A Pollution Disaster Hovers Across Asia
11/28/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: A Pollution Disaster Hovers Across Asia
Source: The New York Times Company
Date: 11/28/97
Author: Nicholas D. Kristof
Copyright 1997: The New York Times Company
POISONED LANDS
First of two articles
Across Asia, a Pollution Disaster Hovers
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In This Article
* The Air: Two Bangkok Girls Gasp for Breath
* The Water: Lead and Bacteria Foul Asia's Rivers
* The Complexities: Unclear Causation Vs. Clear
Prosperity
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BADUI, China -- This little village is hauntingly
beautiful, a patchwork of mud-brick shacks framed
by the vastness of the Yellow River on one side and
rugged gray mountains on the other. But as peasants
shuffle along the ocher paths, their eyes following
their children and aching at the sight, the hamlet
suddenly seems chilly, frightening and grotesque.
One-third of the peasants in this hamlet in Gansu
Province in western China are mentally retarded or
seriously ill. Most people die in middle age, the women
report unending miscarriages and stillbirths, many of
the children are trapped in toddler-size bodies that
they never grow out of, and even the goats totter and
stagger into trees as they go blind and insane.
In the entrance to one house stood a boy named Wei
Haiyun, only 29 inches tall -- the height that an
average American baby boy reaches at 12 months, but
Haiyun is 8 years old. Haiyun, who is mentally retarded
as well, casually urinated on the floor and then played
with his fingers in the puddle, as his mother watched
and bit her lip and admitted that the only word he ever
utters is "Ma."
The peasants believe that the horrors of Badui village
are the result of polluted water discharged by the
state-run Liujiaxia Fertilizer Factory next door. The
factory, which sometimes denies the accusations and
mostly ignores them, dumps its wastes into the Yellow
River just upstream from where the villagers draw their
drinking water.
The pain here in Badui is emblematic of the growing
environmental catastrophe all across Asia. The cost of
Asia's "economic miracle" is a rising tide of pollution
that is proving a burden not just for Asia but for the
entire earth.
Already, Asia has what many experts consider the
dirtiest water in the world, the filthiest air, the
most worrisome overfishing, and the
fastest-disappearing coral reefs. One study by the
United Nations suggested that 13 of the 15 cities with
the worst air pollution in the world are in Asia.
"The worst pollution in the world is unequivocally in
Asia," said Daniel C. Esty, director of the Center for
Environmental Law and Policy at Yale University and
co-author of a new book on Asia-Pacific environmental
issues. "The statistics about China are stunning, and
right behind those Chinese cities stand almost every
other major city of Asia: Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta are
all right up there among the top polluted cities of the
world."
When delegates from the United States and more than 150
other countries gather in Kyoto, Japan, beginning Dec.
1 for a conference on global warming, one of the
fundamental underlying challenges will be how to
accommodate the economic rise of Asia. Aside from the
United States, China is already the biggest source of
the greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and --
perhaps more worrying for the long run -- the two
fastest-growing sources of these emissions are China
and India.
More than 1.56 million Asians die each year from the
effects of air pollution alone, not counting 500,000
more who die each year from dirty water and bad
sanitation, according to estimates published recently
by the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
Another new study, also from the World Bank but using
different assumptions, calculates that 2.03 million
people die annually in China alone from the effects of
water and air pollution.
All these figures represent statistical stabs in the
dark, so all the numbers in this article may well be
incorrect. But whatever the precise figures, it appears
that considerably more people die each year from
pollution in Asia than died in the Indochina wars
centered on Vietnam (about 1.4 million, from the 1950s
through the 1970s).
Industrialization vastly magnifies the impact that
humans have on nature, and so for the last two
centuries it has been the transformation of America and
Europe that has had the most dramatic consequences for
the planet Earth. But many experts believe that in the
coming decades, it is the industrialization of Asia
that will pose fundamental new stresses for the
ecosystem. Not only does Asia have 60 percent of the
world's population, 12 times as much as North
America's, but Asia's industrialization is also taking
place at triple the pace of the industrial revolution
in the West.
"Asia's potential effects on global warming are
certainly going to be much larger than in the past, and
its potential effects on other aspects of the
environment, and particularly its own environment, are
likely to be greater as well," said Jeffrey Sachs,
director of the Harvard Institute for International
Development and co-author of a major study on Asia's
development. "And what that really means is that Asia
has got to be a lot smarter than it has been in
environmental management."
THE AIR:
Two Bangkok Girls Gasp for Breath
The paradox is that Asians are not fleeing the filth
but embracing it. From India to China, Asians vote
with their feet -- moving from rural areas with
relatively clean air to the squalid mega-cities that
are among the filthiest places on earth.
To an American, the endless Howrah slums in Calcutta,
India, or the shantytowns outside Jakarta, Indonesia,
seem hellish intersections of gritty air and
contaminated water. But to many rural Indians or
Indonesians, the slums sing of opportunity, of jobs, of
schools, of hope to break out of subsistence poverty.
So peasants take a calculated risk, accepting that
their children may die of respiratory infections or
diarrhea in exchange for the chance that they may
become educated and rich. It is a dangerous gamble but
not necessarily a foolish one, and for many people it
pays off.
Partly as a result of such risk-taking, most Asians are
living longer and better than ever, and others are
choking to death.
The stakes in this terrible gamble are evident in the
sparkling black eyes of Kittiya Soisingh, a
14-month-old girl who lives in Bangkok. Her parents
moved to a Bangkok slum to get a better life, and as a
result Kittiya may lose hers altogether.
Kittiya lives in a dark hovel beside an elevated
highway, cars and trucks spewing out black exhaust
beside her and above her, and so the air is dense with
grit. She almost died recently after a respiratory
infection and spent a month in a hospital, but now she
is out again, lounging on a table on the cracked
sidewalk outside her home, watching as the cars and
trucks whiz by, waiting to be rushed to the hospital
the next time.
"I'm always afraid," fretted her mother, Vilgi
Ratchamphu, 20, as she played with the girl on the
street. "I'm always afraid that she'll just stop
breathing."
The problem for Kittiya is the particles in the air. In
Bangkok and most Asian cities, these particles total
more than the danger level of 100 micrograms per cubic
meter. Among the worst cities on record are Taiyuan,
China, and Delhi, India, each with more than 500
micrograms. Even worse is the "indoor air pollution"
caused by cooking or heating with coal briquettes;
indoor particles in China have been measured at 11,000
micrograms.
These particles can trigger asthma and respiratory
infections in children like Kittiya, and although such
infections are rarely thought of as deadly in the West,
they are the third leading cause of death in the world
today, after heart disease and cancer. Moreover, cancer
and heart disease tend to kill the elderly, so
statisticians say acute respiratory infections cause
more "years of life lost" than any other ailment in the
world today.
Particles are also associated with higher rates of lung
cancer, of heart attacks and especially of chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, a fancy way of
describing what happens when particles clog up the
lungs so that people cannot breathe. This is the
leading cause of death in China and kills Chinese at
five times the rate in the United States.
To be sure, it is not just the particles that kill
children, but also poverty.
Across town from Kittiya's slum, at one of the best
nursery schools in Bangkok, 13-month-old Alisa Srirat
also suffers from asthma and sensitivity to respiratory
infections. A vivacious little girl with chipmunk
cheeks, Alisa was born in England, where her father was
studying at a university, and she began gasping for
breath almost immediately after moving to Thailand and
encountering Bangkok's air.
The girl's father, Wichai Srirat, a 33-year-old
university lecturer, was able to afford good medical
advice and he ended up buying an air filter for his car
to shield his daughter from air particles on the roads.
That has largely resolved the crisis.
Srirat smiled as he watched his daughter play on a
jungle gym at the nursery school, and he mused, "She's
so much better now."
For poorer parents like Kittiya's, stuck in the
dirtiest neighborhoods and limited to third-rate
medical care, if any, the deadliness of urban air in
Asia creates an excruciating dilemma.
"She can be treated, but she can't be cured, and the
doctor says we should leave this area, " Kittiya's
mother noted sadly. "If we stay, she'll never get over
this. Her lungs won't be able to take it. But we have
no place to go."
That is not exactly true, for the family could go back
to the village that it left only a year ago. But a
Bangkok slum, despite the bedraggled rats that amble
along the gutters, still offers better schools, clinics
and jobs than the countryside.
So Kittiya's parents are not being irrational in
risking her life. She may die, but she may also be the
first in her family to break out of a cycle of
subsistence poverty. It is a gamble that leaves her
mother breathless with fear, but one that she still
accepts.
THE WATER:
Lead and Bacteria Foul Asia's Rivers
One of the greatest scientific mistakes of the 20th
century was the decision to add lead to gasoline to
improve performance. The lead in the air from car
exhaust maims children intellectually, permanently
impairing their brain development.
In Chinese cities like Shanghai, the roads are clogged
with new cars that are one of the most dazzling signs
of China's economic triumph. But various studies have
found that at least 65 percent of Shanghai children
have lead levels higher than the point considered
dangerous to mental development.
The retardation is permanent, and half a century from
now, most of these people will still be living out
their lives, the flotsam of Asia's industrial
revolution.
Most of the lead comes from auto exhaust and hangs in
the air, but because of factory discharges, Asia's
rivers also average 20 times more lead than the rivers
in the industrialized world.
Asia's water is almost as deadly as the air, for
hundreds of thousands of people die from drinking
polluted water, particularly in places like India,
where the rivers sometimes function simultaneously as
water sources and sewage systems. The average Asian
river has 50 times more bacteria from human feces than
World Health Organization guidelines allow.
Perhaps the worst slum in the world is in on the edge
of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on a muddy slope leading to
the Bassac River. As one strolls along the wooden
planks that serve as sidewalks over the stinking mud
and excrement, making conversation with exhausted women
trying to prepare dinner and look after their brood of
naked children, nearly every mother acknowledges having
lost a child or two over the years.
It is easy to see why. The tens of thousands of people
who live in the slum drink the river water, which is
polluted with industrial effluents and also functions
as the toilet for the entire community.
There are countless other environmental challenges in
Asia, like deforestation -- the continent is losing 1
percent of its forests each year -- and the loss of
rare species of animals, particularly in countries like
Indonesia that are treasures of biodiversity.
But those problems seem a bit unreal to many workers
and peasants; the giant panda may become extinct, but
every year tens of thousands of Chinese children die
from pollution for every panda that is poached.
THE COMPLEXITIES:
Unclear Causation Vs. Clear Prosperity
The study of pollution is so invested with the
language of science, with everything measured in
micrograms or milliliters, that it all sometimes seems
tidy and precise. But in fact, one of the fundamental
challenges is that at ground level in Asia, there are
enormous uncertainties about how to assess the dangers,
and these unknowns make regulation all the more
difficult.
In Badui and its surrounding villages in China, just
downstream from the fertilizer factory, the precise
reason for the health problems remains as murky as the
factory's effluent. The only thing that is entirely
clear is that something is dreadfully wrong.
In the hamlet of Qidui, which is three miles from Badui
and also relies mostly on river water with factory
waste, there are about 13 births a year, estimates the
village leader, Li Genchen. Of these, he said, eight
are stillbirths or children who die in infancy, and a
couple more survive but with tiny bodies. Only about
three of the births lead to normal children, he said.
As for adults, he said, most die in their 40s.
Circumstantial evidence is clear: The problems in Qidui
and Badui began around the time when the factory
started operations in 1971, and they went away in a
nearby village that got piped water in 1989. Factory
officials acknowledged that they have dumped dangerous
chemicals, including arsenic, into the water, although
they say they stopped releasing arsenic in 1978.
"Water pollution has been a serious problem, and local
villagers have been making trouble over this issue,"
said Fu Youai, an official in the local environmental
protection bureau. "The pollution is too high and has
gone way over the levels set by the state, and it's
harmful to human beings.
"Every year, we order the factory to correct the
problems," Fu added. "But because of budget
constraints, the factory hasn't been able to do so."
Tests of the water conducted on samples carried out to
Japan show the presence of ammonia, nitrites and trace
metals. The tests also showed arsenic in levels that
exceed safety standards, but not by a large margin, and
in any case these would not normally produce precisely
the symptoms seen in these villages.
Doctors and chemists consulted in Japan and in the
United States noted that a single sample is often not
reliable, because chemicals can be released
irregularly. They added that the causation of health
problems can be extremely complex.
Something in the effluent might build up in fish, they
said. Or some chemical in the effluent might act in
combination with a mineral deficiency in the peasants,
and they suggested that identifying the problem might
take years of research.
Such complexities are common, for in Japan's most
famous pollution case it took years to prove that
inorganic mercury used by a factory in Minamata was
turning into a highly toxic substance called methyl
mercury. The methyl mercury then accumulated in fish
and caused birth defects in babies born to women who
ate the fish.
Yet for all the mystery about the ailments of Badui,
there is one overwhelming practical certainty in Badui
that also has an echo all across Asia: The polluting
factory is crucial to the regional economy. The factory
employs 3,000 workers and annually produces 160,000
tons of urea fertilizer, which in turn improves the
diet and raises the living standards of millions of
peasants in Gansu Province.
If the factory was forced to close, the increased local
poverty would almost certainly lead to more people
dying of mundane diseases and fewer children being able
to afford to go to school. So officials at the factory,
which is only marginally profitable and is already
fighting to stay in business, are not at all
sympathetic to the peasants and dismiss them as
troublemakers grasping for compensation payments.
"The villagers are lazy and unreasonable," scoffed Zeng
Qingang, a factory director. "They say, 'We should get
rich by living off the factory.' "
Moreover, even some of the villagers are wary of
thorough investigations that might harm their own
livelihood -- like raising fish in ponds full of the
tainted water. There are several of these fish farms,
and although the villagers say the pollution kills up
to half the fish, they sell the surviving fish on the
market in the nearby city of Lanzhou.
"The fish taste different from the fish raised in
cleaner water," acknowledged Cui Tengxiong, a local
fish farmer. "I'm a bit afraid that they'll test the
fish and then tell us not to sell them."
The heartbreak here in Badui and across Asia is so
numbing that one sometimes forgets that the pollution
is only half of the seesaw, and that the other half --
economic development -- is even more stunning.
Industrialization may be poisoning hundreds of
thousands of people each year, but it is also resulting
in new hospitals and schools that are saving even more
lives.
Even in Badui, the peasants acknowledge that for all
their difficulties with death and disease, their lives
have improved dramatically. As recently as the great
famine of 1959-61, many starved to death in Badui.
So some of the peasants, even as they sorrowfully watch
their retarded children, bear the hardships that they
attribute to pollution remarkably well. They suffer
tragedies but keep them in a kind of perspective.
"My husband's stomach is sick, so he can't do much," Qi
Chunnu, a stooped farm wife with downcast eyes, said
tiredly as she stood in the entrance to her home in
Badui. "My eldest child is mentally retarded. My second
child is deaf and can't speak right."
And then she beamed: "But my third child is OK."