Saturday, August 04, 2007 Ong: Burning people's money on toxic debt By Ted Aldwin Ong Misreadings
LONG before the debate and protests on exchanging toxic waste as contained in the provisions of the Japan-Philippine Economic Partnership Agreement (Jpepa), which is awaiting ratification, the Filipino taxpayers were unaware that it has been paying for the illegitimate debt entered by the Philippine government with Austria.
The half a billion pesos project was intended to provide development assistance to Philippine hospitals in the area of medical waste management through the importation of 26 medical waste incinerators.
The loan was contracted in 1997 between Bank Austria and the Department of Finance (DOF) in order to bankroll the project of the Department of Health dubbed "The Austrian Project for the Establishment of Waste Disposal Facilities and Upgrading of the Medical Equipment Standard in DOH Hospitals."
The incinerators were set up in 1997 to 1998 in the various DOH-run hospitals throughout the country with the capacity of 300-500 kilograms of waste per day.
However, the incinerators had all been retired in 2003 when the incineration ban took effect with the promulgation of the Philippine Clean Air Act (CAA) in 1999. Even without the ban on incinerators as a result of the passage of the CAA, the imported facility could still be proven worthless for it did not meet the emissions level guaranteed by the supplier. In short – substandard.
This claim was substantiated by Ronnel Lim, a researcher of the EcoWaste Coalition when he said that "even if the incineration ban of the CAA never took effect, the incinerators' emissions were outrageously high there was simply no way to defend them. In the joint emission test conducted by both the DOH and the World Health Organization on one of the incinerators, the dioxin emission was a whopping 870 times the limit set by the CAA."
Moreover, Von Hernandez, Campaigns Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia also said that the incinerators exported by Austria to the Philippines were of such low quality that they would never have been allowed to operate in Austria.
The incinerators, however, were granted an exemption from the Environmental Impact Assessment process by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Another ridiculous move of the country's environment agency.
The total cost of the whole project amounted to ATS199,860,000 or P503,647,200 in 1996. The Waste Disposal Component of the project cost ATS95,904,076 or P241,678,000 in 1996.
The incinerators amounted to PhP133,208,662 during its delivery in 1996 and its subsequent installation in the periods 1997 to 1998. The loan, with an interest rate of 4 percent per year, is to be paid off by the government until 2014 in 24 equal semi-annual payments.
Though the facility was proven substandard (and further crippled with the passage of the CAA), principal payments for the loan commenced in 2002 and now represents a $2-million per year debt burden for the Philippines until 2014.
This simply shows that hard-up Filipino taxpayer will have to cover the payment for the loan of this ill-conceived project until 2014 despite not having utilized such a facility. Only our kind of government has the face to do this to its people.
The Philippine Government is practically throwing people's money away at the same time that it is progressively cutting back on health outlays. This incinerator project is nothing but an illegitimate debt incurred to finance a project that poses danger to our people and the environment. This project is dissonant with the global call for the protection of Mother Earth.
This debt must not be honored and it would be logical for the Austrian government to cancel this debt and for the national government to repudiate the loan. This alone gives us a concrete reason why we should not even entertain having the JPEPA ratified by our Congress. Filipinos must not tolerate being at the receiving end of an obsolete technology, more so, of dirty deals and toxic debts. For comments, email them to tao.ssi@gmail.com)
