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Africa needs a major programme to dispose of an estimated 50,000 tonnes obsolete pesticide stocks. Operations over the last seven years have cleared only 2,500 tonnes from these toxic dumps. Photo FAO |
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimates that 50,000 tonnes of obsolete pesticides have accumulated in stockpiles throughout the African continent. The chemicals and their containers are often in poor condition and are frequently found leaking into local water supplies and soil or evaporating into the air to be carried away to contaminate distant environments. The threat to peoples’ health is very real, as is the contamination of local and regional environments. Where Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP) pesticides are included in the stockpiles, the environmental threat can be global. POPs move from warmer to cooler climates and accumulate in animals at the top of food chains such as carnivorous mammals, birds of prey, whales and humans.
But action to remedy the situation and prevent its recurrence is slow. Now PAN
UK and the World Wide fund for Nature (WWF) are leading an international initiative to raise a US$250 million fund to pay for the removal and destruction of all obsolete pesticides in African countries and initiate prevention measures to avoid similar problems from arising in the future. The initiative is called the Africa Stockpiles Project (ASP).
Obsolete pesticide stockpiles have been identified in every African country, ranging from 20 tonnes in the Gambia to over 3,000 tonnes in Ethiopia and perhaps more in other countries where a full inventory has never been completed. The stockpiles include some of the most toxic pesticides ever made, many of which have been banned for years, such as dieldrin and toxaphene, and some may be up to 40 years old. The dangers to health and the environment worsen with each passing day of inaction as the chemicals continue leaking.
Urgent action is needed to stop additional damage to the health of local communities, to local and regional environments and to the global environment. Rapid solutions will also alleviate the economic burden of trying to maintain decaying chemical stockpiles, and help to bring about sustainable changes in the way pesticides are controlled and used.
FAO has taken the lead on the prevention and disposal of obsolete pesticide stocks in developing countries. Its Obsolete Pesticides Programme has been running since 1994 focusing mainly on awareness raising and quantification of the problem. The FAO work has resulted in disposal operations that have removed approximately 2,500 tonnes of obsolete pesticides from 14 African countries. However, of those countries only three can be said to be free of obsolete pesticides: Gambia, Seychelles and Zambia.
FAO has not been alone in its efforts. A number of bilateral donors have also been active. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have been supportive in awareness raising and training, and even the pesticide industry sees value in being seen to be contributing to efforts. Many organisations are also involved in implementing complementary and preventative measures. These include better regulation of pesticides, low input agricultural production, reduced use of pesticides in disease vector control, migratory pest monitoring programmes and a host of other initiatives.
A continental approach
The need for an Africa-wide effort has been identified following extensive experience in trying to address the problem on a country-by-country basis. Progress in removing stockpiles has been slow because national governments and donor agencies have difficulty prioritising the destruction of old chemicals over other development goals.
PAN UK has worked on the issue of obsolete pesticides for seven years, and we have been frustrated by the lack of progress in both remediation and prevention work. The WWF International Toxic Campaign, led by Clif Curtis of WWF US was interested in building on the successful completion of negotiations for the Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) Convention by taking an initiative that could make a real difference to the planetary POPs burden. Together PAN
UK and WWF developed a concept for a project to remove all the obsolete pesticide stockpiles from the entire continent of Africa, and accompany the cleanup with measures that would prevent similar accumulation from recurring.
The idea was developed during the fifth and final round of the POPs Convention negotiations in December 2000 in Johannesburg. This forum offered an ideal opportunity to discuss the concept with key agencies and organisations. Some preliminary discussions led to a draft concept paper that participants used for further discussions within their organisations. The participating organisations were WWF, UNIDO, PAN
UK, Global Environment Fund (GEF), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Chemicals, Global Crop Protection Federation (GCPF), Secretariat of the Basel Convention, World Bank, FAO, Environmental Health Foundation.
The Secretariat of the Basel Convention organised the First Continental Conference for Africa on the Environmentally Sound Management of Unwanted Stockpiles of Hazardous Wastes and their Prevention in Rabat, Morocco in January 2001. The ASP was not sufficiently developed to discuss at this meeting, but delegates nevertheless called for action to support the destruction and prevention of obsolete pesticide stockpiles and other hazardous wastes from all African countries. A 10-year programme was proposed that should be supported by dedicated funds. This element of what has become known as the Rabat Declaration gave strong support to the ASP concept from African governments.
Following Rabat, the ASP partners agreed to hold a meeting in Rome in February to develop the idea further. Additional organisations were invited to this meeting including the Organisation of African Unity, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, African Development Bank, PAN Africa and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee.
Addressing key issues
The scope of the project currently depends on the inventories that FAO has generated in recent years. These suggest that about 20,000-25,000 tonnes of pesticides exist in stockpiles. In reality, the figure may be double this as experience has shown that during cleanup, the quantity of pesticides actually disposed of can be 100% greater than initial estimates. The total for Africa might therefore be around 50,000 tonnes. The most frequently used method of disposal for obsolete pesticides in Africa is currently export for incineration in a European dedicated hazardous waste incinerator. With disposal costs currently running at around US$3,500 per tonne of waste, the total cleanup cost for Africa would come to between US$150 and 175 million.
It is unusual to find a store of obsolete pesticides where the chemicals are all safely contained in drums or sacks. Often the containers are damaged and corroded and the pesticides have leaked out. The problem here is not one of chemical disposal, but of soil treatment. Where the soil is saturated with chemicals it is generally treated like the chemicals themselves and is repackaged for shipment and destruction.
There is however, a gradient of contamination extending from the point of spillage outwards. The less heavily contaminated soil can be treated in ways other than destruction. Options include: thermal desorption to burn or evaporate the chemicals off the soil; chemical treatment to ‘wash’ the contaminants out of the soil with solvents; phyto-remediation where selected plants are grown on relatively lightly contaminated soil and the chemicals are taken up by the plants that are then destroyed; and bioremediation where selected microorganisms break down the contaminants.
The cost of soil treatment is much lower than chemical destruction and ranges between US$150-500 per tonne. Much depends on the quantity of soil, the level of contamination and the chemistry of the contaminants. How much contaminated soil is there in Africa? No one knows, but recent data from Botswana and Mali identifies 31,000 tonnes in these two countries alone.
Built in prevention
But cleanup of obsolete pesticide stockpiles is not enough on its own, and the ASP is not planned only as a waste disposal operation. Equally important is prevention of new obsolete pesticide accumulation. The factors that contribute to the creation of obsolete pesticide stockpiles are well known. They include:
Once the causes for the accumulation of obsolete pesticide stockpiles have been identified in a country, it should not be too difficult to put in place measures to address them. These might include adopting a national policy that supports integrated pest management (IPM) in agriculture and backs it up with training, research and resources; better regulation of pesticide imports and distribution with effective enforcement; construction of pesticide stores complying with FAO guidelines; establishing pesticide container collection and recycling schemes in conjunction with industry, to name but a few.
Implementing such prevention measures effectively costs money and can take years. The ASP will make resources available to initiate these prevention measures, and will help to make links with existing initiatives such as those of the Global IPM Facility, UNITAR and UNIDO, but does not intend to support these measures long term: US$1-1.5 million would start up prevention measures in each country. This would add up to US$75 million to the total ASP budget bringing the total to between US$200-250 million.
The primary focus of the ASP will be to address the acute problem of existing obsolete pesticide stockpiles by bringing about their removal and destruction in an environmentally sound manner. Nevertheless the activities of the ASP will also create opportunities to address related issues such as hazardous waste management and prevention in African countries. The increased scale of activities brought about by the ASP working on a continent-wide basis may also create opportunities to evaluate new strategies or technologies that could not be justified previously.
Technology questions
The question of how the waste will be destroyed is an important one. In destroying these polluting and hazardous stockpiles there is no wish to create other forms of pollution. Incineration can produce a range of contaminants including unintentional by-product POPs in the form of dioxins and furans. The new POPs Convention (paraphrased) requires parties to reduce emissions, use replacement products or technologies and apply best available techniques cost effectively in an effort to address these by-product emissions.
Until now, the vast majority of obsolete pesticides disposed of from Africa have been shipped to Europe for incineration. The flow of this waste has been slow, its shipment has always been in compliance with the Basel Convention that controls hazardous waste movements, and destruction has been carried out in licensed facilities with the capacity to import this type of waste.
Once the ASP starts functioning, it could create a much higher flow of waste. Instead of dealing with 2,500 tonnes over 10 years, up to 5,000 tonnes of hazardous waste would need to be disposed of each year to meet the ten year target for cleaning up Africa. Such upscaled operations could create new opportunities for exploring different ways of dealing with the waste.
Until now there has been strong resistance to the development of hazardous waste treatment facilities in African countries. First, few, if any African countries generate enough hazardous waste to justify the high investment needed for such an installation. Second, the infrastructure and technological capacity needed to operate a hazardous waste treatment facility in Africa do not exist in most countries. Third, no African country has expressed its willingness to host a regional facility that could accept waste from other Africa countries.
The requirements of the POPs Convention might create much needed incentives to develop technologies for the treatment of POPs that do not produce other POP by-products. These already exist, but they cannot compete with incinerators on cost grounds. A UNIDO/United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project funded by the GEF will pilot non-incineration POPs destruction technology in developing countries. Would one, or more African countries be willing to host a regional facility based on this technology?
Another factor that must be taken into account is that destroying the existing stockpiles addresses an acute and very large hazardous waste problem. This bears little relation to the ongoing generation of hazardous waste that is part-and-parcel of pesticide use, industrial development, hospitals and other waste generating facilities. This chronic hazardous waste problem needs to be analysed in each country and appropriate solutions must be developed. These should focus on clean production and minimising the generation of hazardous waste at source. In the case of pesticide containers and unused products for example, pesticide minimisation strategies combined with container recycling and reverse supply chains operated by pesticide suppliers could solve the problem with no further investment in hazardous waste destruction technology.
Making the ASP happen
The six months since December 2000 have effectively been spent assembling the ASP partnership and manoeuvring it to the starting point. Enormous progress has been made in a very short time, and PAN
UK believes that maintaining the momentum is crucial to its success.
NGOs around the world campaign and call for action on a multitude of issues, here we have created an opportunity to make real and significant progress throughout an entire continent. The beneficial impacts from success in this project will be felt globally, not only from the removal of POPs and other contaminants that can affect the global environment, but by setting an example in Africa for the rest of the world to follow.
The next step in developing the ASP will be to apply to the GEF for funds to develop the project. GEF has given strong support to the concept and would like to extend that support through to implementation. Its remit is restricted to supporting projects that fall within the focal areas that GEF is permitted to fund by its governing council. In the case of the ASP it will be the POPs element of the project that will allow GEF to co-finance it. Following the last meeting of the ASP partners in early April, the World Bank formalised its support at Vice Presidential level, and is currently coordinating the process of applying to the GEF for development funds. The bank will also co-finance the development process.
If all goes according to plan, PAN UK and WWF will have initiated and stood at the helm of a programme that could ultimately remove all obsolete pesticide stocks from Africa, and revolutionise the way in which pesticides are used and managed throughout the continent.
[This article first appeared in
Pesticides News No. 52, June 2001, pages 3-5]