In recent years, international trade in toxic waste and hazardous technologies by firms in rich industrialized countries has emerged as a routine practice. Many poor countries have accepted these deadly imports but are ill equipped to manage the materials safely. For more than a decade, environmentalists and the governments of developing countries have lobbied intensively and generated public outcry in an attempt to halt hazardous transfers from Northern industrialized nations to the Third World, but the practice continues. In her insightful and important book, Jennifer Clapp addresses this alarming problem.
Clapp describes the responses of those engaged in hazard transfer to international regulations, and in particular to the 1989 adoption of the Basel Convention. She pinpoints a key weakness of the regulations—because hazard transfer is dynamic, efforts to stop one form of toxic export prompt new forms to emerge. For instance, laws intended to ban the disposal of toxic wastes in the Third World led corporations to ship these byproducts to poor countries for "recycling." And, Clapp warns, current efforts to prohibit this "recycling movement" may accelerate a new business endeavor: the relocation to poor countries of entire industries that generate toxic wastes.
Clapp concludes that the dynamic nature of hazard transfer results from increasingly fluid global trade and investment relations in the context of a highly unequal world, and from the leading role played by multinational corporations and environmental NGOs. Governments, she maintains, have for too long failed to capture the initiative and have instead only reacted to these opposing forces.
Jennifer Clapp is CIGI Chair in International Governance and Professor, Faculty of Environmental Studies, University of Waterloo. She is the author of Adjustment and Agriculture in Africa: Farmers, the State, and the World Bank in Guinea and the coauthor of Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment.
Table of Contents
List of Tables and Boxes viii
Preface ix
List of Acronyms xi
1 Hazard Transfer from Rich to Poor Countries 1
2 The Hazardous Waste Trade and International Regulatory Measures 21
3 The Role of Environmental NGOs in the Evolution of the Basel Ban 53
4 Industry Players and Post-Basel Ban Amendment Politics 81
5 Foreign Direct Investment in Hazardous Industries 104
6 Market-Based and Voluntary Initiatives: Promoting Clean Production? 126
7 Conclusion: Prospects for Clean Production on a Global Scale 150
Index 173
What People are Saying About This
Kate O'Neill
Toxic Exports makes an extremely valuable contribution to the study of one of the focal points of political scholarship and activism around the global political economy: the export of hazardous industries and substances from north to south.
Marian A. L. Miller
In Toxic Exports, Jennifer Clapp takes a comprehensive look at the problems of hazardous waste transfer to the South, bringing together several related strands, including exports for recycling, export of hazardous industry, and the use of market-based and voluntary initiatives.
