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Enforcement to Protect our Food and Drinking Water Supplies |
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DIOXIN
contamination threatens food and Sao Paulo’s Office of the Attorney General in Brazil has entered a first stage procedural settlement with a Belgian company to begin a process to address contamination of a stream leading into and of sediment in Lake Billings which supplies up to one fourth of Sao Paulo’s drinking water. Steps are being undertaken within the settlement to better define the extent of contamination from dioxin and heavy metals, nature of the health risk posed and steps for correcting the problems. The site of the dioxin contamination is the largest in the world, with one million tons of contaminated chalk. The company is one of the largest manufacturers of PVC in the world and the source of these problems. The chalk was involved in the recent Dioxin contamination of German feedstock and animals because it was used to remove some of the acidity in orange pulp exported there for this purpose. The dioxin contamination was first discovered in Germany in milk. After an investigation German authorities traced the contamination to the animals’ food supply and from there to the orange pulp imported from Brazil. Orange pulp is a by-product of the production of orange juice for which Brazil is the second largest producer in the world. The Office of Attorney General in Sao Paolo threatened to bring a civil or criminal law suit after Greenpeace conducted samples around the facility, lake and stream sediments and water.At this stage the company has agreed to pay for all laboratory, experts, and testing work performed to address the scope of the problem and full disclosure to the public within 5 days of all information the company has or knows about related to this problem and sets forth. 15 days are provided for company Greenpeace, CETESBE (the environmental administrative agency in Sao Paulo State) and the Public Prosecutor’s Office to analyze the results. The agreement has stiff monetary penalties to ensure it is complied with. There is some sense of urgency since the contaminated material is located in a wet area which leaches when it rains. Widely publicized media reports of the contamination of animal feedstocks and livestock in Belgium (requiring incineration and land disposal of hundreds of thousands of tons of contaminated chickens, eggs, poultry, pigs, cattle, and feedstock) and related incidents in The Netherlands (also affected by the dioxin contaminated citrus pulp for preparation of cattle feed) underscored the value of informal networking among country enforcement officials. Informal contacts through INECE have facilitated the timely exchange of technical information, results from similar experiences in the past, and hopefully may eventually lead to more timely identification of problems, expeditious and thorough investigations, clean up and enforcement sanctions as appropriate to prevent such occurrences. |
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FAO
Requests Pesticide Inspector The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is embarking on a project to develop training for the Sahel, Africa on Pesticide Management. As an integral part of this training they recognize the importance of effective environmental enforcement and have requested pesticide inspector training materials in several languages including English, French and Portugese. The FAO plans to develop a practical “how to” manual for inspectors which would contain information on relevant legislation, storage requirements, sampling methods, recognition of potentially obsolete pesticides, and basic information to transmit to vendors and distributors. Both regional and national modules for inspectors involve the verification of pesticide importations, distributors, vendors, sprayers, and government institutions using pesticides. As the Management Project works with nine countries in West Africa, it is anticipated that the manual will be translated into English, French, and Portugese, which will also make it accessible to the broader African continent. |
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