Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries

by Jennifer Clapp

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 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.

192 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2001

Reviews

[Melissa]

Chapter 1 Hazard Transfer from Rich to Poor Countries


This chapter is an excellent reference for an overview of liberal economist perspective versus global civil society on the debate of exporting hazardous waste from rich countries to poor. Clapp also offers an analysis of the impact of the Basel Convention and subsequent Ban Amendment and outlines the evolution of hazard transfer from waste to recycling to industry to promises of clean technology. Her conclusion, not surprisingly, is a call to reduce hazardous waste in the first place. This book, however, was written in 2001. One would be wise to review ratification of the Basel Ban Amendment in the last several years and perhaps check out the Basel Action Network.

[Laurie Neighbors]

I'll bet you a million dollars you aren't really interested in my review of this book.

It's about trash.

[Kate]

quick read. she does a great job outlining the political economy factors that both allow and create incentives for dumping wastes on south countries