Rio Declaration On Environment and Development: An Assessment

must be monitored in the light of more and more stringent control
and regulation of chemical industries in the industrialised countries.
While the South has had to grapple with the dumping of toxic products
and wastes, we are now vulnerable to the dumping of hazardous
industries and technologies. The former UN Centre on Transnational
Corporations released a survey report in 1991 which revealed that
the bulk of technologies which exist in industrialised countries are
hazardous in nature. It follows that the bulk of technology transferred
to developing countries is also hazardous to the environment and
human health.
This fear is reinforced by the infamous World Bank incident which
created an international scandal. An internal Bank memorandum
written by Larry Summers, then Chief Economic Adviser and one of
the Vice Presidents of the Bank, argued that the Bank should finance
the relocation of polluting industries to the less developed countries.
This was considered to be cost-effective; the countries were so poor
that any economic benefit would be positive; and finally, pollution
levels in those countries were still low so that the incremental
pollution would not be so bad! Summers is now a senior official in
the Clinton Administration.
Foreign investors should thus be subject to a regulatory system which
closely scrutinises them to avoid double standard practices. Waste
treatment technologies, for example, are costly in many industrialised
countries, and this was a major reason for the export of hazardous
wastes to developing countries in the 1980s. The Basel Convention
on the transboundary movement of hazardous substances was
concluded in the late 1980s, and came into force with the requisite
number of signatories in May 1992. This convention requires waste
reduction at source as a primary obligation of signatory states.
Importing countries must possess the appropriate technology while
prior informed consent must be given by such countries. International
negotiations to spell out the details of the prior informed consent
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