Ethiopia's toxic legacy

An international expert task force visited Ethiopia in November 1998 to assess what needed to be done to rid the country of huge quantities of widely dispersed obsolete pesticides which have accumulated over the past three to four decades. Mark Davis of the Pesticides Trust [now PAN UK] participated in the mission and reports here what he found.

An assortment of pesticide drums and useless spray machines at the Ministry of Agriculture store in Addis Ababa. Photos: Mark Davis

At one of the busiest road junctions in Addis Ababa where five roads and a railway meet, the organised chaos of Ethiopian traffic churns the cars, trucks, buses, trains, donkeys and pedestrians hesitantly through the jumbled knot of vehicles and people. Who knows how many thousands of people pass through that junction every day? Work yards surrounding the junction are full of trades-people and their clients. Some of the plots are jammed full of wood and corrugated iron shacks where families live, eat, and sleep. Towering high above the junction and glistening in the sunshine is the biggest grain silo in Ethiopia holding many tonnes of wheat, barley, sorghum, teff and other grains that Ethiopian farmers grow. This year the rains were good and yields are high so that the Ethiopian Grain Trade Enterprise (EGTE) which manages the silo will be exporting grain to Sudan and Egypt.
    Immediately over the road from the silo, perhaps 40 metres away is another walled compound belonging to the Ministry of Agriculture. It is well guarded and unauthorised visitors are not allowed in. The contents of the yard are not impressive: several dead and butchered Land Cruisers and similar vehicles, a mobile crane that might still work, and some other odd machines. Not much is happening in this yard. A few work sheds litter the site and at the far end is a battered looking corrugated iron structure with a number of gaping holes where the metal sheets have been pulled, blown, or simply fallen away.
    This shed contains an estimated 10 tonnes of pesticides, but it is hard to tell precisely how much is there, or to identify the chemicals since most of the sacks holding the powdered formulations have burst, and the barrels have leaked their contents into the soil. What is beyond doubt is that the products stored here were among the most toxic and persistent pesticides ever made. And here they are, being washed away by the rains and blowing in the wind in central Addis Ababa, next to the biggest grain store in the country.

Wolfgang Schimf, part of the international task force examining obsolete pesticides in Ethiopia

    Some 450 kilometres away to the east in Dire Dawa-a town on the rail route to Djibouti-two sealed shipping containers stand in a wood. Within earshot but just out of sight through the trees a mass of chickens temporarily occupying a poultry farm can be heard. Nearby several groups of workers are busy preparing seeds and soil for their tree nursery, or tending the young saplings in the field. They take water for the trees from a tank which is filled from a well tapped into the ground. The water table is satisfyingly high here, so water is plentiful and easy to extract. Sometimes the women and men who work here wash in this water or take a drink to cool themselves from their hard work.
    One of the shipping containers looks damp around its base, and on closer inspection it can be seen to slowly drip a brown oily liquid. The smell gives away the nature of the dripping contents. They are organochlorine insecticides which have been stored here for a decade. No one can tell how much remains in the padlocked container, but we do know that the chemicals have been steadily dripping onto the soil and seeping into the ground water which the tree nursery workers, and the chickens, drink.
    A few bumpy minutes drive away is the busy compound of the Desert Locust Control Organisation for East Africa (DLCO-EA). The energetic Manager of the compound welcomed us enthusiastically knowing that we were as interested as he in finding a way of getting rid of his obsolete pesticides. He showed us to a well-constructed breeze-block building perhaps 40 metres long. It contains about 1,000 drums of pesticides, most of which have long since passed their useful expiry date.
    There are signs of pesticide leakage from outside the building, and a strong odour on approaching it. Inside, the chemical smell is overwhelming and the gravel floor is soaked with leaked pesticides; in some places there are pools of liquid. In several places where liquids have evaporated, a chemical sludge remains. Several drums are ballooned as a result of internal gas pressure. BHC, diazinon, dieldrin, fenitrothion, dimethoate and malathion-all organochlorines and organophosphates-feature strongly here.
    In total there are 402 stores at 256 sites containing around 1,500 tonnes of obsolete pesticides in Ethiopia. That does not include massive but unquantifiable amounts of soil soaked in pesticides which have leaked from their containers. Nor does it include thousands of sprayers for which no spare parts can be obtained, or contaminated building materials, pallets, shipping containers and other miscellaneous items.

Donors or dumpers?
Many of the pesticides were donated with the best of intentions by aid agencies to help the Ethiopian people during difficult times to protect their crops or combat disease. Lack of coordination between donors and real needs in the field frequently resulted in supply of the wrong chemicals, or quantities far beyond local needs, or even something as simple as pesticidal products being supplied in units which are too large for Ethiopian farmers to use.
    A classic example is Actellic (pirimiphos methyl) supplied from the UK in sacks of 10kg or 25kg for use on stored grain. Ethiopian farmers cultivate small plots of land and harvest small amounts of grain. The small quantities they store can be protected from insects with perhaps half a kilogram of Actellic. Since all guidelines strongly advise against decanting pesticides from large containers into smaller ones the supplied sacks have remained undistributed until the active ingredient has all but disappeared from the formulation. Actellic is now imported in 1kg packages which farmers are keen to buy, but there remains a stockpile of over 170 tonnes needing disposal.
    In other cases over-enthusiastic central purchasing, for example for the state farms, resulted in massive oversupply of pesticides which could not be used before they lost their efficacy or leaked away. 'Encouragements' offered by pesticide suppliers to officers responsible for pesticide procurement added to this problem.
    The stocks held by the DLCO-EA in Dire Dawa came about as part of a strategy to keep pesticides at the ready in case of a locust swarm. The swarms never came, some of the chemicals stored were banned from use, other chemicals deteriorated to a point where they were unusable, and others corroded their barrels and leaked out. More than 110,000 litres of obsolete concentrated locust control pesticides need to be disposed of. Add to that their containers, the ground into which they have leaked and the building materials soaked in chemicals which can never be decontaminated, and the total quantities are huge.
    Other causes of obsolescence include the absence of labels-not that they have become lost, but many of the pesticides supplied never had labels other than the name of the product and its manufacturer. Sometimes labels are in inappropriate languages. Occasionally products are supplied without enough information about their intended uses (see photo above). Several barrels of pesticides labelled prominently as a gift from the EEC to the people of Ethiopia, for example, tell users only that the product is called Vincit. No such product is listed in any of the recognised reference manuals and one can only guess what its intended use is.

Middle Awash State Farm massively oversupplied with pesticides that are now leaking into an environmentally sensitive flood plane.

Dealing with disposal
The Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture is concerned about the situation and wants help to implement a solution. They were one of the first countries to respond to a request from FAO for an inventory of obsolete stocks. Their list identified 1,150 tonnes of pesticides and equipment. The international expert task force which visited to assess the situation and propose solutions last November concluded that the total quantity of pesticides is probably closer to 1,500 tonnes with an additional 1,000 tonnes of heavily contaminated soil.
    The only currently available method for disposing of such large quantities of obsolete pesticides is to repackage them, ship them to Europe and incinerate them in a dedicated high temperature toxic waste incinerator. Costs for such an operation range between US-$3-4 per kg. The estimate cost for clearing Ethiopia of its obsolete pesticides is US$4.5 million. US-AID has pledged $1 million, the Governments of the Netherlands and Sweden have pledged support but final amounts are not known. The Global Crop Protection Federation which represents the interests of major pesticide manufacturers has pledged $1 for every kilogram or litre of pesticide which is attributable to one of its member companies.
    Much has already been done to prevent a recurrence of the problems which led to the accumulation of the obsolete pesticides in Ethiopia. Pesticide regulation is in place and some pesticides have been banned; analytical laboratories have been equipped and staff are being recruited; central purchasing has been reformed; tighter specifications are applied to procurement orders. More can still be done and the proposed $4.5 million disposal operation includes support for the development of prevention strategies.
    Ethiopia, like many other developing countries burdened with a legacy of obsolete pesticides, needs to rid itself of this problem. It can only do so with the assistance of the international community which helped to create the problem.  (MD)

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 43, March 1999, pages 12-13]