin, D aldrin, DDT, and they... they are of the dirty dozen pesticides, and we cannot use them.

JOHN WAITE:
Literally floor to ceiling here, sacks. And one of them at least, actellic here, is... is made by ICI, a British company.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Yes, it's... it was initially imported from ICI for weevils, and it was locked in the store alongside the DDT, and D aldrin.

JOHN WAITE:
Now you've got some drums here, look skull and crossbones on these. More drums here, and, of course, I can see daylight coming in through the ceiling there. So when the rains come, it washes out the bags and the sacks.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Yes.

JOHN WAITE:
And when the rains come it rots even more of the cans and canisters and drums. When the winds blow there's no windows and it blows out.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
The barrels start to leak, so there... there is leakage and mixing up. And that's total pollution in the area.

JOHN WAITE:
So how much of a problem have you got then, right across Ethiopia?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
This is a very grave situation, and we're... we're very, very much concerned that unless something... something is done very urgently there will be a disaster.

JOHN WAITE:
And so our journey across Ethiopia began, in a white Land Rover with the familiar blue circles of the United Nations on its doors. We pressed on eastwards, across the great Rift Valley, heading out deep into the lowlands of Ethiopia, and the semi-desert region of Dire Dawa, the last major stop before Djibouti and the Gulf.

Dire Dawa is headquarters for East Africa's Desert Locust Control Organisation. The area has historically been ravaged by plagues of desert and migratory locusts, which have stripped whole fields of crops bare in the space of a few minutes.

Now it's the town's store of obsolete pesticides that are posing the problem.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Now we are in the town of Dire Dawa which is east of Addis Ababa, and we have about 100 tons of obsolete pesticides in only one store.

JOHN WAITE:
The headquarters of East Africa's Desert Locust Control Organisation is a long, low building with a wide shady veranda. We stopped, briefly, at the offices to collect Sahai, whose duties include safeguarding the store. It lies some distance behind the main building. Inside, more than a hundred tons of rotting pesticides, some 40 years old. And, once again, you didn't need to see them to know they were there.

And as we approach the store, there's the smell.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Yes.

JOHN WAITE:
How far are we? Thirty metres, and we can smell it already.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
You can smell it from 50 to 60 metres away. You can see, on the wall outside, leaking.

JOHN WAITE:
Oh my goodness.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
All the way.

JOHN WAITE:
Look... looking at this warehouse now, the latest store we're visiting, one whole wall, the base of it, is discoloured dark brown, with a liquid that's clearly spilled from the canisters inside, has it, and seeped through the walls?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Flooding all the way.

JOHN WAITE:
This is the worst store?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
This is the worst store.

JOHN WAITE:
Just put these on... protective overboots on. Thank you.

Well, they've opened it for us, let's go and have a look. Oh that's... that's quite horrible isn't it? The... the smell is... is overpowering. And, in fact, the floor is completely covered, pools of liquid pesticide. And in front of us is a... is a drum which has clearly leaked, and there's a sort of calcified, yellow bubbles and... and it's like a minor volcanic geyser has erupted, and the yellow lava from it has just turned to stone. And now that's spread over the floor here.

The floor, as I say, you can here, it's difficult to walk because it is really so thick. It is inches deep in leaked liquid pesticide, the stink... the smell is very, very strong. This is a huge store, Yibreh, isn't it? It's what? Fourteen foot high, 50 yards long, would you say?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Fifty yards and about 40 yards wide. And this was meant for locust control, but... but as you can see, but it is D aldrin, aldrin and all these things which... which are totally banned and we can no more use them.

JOHN WAITE:
I'm feeling in my chest now. I mean, I gagged when I came in because of the smell, but now my chest is starting to feel raw. That must be something to do with what's coming off... the fumes that are coming off these.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
(Inaudible comment)

JOHN WAITE:
Right. Well, we won't stay long. I'm just going to walk into the dead centre of the warehouse, and it is three, four inches deep in this. And there are pools, look, great pools of oozing, in this case, black liquid pesticide. Yeah, I think we should make our way out. That's... you know, it's quite horrible.

And I see that waiting outside is Sahai who is the store manager. You... you just keep away from this place do you Sahai?

SAHAI:
I'm not ready to enter this area...

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
She's saying she hasn't got protective clothing, and she's... she's afraid of the poison. She can do this several times, and she's avoiding of getting into the store.

JOHN WAITE:
In fact, so overpowering was the stench from the store that four years ago worried workers removed many tons of pesticide, sealed them in two giant shipping containers and transported them several kilometres out of the town to a tree nursery where they hope they'd at least be shaded from the sun.

It was there Yibreh Tetemke took us next. A winding bouncy road, flanked with donkeys, goats and oxen, passing by strings of camels loaded with eucalyptus staves, and local girls, their faces painted orange with turmeric.

Well, we're now out in the heart of the countryside, walking through a lovely avenue of neem trees, local trees, you can hear them, full of birds. Orange butterflies are drifting all about. And this is where you had to bring some of the worst containers, because they were getting too dangerous for the main stores?

I can see through.. to the glade there, there they are. Two - they're huge! in fact, it says what they contain, a thousand cubic feet of... of pesticide in there, which is 180 tons.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Yes, imagine. Those (unclear) contain about 360 tons.

JOHN WAITE:
Yes. And they're up on breeze blocks which were originally right, I'm sure. But look, this one, the nearest to us as we approach the first container, is already black with leakage.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Yes, this is... these have been leaking. And, in fact, when you come during the rainy season you can find them polluting the area. It has... you can see clearly that change in the colour - totally black.

JOHN WAITE:
There's a black ring all around them.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
It's corroded.

JOHN WAITE:
So it's literally seeping through the floor of this thing.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
Definitely.

JOHN WAITE:
And into the ground here, and there's the smell again.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
There's the smell again. And it's just leaking.

JOHN WAITE:
The nursery which is home to the giant containers employs around 50 local people, whose job it is to tend the saplings.

Well, we've found a group of workers who are sheltering from the midday sun under the... in the shade of a small copse of trees. Could you ask him, Yibreh, what does... what do the workers here think about having, I can see them from here, about 20 yards away he's got 360 tons of destabilising pesticide? What does he think about that?

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
(Translating) It's just terrible smelling, and they're very much disturbed because they are inhaling toxic chemicals.

JOHN WAITE:
So they are worried about it all the time.

YIBREH TETEMPKI:
(Translating) We're very much concerned that... we're expecting that something should be done very soon otherwise we're afraid to work around here.

JOHN WAITE:
Yibreh Tetemke showing us Ethiopia's toxic time bomb. Before we return to London, we checked again with officials at the Ministry of Agriculture in Addis Ababa, who confirmed that though they had received some funds from the US and the Netherlands, they still fell far short of the four and three quarter million dollars that it's estimated removing, cleaning and safely incinerating the chemical stockpile would cost.

As for their appeals for help to the UK, and the European Union, both of which had supplied pesticides either as aid or for profit, those appeals, so far, appear to have fallen on largely deaf ears.

We saw copies of Ethiopia's request for help to the UK Government's Department for International Development, where Clare Short is the Secretary of State. As Mark Davis from the Pesticides Trust [now PAN UK] recalls, the request was rejected.

MARK DAVIS:
At the end of the day, the decision was that they couldn't support it because the disposal of obsolete pesticides is not written into their development programme with Ethiopia. As a consequence, there is nothing available from the UK for support of this project, and out of the 1500 tons of pesticides in Ethiopia, at least 200 tons comes from the UK.

JOHN WAITE:
And the United Nations has fared no better. In Rome, at the offices of the UN's food and agriculture organisation, the FAO, which is coordinating attempts to dispose of the global stockpiles, Dr Alemayu Wodageneh says they've had no luck with London.

ALEMAYU WADAGENA:
So far we have not received contributions from the UK Government. They are aware of the problems, just waiting.

JOHN WAITE:
So, if some governments seem reluctant to hand out cash for the Ethiopian clean-up, what about the wider global problem of obsolete stocks, and the role of the companies that manufactured these products in the first place, companies like Zeneca, formerly ICI Agrochemicals, Ciba-Geigy, Bayer, Dow Chemicals, AgrEvo and Shell? According to its press release, the Global Crop Protection Federation, which represents the majority of the industry, believes:

"Obsolete crop protection stocks is an important issue in developing countries. An issue which is taken very seriously by the crop protection industry, as part of its cradle to grave responsible care commitment."

Which seems very positive, but:

"The level of assistance is to be decided on a case by case basis, after verification of the stocks and their origin, and will be an individual company decision."

MARK DAVIS:
Making a statement like that suggests that industry is willing to identify the products that they supplied, and give money to dispose of them. It isn't quite as straightforward as that.

JOHN WAITE:
Mark Davis of the Pesticides Trust [now PAN UK].

MARK DAVIS:
These are companies that are making billions in profits. Now the amount that they are putting in to disposal of these pesticides is minuscule. It's... it's petty, it's hardly even worth talking about.

JOHN WAITE:
In fact, it's just one dollar per kilogram, when many experts estimate the true cost of clearance could be as much as five times that amount. And, what's more, the Global Crop Protection Federation says its members will only pay this money when obsolete pesticides can be directly attributed to individual companies, a burden of proof, according to Mark Davis, which poor countries will find virtually impossible to provide.

MARK DAVIS:
We're talking here about pesticides which have no labels, sometimes they were supplied in drums which have since corroded and their chemicals have now been transferred into new drums, and therefore there's no original label, no original container. In order to prove that these chemicals were derived from a particular company, they often have to go through complex and expensive analysis. Whatever information you've gathered, you then have to enter negotiations with each individual company, because the trade association itself is not able to enter negotiations on their behalf. And by the time you've gone through that whole process, you may have identified about... a very small quantity of pesticides that has come from a particular company who is then willing to pay only the incineration costs of these chemicals, which amounts to something like 25 per cent of the total disposal cost. And, frankly, at the end of the day, it is simply not worthwhile.

JOHN WAITE:
The FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations also appears exasperated with what it calls the snail's pace of current efforts at a clean-up. The global agrochemical industry, says the UN's Dr Wodageneh, with sales of around $30 billion a year, could and should do more to help clean up the mess it helped to create.

ALEMAYU WADAGENA:
The rate, and the contribution is almost nothing, it's peanut, it's just nothing. We cannot move. We're just sitting here, and probably waiting and praying.

JOHN WAITE:
In fact, praying for a change of heart were the very last words government officials in Ethiopia said to us before we left to return to London. And it may be that those prayers are beginning to be answered.

For though officials in Addis Ababa were quite clear that they had received virtually no money from industry to help with the possible clean-up, nor were they realistically expecting to soon, when we spoke to Dr Hugo Brown of Zeneca Agrochemicals, formerly part of ICI, and a member of the Global Crop Protection Federation, he was much more positive about his company's desire to help.

DR HUGO BROWN:
We have made it very clear to the FAO and to governments that we are prepared to provide our share of the cost of disposing of the product which we sold there which are now obsolete.

JOHN WAITE:
But when is the money going to be forthcoming?

HUGO BROWN:
Well, we have already spent quite a bit of money to this stage, in giving technical advice and so on, and we have actually promised that we will provide the money that is required.

JOHN WAITE:
To whom have you promised? And what sorts of money?

HUGO BROWN:
Well, I think there's a project which is going on in Gambia just now, which will clear up all the obsolete stocks of pesticides in the Gambia.

JOHN WAITE:
But Gambia, of course, the smallest country in Africa, I think 14 tons of pesticides in total, that's .07 per cent of the total stocks in Africa, it's going to take a much bigger clean-up than that, isn't it?

HUGO BROWN:
Absolutely. And if... if we then move on to a country like Ethiopia, which has got a much bigger problem, then we have said that we will pay our share of that... that cost. Now I also understand from sources in... in Ethiopia this week that the Ethiopian Government has actually put together a package that... and they intend to appoint a project coordinator. Now we think this is excellent news, we've got the Government getting.. .getting to grips with the situation locally, we've got money from the aid agencies, and we've got companies like ourselves who are prepared to add their share of the cost.

JOHN WAITE:
But when I was in Ethiopia a few days ago, the Ethiopian Government didn't know anything about money coming from Zeneca, or indeed from any of the big chemical companies around the world.

HUGO BROWN:
Well, I'm disappointed with this because we've... we've actually been talking to the authorities in Ethiopia about our particular products since 1995.

JOHN WAITE:
But we contacted Ethiopia, the authorities there, just before we recorded this interview, to check the latest situation, and there's been no change since I was there a few days ago. They have not received any money...

HUGO BROWN:
(Interrupting)... Ah yes, I think in terms of receiving the money, then.. .then that's absolutely true. We haven't actually parted with any money towards Ethiopia. What we've said is, what we've got to do about this is go to these individual stores, identify which products are there - now that's something which up until now we haven't been able to do.

JOHN WAITE:
Why not?

HUGO BROWN:
Because we can't... we can't just go into these stores, we need to get authority and permission to do so.

JOHN WAITE:
We went in, the moment we asked we were invited in. They're desperate to show people the problems that they have.

HUGO BROWN:
Well, I should say that we have had discussions, and have asked for that permission, and I'm hopeful now that with the change in approach, which.. which I see in Ethiopia in particular, that we really will get to the bottom of this because that's what we want to do.

JOHN WAITE:
You're talking again now of going and having a look, and considering further. Well, how long has this got to go on? When does some hard cash start going the way of poor nations?

HUGO BROWN:
Right, well I... I'd like to stress that as far as Zeneca's concerned money is not the problem, what we need to do is get this programme coordinated, and that's the sort of thing where we can really get everyone working together to solve the problem.

JOHN WAITE:
So let's just see where we are here, because on behalf of those I was speaking to a few days ago in Ethiopia, I think they'll be very surprised to hear this apparent change of heart, and very heartened to hear this.

HUGO BROWN:
I'm surprised you think it's a change of heart, because certainly when... when we talked to the Ethiopian authorities last October, we actually made this offer that we.. .we would actually help with the cost of this. We have actually talked to them about this.

JOHN WAITE:
Well, I was speaking to Ministry officials in Addis Ababa last week, and the last thing they said to me was they were praying for Western governments, and Western industry to change their minds, and actually do something. Are you now saying that is going to start?

HUGO BROWN:
Well, I... I very much hope so. That... that's what this... this project should be doing. This project should be identifying what the problem is, gathering the funds form the various people who are prepared to contribute, and then making sure this happens. I certainly feel that this is essential that we get this sorted out. We can't have this going on. We must get the things moving, and we have been very frustrated at... at the speed at which things have been going forward.

JOHN WAITE:
Dr Hugo Brown of Zeneca Agrochemicals. We also asked for a Minister from the Department for International Development to answer questions about the concerns we've heard today, to discuss the UK's contribution to both the creation of pesticide stockpiles, and their possible disposal. But, our request was declined. We did however receive a statement:

"We will keep requests for funding of disposal of obsolete pesticides under review, taking into account the contributions others have made and the overall need. Our present priority is to support sustainable agriculture".

Nevertheless, since we began our investigations, the Department for International Development appears to have had something of a change of heart as well. For the statement concluded:

"In Ethiopia, the Department for International Development has agreed a grant to the Pesticides Trust [now PAN UK] to support an FAO-led programme to dispose of obsolete pesticides."

The Department refused to specify how much money they were making available to help with the programme of safe disposal, or why they'd decided to announce the special grant just days before this programme was broadcast. However, if the Government, or indeed the agrochemical industry, have any further changes of heart we'll let you know.

Meanwhile, that's all in this edition of Face the Facts. We'll be back in a week's time. In the meantime, of course, please let us know of anything you think we should be investigating.

ANNOUNCER:
Face the Facts was presented by John Waite, and produced by Fiona Hill.

NB: Phonetic spelling throughout where necessary.