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Nigerian entrepreneurs are facing the death penalty for inviting European
companies to ship toxic waste to Nigeria disguised as edible oil. The European
commissioner for the environment, Karel Van Miert, has condemned the trade,
but environmentalists say the European Community’s waste policy promotes
such business.

Over the past few months, European chemicals companies have received
letters purporting to be from several apparently different companies in
Lagos, offering to import waste. The Nigerian companies say containers should
be labelled ‘edible oil’ or ‘pharmaceutical product’, to get around the
fact that exporting waste to Nigeria is illegal under both Community and
Nigerian law.

In one letter, the Nigerians assure prospective clients that ‘financial
gratification for the relevant government officials’ will ensure ‘easy clearance’
of the waste into Nigeria, and that ‘officials . . . have agreed to keep
the transaction secret as long as they get their share financially’.

Another Nigerian firm sent a letter from within the Federal Ministry
of Science and Technology stating that ‘by virtue of my position in the
office of Federal Environment Protection Agency in Nigeria, I wish to arrange
for . . . industrial and chemical waste . . . to be transported down here’.
A third letter offered Poland’s atomic energy agency the use of 3000 square
metres of land ‘for disposing waste of all kinds’.

Nigeria banned waste imports after a dump of Italian toxic waste in
the town of Koko poisoned local people and caused an international scandal
in 1988. This led to a ban on all waste shipments to Africa by the Organization
of African Unity. When a European plan to ship waste to Somalia made it
apparent that the OAU ban was being ignored (This Week, 19 September), Nigeria
increased the penalty for importing waste from life imprisonment to death.

The Nigerian government is now looking for the authors of the letters,
a task that was made easier when one was published in full this month by
the Dutch news magazine Elsevier.

Greenpeace has condemned the magazine and Van Miert for releasing the
letters and endangering the Nigerians, when ‘the real culprits are the companies
that export the waste’. Greenpeace replied to the Nigerians, posing as a
prospective client, in an effort to smoke out their previous customers.
Now it says this is impossible.

Anita Fokkema of Greenpeace claims in a letter to Van Miert that under
rules for waste exports approved last month, the Community ‘imposes less
control on waste bound for the Third World and Eastern Europe than it does
for shipments within the Community’. Under those rules, waste on a ‘green
list’ of toxic substances that are considered to be least dangerous can
be sent to Africa after it has been approved once by the importing government.
In contrast, the Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste requires importing
governments to approve every shipment (This Week, 7 November).

Greenpeace charges that, at a meeting later this month, industrialised
countries will try to have the chemicals on their green list removed from
the convention’s strict controls.