Slow poisoning

WE are killing the planet and ourselves in the process. Citing a 2006 World Bank study, the Sindh environment minister said at a seminar in Karachi on Saturday that pollution is causing some 25,000 deaths a year in Pakistan and costing the country roughly six per cent of its GDP. Needless to say, it is the poorest of the poor that are hit hardest by this toxic assault on our day-to-day lives. It is the poor who are forced to live in areas that nobody else finds desirable, where factories discharge fumes and effluent that would make people of a more genteel upbringing recoil. And within the ranks of the poor it is young children and women, who don’t get the lion’s share of the daily meal and are exposed to the pollution for almost 24 hours a day, who are most at risk of falling ill. It boggles the mind that successive governments have failed so abysmally in enforcing laws that exist on the books but are flouted at will.

Greed comes into it but that is hardly the full story. More to blame is a callous disregard for human welfare and the assumption that the poor can make do with circumstances that the rich wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies. Adopting environment-friendly practices would cost an industrialist a negligible fraction of his overall profits. Yet he doesn’t do so. Why? Because he doesn’t care. The factory owner is also secure in the knowledge that officials of the provincial environmental protection agencies can be threatened or bribed into submission. Fertiliser companies owned by the armed forces have violated environmental laws in Sindh on more than one occasion but the incidents have been brushed aside and the cases never taken to their logical conclusion. Fines, even on the rare occasion when they are applied, are so absurdly low that an industrialist could pay them 20 times a year without really feeling the pinch. It doesn’t take rocket science to deduce that the productivity of a workforce that inhales toxic fumes, lacks basic sanitation and drinks contaminated water can never be optimal. Our healthcare system is cash-strapped as it is. It can do with fewer patients. Dawn Editorial