Can Globalization Survive the Export of HAZARD?

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Toxic waste management

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Can Globalization Survive the Export of HAZARD?

ON THE NIGHT OF DEC. 2, 1984, a storage tank at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, owned in part by the U.S.-based Union Carbide corporation, burst open, sending a cloud of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas toward the Jayaprakash Nagar shantytown that bordered the plant, and from there on to the rest of the city. "Slowly, the people of Bhopal in India's Hindi-speaking heartland began to awaken to horror and death," wrote former New York Times correspondent Sanjoy Hazarika in Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy. "The city began to cough, to choke and heave, as tens of thousands woke to a suffocating, acrid white-yellow mist.... Then the panic began as people saw husbands, wives, parents and children struck down--gasping for breath, clutching at burning, hurting eyes and chests, frothing at the mouth ... and then choking on their own vomit and blood." The accident would claim more than 6,000 lives within a week and over 16,000 to date, going down in history as one of the world's worst environmental disasters.

Due to a globalized economy, developing countries are trying to cope with thousands of hazardous industrial chemicals they did not invent and that they have little capacity to regulate adequately. Although the chemicals have a range of important economic uses, Bhopal shows the Faustian bargain they often represent.

The sole silver lining to the tragedy was the international spotlight i...

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