Wasting the Nation.indd - Groundwork

Chapter 4: The toxic cradle of productionBox 12: Making the Bhopal disasterWhat are the consequences of leaving decisions about production processes entirelyup to the producers? Analysing the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, Joel Kovelconcludes that the disaster was caused by a series of decisions to lower costs in orderto make bigger profits:There is no mystery here: at virtually every point… we find that Carbide didthis or that to lower its costs; further, that the ‘this and that’ had the effectof summating the risks that the monstrously dangerous MIC 58 (itself chosenas a product to lower costs) would escape; and, further, that Carbide’sblameworthiness consisted precisely in the callous and self-serving way in whichit was prepared to put Bhopal in harm’s way to lower costs. Its evasion of legalresponsibility needs to be understood within the universe of meanings thatcluster about this prime necessity, from particular legal and public relationsmanoeuvres to the whole international setup that makes an ancient and proudcountry such as India unable to stand up for the rights of its own people. Theefficient cause here, then, would have to comprise not just the particular greedof this corporation, but the system imposing upon it the never-ending pressureto cut costs – or, from the other side, to make profits. [2002: 35]Similarly, many waste management decisions are made to lower costs, rather thanto manage the waste as well as possible. This approach even has a name as officialpolicy: Best Available Technology Not Entailing Excessive Cost, or BATNEEC.What is excessive cost? The Bhopal experience illustrates this too. Without admittingliability, Carbide agreed to pay $470 million, equivalent to $0.43 per share of itsstock market value, to the Indian government. The government then decided not toprosecute the corporation and, on the day of that decision, Carbide’s shares went upby $2 each – yielding a net benefit to shareholders of $1.57 per share. Why?The answer is brutally revealing: because the company proved – in this first largescaleindustrial accident case affecting a transnational corporation operating inthe so called ‘Third World’ or South – that it could get away with murder, nowand in the future. Wall Street knew then that business could go forward, andthat the orderly extraction of profits from the South had become more secure.[37]58 MIC is methyl isocyanite- 82 - groundWork - Wasting the Nation