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Customs Operations Go Green |
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By Julio Godoy*
The
United Nations is training police, attorneys and judges to halt
global smuggling of dangerous substances and endangered species.
PARIS - The Fiji Department of Justice, for
the first time in its history, ordered a local company and its president
to pay fines for illegally importing and storing CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons),
a chemical that depletes the Earth's protective ozone layer.
The president of United Airco, Kim Bentley, admitted to the crime
in January. The trial was held immediately after the Green Customs
Project, of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), conducted
a workshop with the customs staff of the Fiji islands, in the South
Pacific, teaching them to identify illegal trade in harmful substances
like CFCs.
The ruling ''is confirmation that our program works,'' the director
of Green Customs, Rashenda Shende, told Tierramérica.
This UNEP initiative was launched in 2003 with the aim of coordinating
prior efforts to control illegal trade, in accordance with international
treaties like the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances,
the Basel Convention on Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste
and Disposal, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species of Flora and Fauna.
The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1989, was successful in sharply
reducing production and use of CFCs in refrigeration and air-conditioning
systems in industrialized countries, and gave developing countries
until 2007 to follow suit.
This and other treaties promote monitoring of international trade
in illicit substances. With the launch of Green Customs, the rigor
and coordination of those controls has increased, Shende said.
The program will also play a central role in the implementation
of the Rotterdam Convention (on prior informed consent and therefore
reduction of trade in pesticides and other dangerous chemicals)
and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.
''We have launched a series of training programs for customs police
to help them identify trade in illicit items, like CFCs or endangered
species,'' Shende said.
''We are also promoting international cooperation so that the government
that discovers a customs crime can inform the government in which
the illegal trade originated, in order to prevent it from happening
again. And we are training attorneys and judges to integrate departments
of justice in our fight,'' he added.
According to unofficial calculations, illegal trade in dangerous
chemical substances and endangered species moved at least 30 billion
dollars in 2000.
The Environmental Investigation Agency, a London-based independent
organization, says there is still excess production and trade of
CFCs by industrialized countries, including Spain and Italy, which
''abuse'' the Montreal Protocol's exception for ''basic national
demand'' for the chemical.
Its report predicts that CFC contraband will increase in the 113
developing countries that the treaty has ordered to reduce consumption
of the substance.
The Green Customs program may be insufficient to meet its own objectives
because its nominal budget for the 2003-2007 period is just two
million dollars, of which ''only about 300,000 dollars have effectively
been made available,'' according to Shende.
Despite these limitations, five new customs training workshops will
be held this year, in Trinidad and Tobago, Georgia, South Africa,
Bhutan and Syria.
The Trinidad and Tobago workshop, which marks the beginning of the
program in Latin America and the Caribbean, is slated to take place
in June. According to Miriam Vega, regional UNEP coordinator for
the ozone unit, since 1999 mid-level customs officials have been
trained to control entry of CFCs.
Vega told Tierramérica that 80 percent of Latin American and Caribbean
countries have already undergone education intended to identify
trade in ozone-depleting chemicals.
* Julio Godoy is an IPS correspondent. With
reporting by Diego Cevallos in Mexico.
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