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AIM (Agencia Informação Moçambique) News

On Friday night, Impacto and the company it has subcontracted, Environmental Resources Management (ERM), explained how they planned to go about revising the study and, rightly or wrongly, many in the audience got the impression that they had already accepted incineration in principle.

With some six million dollars of Danish finance, the Mozambican authorities have collected hundreds of tonnes of obsolete and highly dangerous pesticides from all over the country, and brought them to the southern city of Matola.

The plan was to incinerate them in the Matola cement factory, but this caused an outcry from Matola residents and from environmentalists. It was feared that the original Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), since it was carried out by Danes, with precious little local input, was not an independent study - hence the decision to revise it.

The project's critics suspect that revising the EIA is no more than a piece of theatre hiding the fact that all the main decisions have already been taken.

At Friday's meeting it became clear that the Danish incineration equipment is already in Maputo, and that the cement company has prepared its furnaces to receive the pesticides as soon as the government gives the go-ahead.

The audience noted that, in his explanation, ERM spokesman Peter Hughes put the search for alternative solutions last in the list of tasks. Critics of incineration believe this should be right up at the top.

Aurelio Gomes, a spokesman for the Matola environmental group Livaningo, accused Hughes of "coming here to defend incineration. It seems that Impacto wants the incinerator. We don't."

Likewise Zelia Menete, Matola municipal councillor for environmental matters, said "the way the document's been presented, it looks as if you've already decided in favour of incineration. If that's the case, then this is all a waste of time."

She thought that the study of alternative means of disposing of the pesticides should have been the first point on Impacto's list of tasks.

The well-known writer and biologist Mia Couto, who works for Impacto, had to stress that the impression given was wrong, and that Impacto had not yet decided whether to recommend incineration.

Impacto director Mario Rassul repeatedly tried to convince a sceptical meeting that no final decision had been taken. He pointed out that the job of Impacto and its associates was to review an existing EIA and not to write a new study.

But although it had to start from the original EIA, this did not mean that Impacto agreed with incineration, Rassul insisted.

Menete and Gomes both took issue with a claim by Impacto that the Bamako and Basle conventions on toxic waste, to which Mozambique is a signatory, make it impossible to re-export the pesticides back to Europe or America. Their reading of these conventions was that they did not forbid African countries from exporting their wastes to developed countries.

The cement company, Cimentos de Mocambique (CM), which is owned by the Portuguese cement giant CIMPOR, also came under attack, for its willingness to receive the Danish incineration technology and burn the pesticides.

CM technician Antonio Rama blamed the government. "There are governmental impositions which have to be complied with," he claimed.

"What impositions?" asked an incredulous Menete, reminding Rama that it takes two to sign a contract.

The government and CM had agreed mutually to the incineration, she pointed out. Rama had to agree, but added "We were willing, but there are certain impositions."

(AIM)