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AIM (Agencia Informação Moçambique) News

The initial project for dealing with the pesticides, financed by the Danish develoment agency Danida, envisaged bringing hundreds of tonnes of pesticides from all over the country and destroying them in the furnaces of the Matola cement factory.

Environmentalists from inside and outside Mozambique opposed the project, and public pressure was such that the government was obliged to hold an independent review of the original environmental impact study.

The review team was headed by the Mozambican company Impacto. Its final document, a copy of which "Metical" has obtained, favours exporting the pesticides rather than incinerating them.

Two possibilities are mentioned: re-exporting the pesticides to their countries of origin in the northern hemisphere, and exporting them to South Africa.

Impacto argues that incineration, and secure landfills (the original option for pesticides containing heavy metals such as mercury, which it is too dangerous to burn) are long term solutions, which can only be designed after drafting a National Waste Treatment Strategy.

"It is not reasonable to design solutions of such complexity to solve specific problems, that are not linked to permanent and foreseeable medium and long term needs," the Impacto document says.

Danish consultants from the firm Monberg and Thorsen have been exploring the possibility of returning the pesticides to the companies that manufactured them. So far they have identified the makers of 40 per cent of the pesticides. Contacts are under way with two major European chemical companies, Bayer and Zeneca.

Environment Minister Bernardo Ferraz has always argued that the international environmental conventions Mozambique has signed prohibit the re-export of wastes. But Impacto has quite a different reading of these conventions: it says that the Bamako convention allows the export of wastes "in cases where the exporting state does not have the technical capacity and/or infrastructural conditions to solve the problem in an appropriate manner."

In fact, some pesticides have already been re-exported from Mozambique. The German agency GTZ, Impacto says, exported 280 tonnes of pesticides from Mozambique to Britain and Germany at a cost of 693,000 US dollars - which is 2,292 dollars per tonne.

This compares very favourably with the costs of the incineration project - 8.278 million dollars for 900 tonnes, or about 9,000 dollars a tonne.

The only difficulty GTZ faced was the slowness of the Mozambican authorities, who took a year to authorise the operation.

Also much cheaper than incineration would be the export of the pesticides to South Africa's Holfontein treatment station, about 600 kilometres from Maputo.

As for the treatment station at Matola, run by Monberg and Thorsen, where the pesticides are being stored, Impacto says that the choice of site was a mistake, due to its proximity to residential areas, among other factors. It was also an error not to undertake prior decontamination, when there were "evident signs of serious pollution in the area" (it had been previously been occupied by the company Boror which had stored chemicals there).

The study recommends moving the treatment station to another site. If this recommendation is not accepted, than at least a programme should be undertaken to correct the anomalies detected.

Environmentalists had criticised the original environmental impact study, undertaken by the Danish firm MFG, because it did not consider any alternatives to incineration. Impacto appears to agree, since its document refers to +failings and gaps+ in the MFG study.

Impacto also recommends that a national stratgy for dealing with wastes should be drawn up speedily, based on studies of the amount, types and level of toxicity of wastes produced within Mozambique.

It argues that it makes no sense to talk about providing Mozambique with the capacity to eliminate its own toxic wastes without carrying out these studies first. (One of the main arguments of the Environment Ministry in favour of incinerating the pesticides was that the Danish technology introduced into the Matola incinerator could then be used to destroy the wastes from various of Mozambique's own industries.)

The government's position towards the Impacto recommendations is not yet known.

(AIM)