I remember hearing about the appalling gas explosion at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India 25 years ago. Reading Mick Brown’s excellent article in the Telegraph Magazine (UK), 8.8.09, I have only just understood how much the truth about the toxic gas was suppressed.
The Union Carbide plant was part of the 1970s ‘Green Revolution’ in India, a government scheme designed to feed the masses by using high-yield seeds with a heavy reliance on pesticides and fertilisers. The pesticide carbaryl was produced at the plant under the trademark, Sevin.
The highly toxic and combustible chemical MIC is one of the key ‘ingredients’ found in Sevin, and it was MIC that escaped as a toxic gas causing thousands of deaths in December 1984. On hearing of the explosion, university student Satinath Sarangi went to Bhopal to volunteer for relief work. He has since set up the Bhopal Medical Appeal and the Sambhavna Clinic to provide community care for those suffering the ongoing effects of the gas leak.
When the disaster first happened Union Carbide’s medical director sanctioned the use of sodium thiosulphate as a detoxifyer, but then advised against it. As Sarangi points out, the company did not want the drug used as its effectiveness would prove that the poison had entered the bloodstream and wasn’t (as they claimed) “nothing more potent than a tear gas.”
Sarangi researched what medicines people were using and found that “the chemical disaster had actually produced a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies – who are part of the chemical companies.”
The silver lining to this shocking tale of corporate cover-up and neglect (Union Carbide has refused to clean up the factory site so heavy metals have leached into the water supply, contaminating drinking water) is that the Sambhavna Clinic offers a mixture of modern medicine and traditional ayurvedic and holistic therapies. The idea of the ayurvedic medicine is to use oils and massage to rid the box of toxins rather than add to the toxic load with chemical drugs.
In February 2008 I met New Zealand documentary-maker Barbara Summer Burstyn at Melbourne’s A Taste of Slow. She came over to talk about her journey through India with her husband Canadian cinematographer Tom Burstyn and biodynamic farmer Peter Proctor. They were filming the award-winning documentary One Man, One Cow, One Planet.
She discovered that mechanised and chemical farming has made many farmers redundant and created high levels of personal debt. As a result, the suicide rate among farmers has escalated. The environmental costs have been equally high: the accumulation of chemicals in the soil has eradicated the vital layer of topsoil. “Soil in India has become merely a means of keeping plants upright,” says Barbara.
Referring to big bucks agri-business as ‘anti-human’ and ‘anti-growth’, Barbara think it is essential to maintain a bank of knowledge about traditional human-based systems, “so that we will be ready to forge ahead when everything else falls over.”
In Bhopal pretty much everything did fall over, so it is all the more heartening that 24,000 people are registered at the Sambhavna Clinic and receiving free treatment. The clinic was funded with the help of donations from Greenpeace and a trust established by Dominique Lapierre, author of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal.
