COCHIN, India — In response to Greenpeace's renewed call for the closure of Hindustan Insecticides Ltd. (HIL), Eloor factory after workers and community had a miraculous escape from a Bhopal-like tragedy last week, a section of the workers of the factory have begun attacking Greenpeace and other local groups, accusing us of spreading lies, creating fear psychosis, false propaganda, and of bearing malafide anti-worker intentions, amongst other things. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Greenpeace has consistently maintained that POPs (Persistent
Organic Pollutants) production facilities like the HIL factory are
a huge threat to the environment as well as to human health. This
fact is recognized by the Stockholm treaty on POPs, which came into
effect earlier this year. The current environmental load of POPs is
primarily a result of their being released into the environment
from world-wide production, use and disposal. In this one-sided war
waged by synthetic chemicals against life, workers are first in the
line of fire.
Over the past 50 years or so, workers from many different lines
of employment have been exposed to POPs in countries all over the
world. In more recent years, while more stringent safety
regulations and banning of POPs chemicals would have reduced
exposure in the workplace in industrialised countries, this is not
always the case in less industrialised countries, like India. Faced
with an unfair choice between death by poisons or a life in
poverty, workers in poorer nations choose to remain silent about
poisons in the workplace.
In most cases, where occupational exposure has been observed or
is likely to occur, the workers are unaware of the nature of the
poisons they deal with. Again, the spectre of job-loss has been
used effectively to stem any effort to meaningfully implement the
'Right to Know´ and ensure hazard-free work conditions.
According to a 1991 study published in the journal Environmental
Research, a group of workers handling pesticides such as DDT were
found to have decreased fertility when compared to a less exposed
group. There was also a significant increase in stillbirths,
short-lived babies and congenital defects in children born of these
men.
Clear evidence exists that pesticide sprayers suffer elevated
exposure to the chemicals they work with. For instance, research on
workers in Mexico who sprayed DDT against diseases such as malaria
showed they had 6-fold greater concentrations of these chemicals in
their tissues than the general population from the area. Similarly,
levels of HCH were elevated in workers who sprayed this chemical
against vector borne diseases in Brazil.
Research on health impacts of occupational exposure to POPs in
industrialised countries is not extensive but does provide some
evidence of adverse effects associated with exposure to dioxins and
other POPs in the workplace. In industrialising nations, research
on workers is even more limited.
In 1999, Greenpeace surveyed and sampled the outskirts of the
HIL factory, especially a stream leading out of the factory into
the community water body and the river and found 111 chemicals of
which 39 were hazardous organochlorine compounds including DDT and
metabolites, endosulfan and metabolites and their degradation
products. In 2002, further sets of samples were analyzed to
investigate how far the pollution was traveling through the creek
system. The study clearly elucidated the serious pollution of the
creeks of the island of Eloor with toxic and persistent organic and
inorganic compounds.
Conditions do not appear to have improved at all in the 3 years
since Greenpeace´s first survey. For the first time, contaminants
were recorded to be passing the whole breadth of the island to
enter the Periyar River at its southern shore.
In a health study conducted by Greenpeace in 2003, the community
living in the area was found to be badly affected. The probability
of these people of succumbing to various diseases was much higher
than normal control values. Against this background, the onus is on
the management to undertake comprehensive health investigations on
their workers to assess the impacts of handling of chemical poisons
as part of their daily work.
In the light of these facts, Greenpeace has been pressurizing
the government to put in place systems for phasing out of POPs like
DDT and for increasing transparency in Public Sector undertakings
like HIL.
We appreciate and understand the workers´ concerns regarding the
future of their livelihood, once the factory is shut down. But the
shut-down is inevitable, both due to the Indian government´s
commitment to implementation of the POPs convention as well as the
life cycle of the obsolete technology at the factory.
We call upon the workers to confront their management and the
Indian government to demand closure of the poison factory with a
phase-out programme that includes an economic and medical
rehabilitation package for them. We request the workers´ union to
pay heed to the scientific findings about the impacts of their
production facility and arrest future degradation of environment
and join us in realizing our vision of a toxic free future.