Asian Pollution is widening its Deadly Reach
11/29/97
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Headline: Asian Pollution is widening its Deadly Reach
Source: The New York Times Company
Date: 11/29/97
Author: Nicholas D. Kristof
Copyright 1997: The New York Times Company
POISONED LANDS
Second of two articles
Asian Pollution Is Widening Its Deadly Reach
In This Article
* The Smoke: Students Can't See the Blackboard
* The Filth: Local Pollution, Global Effects
* The Politics: Public Awareness Is Often Lacking
PENYENGAT RENDAH, Indonesia -- Ramli lay on the
plank floor of his shack, coughing and breathless,
fighting for air like a beached fish.
Ramli, a 37-year-old sawmill worker, died like that in
this riverside village on the island of Sumatra,
leaving no savings and no legacy other than the
uncomprehending tears on the unscrubbed faces of his
three little daughters -- and the mound in his widow's
abdomen that signifies another baby is on its way.
Yet as Ramli's widow and children sat grieving inside
their shack, wondering how they would survive, the
girls coughing themselves, they had no idea what killed
him.
What about the smoke?
"Oh, yeah, that might have been it," agreed Dariah, his
27-year-old widow, who like many Indonesians has just
one name, and she looked for a moment out the open door
of the shack. The smoke from forest fires was
everywhere, an unimaginable cloud that stings the eyes
and tightens the chest, like the plume from a campfire
-- except that it has blotted out the sun across
hundreds of thousands of square miles in Southeast Asia
and left the region with the ambiance of an ashtray.
The smoke is a striking example of the public
obliviousness in Asia to the health risks of the
growing environmental disaster throughout the region,
an obliviousness so profound that wives discount even
the pollution that transforms them into widows. More
fundamentally, the smoke has affected a half-dozen
countries and demonstrates how, partly because of this
obliviousness, Asia's filth is becoming increasingly
cosmopolitan.
Asian polluters are not merely sullying their own
countries but are creating environmental catastrophes
that cross international boundaries and create a burden
for the entire planet.
If the traditional paradigm of a pollution problem was
a factory that dumped mercury in a lake, harming its
immediate neighbors, the environmental headaches of the
future increasingly will be regional and global
challenges like global warming or acid rain.
Asia will have to play a crucial role in the resolution
of these problems, the most vexing of which is perhaps
global warming, the topic of the international
conference in Kyoto, Japan, that begins Dec. 1. Asia
now is the source for only 17 percent of the greenhouse
gases like carbon dioxide that are suspected of causing
global warming, but its carbon dioxide emissions are
rising at four times the world average.
Just in the last few months, by one calculation,
Indonesia's forest fires have released as much
greenhouse gas as all the cars and power plants
throughout Europe will emit this entire year.
Fundamentally, Asia is so huge, is industrializing so
quickly and is so dependent on coal and oil -- prime
sources of carbon emissions -- that its share of
greenhouse-gas emissions is almost certain to overtake
that of the West. The Asian Development Bank calculates
that by the year 2020, the emissions will increase two
to five times, depending in part on whether curbs are
instituted.
The Smoke:
Students Can't See the Blackboard
The forest fires of Indonesia demonstrate the
difficulty of grappling with transborder pollution.
Malaysia and Singapore were particularly hard-hit, and
their relatively well-educated populations were more
aware of the dangers of breathing the smoke. But they
were in effect the hostages of Indonesians who saw the
problems as an inconvenience rather than a health
crisis.
At a junior high school in the city of Jambi on
Sumatra, a few hundred students in tan uniforms swarmed
about the open square in the middle of the school, none
wearing face masks. Some played tag -- an ideal game,
because the blanket of smoke made it easy to hide --
and teachers dismissed the haze as nothing more than a
bother.
"We have no health problems and no drop-off in
attendance," Ratnajuwita, the matronly principal of a
private school in the Sumatran city of Jambi, said as
she sat on a couch in her office. "Everyone is fine.
The only problem is that we can't use the blackboards
in the classrooms."
Why?
"The smoke is so thick in the classrooms that students
can't see what is written," Ratnajuwita explained
patiently. Then she smiled reassuringly and added, "But
there are no health problems."
Officials at the government hospital in Jambi largely
echo that line, describing the smoke as more of a
nuisance than a hazard. But that may reflect government
policy more than medical fact, for in other countries
periods of severe haze have been associated with sharp
increases in short-term death rates, as well as
long-term increases that are harder to measure.
Twenty miles from Jambi, in the riverside village of
Kumpeh -- a cluster of wooden houses on stilts,
inaccessible except by footpath -- the local farmers
have not been informed of the official line. They say
that many of the 1,496 people in the village are sick,
and they add that three have died after bouts of
coughing and fighting for breath.
Most of the homes had their doors open, with people
coming and going, but Sukri's door was closed, and he
was sitting morosely with his wife and children in the
dark. Sukri, a 27-year-old farmer with curly black
hair, a thin mustache and dark brooding eyes, was
struggling with the incomprehension any parent faces
upon outliving a child.
"When our baby was born, he was healthy," he said
quietly, sullenly, as if still disbelieving that his
6-week-old son had died the previous day. "Then he
began to cough, and his chest seemed to hurt him. He
cried a lot, and he lost his appetite. He was sick just
a day and a night, coughing, heaving for his breath,
and then he died."
Sukri paused and added with a shake of his head, "It
was so quick."
The baby's surviving sisters, 3 and 9 years old, sat
beside their father, eyes stained but dry, coughing
themselves.
"It may have been the smoke," Sukri said resignedly, as
if in a dream. "But we don't know. We just don't know."
Neither does anyone else. The baby died and was buried
without ever seeing a doctor -- the same fate as Ramli.
Doctors consulted in other countries noted that it was
impossible to make a precise diagnosis in such a case,
but added that the symptoms sounded as if they involved
a respiratory ailment and that such levels of smoke
would normally be associated with deaths from
respiratory diseases.
The Sumatran forest around these villages, so isolated
in places that some tribesmen still blow poison darts
from 6-foot-long blowpipes to catch game, has been the
scene of slash-and-burn agriculture for hundreds of
years, but only since the 1980s has the smoke become a
substantial problem.
This year was far worse than normal, partly because
farmers and loggers alike were more aggressive in
clearing land and partly because the monsoon rains did
not arrive in the fall to put the fires out.
The result was that the smoke spread as far as
Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines,
enclosing an area inhabited by 200 million people.
The smoke may now be dissipating, but at its peak it
devastated tourism throughout the region and harmed the
regional economy, while also causing airplane,
helicopter, car and boat crashes that killed hundreds.
And no one knows how many people like Ramli or Sukri's
son have died, or what the health effects will be on
the countless millions of people who lived in the
center of the ashtray for months, breathing in the
smoke day after day.
To hike through the villages of Sumatra is an eerie
experience, the smoke stinging the eyes and blotting
out the tropical sun so that even midday feels like
dusk. The woods are completely quiet, the birds
refusing to chirp and even the monkeys sitting forlorn
and silent in the trees.
The Filth:
Local Pollution, Global Effects
Asia's problems are so severe because pollution
tends to reflect two fundamental forces:
industrialization and increasing population density.
The filthiest smoke and water arise in the early stages
of industrialization, where most of Asia is now, and
Asia's population is dense and growing rapidly.
In that respect, the forest fires are an anomaly, for
the worst problems tend to be in the new mega-cities,
those with more than 10 million people. Asia has nine
of the world's 14 mega-cities, including the biggest,
Tokyo, and the fastest-growing, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
If the image of Asia past is the timeless one of a
peasant in a rice paddy, then the symbol of Asia in the
coming decades may be of children playing in the
rivulets of sewage that run through Dharavi, the
gritty, smoky shantytown in Bombay, India, that is
probably the biggest slum in the world.
While the pollution in Dharavi will kill or harm
primarily the people of Dharavi, some of the filth will
reverberate across the region and around the world.
The Kyoto conference underscores the attention being
devoted to international concerns like global warming
-- although, to be fair, when it comes to global
warming, Americans are the most profligate source of
emissions, so that the people of New York threaten the
citizens of Dharavi far more than the other way around.
Some international environmental concerns are regional,
like the air-pollution particles and acid rain that
originate in one country and then endanger people in
neighboring countries. These are international but not
quite global, for the air pollution from the Asian
mainland is detectable in Hawaii but not in the
continental United States.
Then there are the genuinely global challenges, like
global warming or the chlorofluorocarbon emissions that
harm the ozone layer. China is now the largest source
of those emissions, but it and all other countries are
to halt production within a decade under an
international treaty.
A third global challenge is the preservation of
resources in the international "commons," like the
oceans. And as one ponders the impact of a prospering
Asia on these commons, a sobering sign of what is to
come is coral reefs.
Cantonese cuisine in southern China emphasizes the
freshness of the ingredients, and any self-respecting
Cantonese restaurant buys its fish live and keeps them
in an aquarium until they are ready to be cooked. The
economic boom in Hong Kong and southern China has meant
a surge in the demand for live fish, and the easiest
way for fishermen to catch live fish is to squirt a
milky concentration of sodium cyanide into coral reefs.
The cyanide kills the smaller fish but stuns the larger
ones so that they can be easily netted and placed in
large tanks in special fishing ships, sometimes
converted oil tankers. The cyanide also kills the
coral, and so over the last 15 years coral reefs
throughout the Pacific have been severely damaged by
the cyanide fishing.
To dive along many of the pristine beaches of the
Philippines today is to glide through empty, dead coral
reefs that seem like ghost towns. Orange and red coral
reefs where multicolored fish used to flit about
through the turquoise waters are now white coral
corpses devoid of life.
For all the environmental catastrophe under way in
Asia, Westerners are in no position to feel superior.
Indeed, Asian countries are a mess primarily because
they have been outdoing the West in economic growth,
and they are in fact paying more attention to
environmental problems than Europe or America did at
similar levels of per capita income.
Even China has adopted sophisticated environmental laws
-- albeit routinely unenforced -- and established an
environmental protection office in every county, which
is more than the United States has done.
To be sure, the offices are normally feeble and
ineffective, often protecting polluters more than the
environment, but China's lukewarm efforts today still
compare favorably with the inaction against the clouds
of coal dust and smoke in American cities early in this
century.
"In spite of my lack of sympathy for the Chinese
regime, at a comparable stage of development, we were
doing less for the environment," said Vaclav Smil, a
scholar at the University of Manitoba in Canada.
Progress is evident amid the filth, and in the
wealthier countries of Asia, there is hope that the
worst is, if not over, at least in sight.
"The pollution is getting worse and worse, but the
speed of the deterioration of the air is slowing," said
Lee Kark Bum, a presidential aide in charge of the
environment in South Korea. "So in South Korea we're
expecting to get to the worst point around 2005, and
then by 2015 the pollution will become less and less."
One open question is how the economic crisis in Asia
over the last few months will affect the environment.
It will probably slow the pace of industrialization --
and thus of environmental degradation -- but it may
also lead to cost-cutting that reduces the sums spent
on cleaning up the pollution.
"For the next three to five years, the pressure on
governments will be to adjust to weaker currencies,
weaker stock markets and a general lack of trust on the
part of international investors," said Peter Hills,
director of an environmental-studies center at Hong
Kong University. "That's going to push the environment
aside."
Still, despite the economic difficulties, Asia is
expected to continue to grow, and as it does so, one of
the most encouraging environmental examples for the
region is Japan. In the late 1960s, Japan was perhaps
the most polluted country in the world, and then over
the last 25 years it cleaned up its air and water and
transformed itself into one of the least polluted and
most energy-conscious nations in the industrialized
world.
The basic problem is simply that some other Asian
countries are in part planning to follow Japan's
trajectory precisely -- first create the filth, then
clean it up later.
"I think that's based on a false premise, that the only
way to industrialize is to pass through the valley of
the shadow of pollution, and then we'll come out rich
on the other side," said Jonathan Lash, president of
the World Resources Institute in Washington.
Lash and other experts are almost unanimous that the
old model is no longer valid, if it ever was, and that
pollution-control steps can be taken even by poor
countries to save money as well as lives.
Sulfur emissions from the burning of Chinese coal, for
instance, cause acid rain that leads to an estimated $5
billion in damage annually to Chinese crops and
forests, not counting damage farther downwind to Japan
and South Korea.
In Chongqing, a once-lovely Chinese city with some of
the worst pollution in the country, the rain is so acid
that it sometimes has a pH level of 3, roughly the same
as Chinese vinegar.
At this point, the economic damage to crops is so
severe that China would save money by curbing sulfur
emissions.
Still, many pollution-control measures -- like any
investment -- require an upfront cost to generate
returns later on.
The Politics:
Public Awareness Is Often Lacking
One reason many Asians are oblivious of the
environmental risks, and therefore inclined to add
to them, is that much of the region lacks a vigorous
free press and dynamic political opposition to point
out the problems. Even Malaysia, which is relatively
democratic by Asian standards, banned scholars a few
weeks ago from making statements about the forest-fire
smoke without official approval.
Education Minister Mohammed Najib bin Abdul Razak noted
that one researcher had been quoted as saying that
breathing the haze blown into Malaysia was equivalent
to smoking 40 cigarettes a day. Najib denounced such
findings as "speculative in nature."
"Painting such a picture could give a negative image of
Malaysia, causing a scare among Malaysians and
preventing foreigners from coming to the country," he
said.
Yet while political freedom might boost reporting and
discussion of pollution risks, it is equally clear that
freedom itself is not enough. Another prerequisite is
simply an environmental consciousness, for the
Philippines is one of the most democratic countries in
Asia, and yet it still uses leaded gasoline and has one
of the worst environmental records around.
This lack of consciousness means that while ordinary
citizens may complain about the degradation, they are
also among the biggest offenders. In the Indonesian
forests, for instance, some of the fires were set by
ordinary villagers -- people like Purwadi, a
42-year-old farmer near the Indonesian town of Kuala
Tungkal.
The area around his farm was already thick with smoke
from other forest fires, so that even at midday a car
must drive with lights, and there was Purwadi setting
fire to another forest. A poor, uneducated man, Purwadi
moved to this forest as a pioneer, building a shack and
living without electricity or running water.
He stood barefoot in the field, plumes of smoke rising
all around him, and was happy to speak of the poisonous
snakes in the grass and the wild pigs in the
surrounding jungle. But the conversation grew strained
when less tangible topics were raised.
What about the health consequences of the burning
forests, the impact on neighboring countries?
Purwadi looked startled and paused a long time. He
shuffled his feet and politely explained that he did
not know about any of that.
"There's no other way of clearing the land," he added.
"And I've got to plant my chilies."