Super Size Us

SUPER SIZE US Cap-de-Ville/Chatham to lose twice what Union Estate did for Alcoa's smelter Sunday, February 13th 2005

Union Industrial Estate takes shape in rural La Brea In the Oscar-nominated documentary film Super Size Me, director and guinea pig Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonalds for a month; breakfast, lunch and supper. When asked if he wants to be "super sized" he has to accept and gorge the huge cola and extra fries. The short junk diet nearly killed him.

Cabinet Minute No 3072 of October 28, 2004 confirms Trinidad and Tobago's lust for an even unhealthier diet, currently with no health warnings or regulations, which will last for decades. We are being super sized by the Government without our say-so and, say some, Parliamentary approval.

In a multi-part investigation, freelance journalist MARK MEREDITH reports on Alcoa's proposed new aluminium smelter site at Cap-de-Ville and Chatham in Cedros, the Union Industrial Estate development in La Brea, and the new wave of industrialisation sweeping crowded Trinidad without appropriate legislation, transparency, and procedure.

Cabinet Minute 3072 authorises the National Energy Corporation (NEC) acting for the Government and partner US aluminium giant Alcoa - "to take the necessary steps to cause to be acquired any privately-owned portions of land which are required for the development of the (Cap-de-Ville/Chatham) industrial estate and to develop, with urgency, the said estate".

They instruct that, "without prejudice to the work being undertaken by Alcoa and the NEC for the proposed smelter at Union Estate, Alcoa be offered an appropriate site at the Cap-de-Ville location".

Some o f what the communities o f Vessigny, Union and Sobo villages lost-rubber tree forest, or the "buf fer zone" shielding them from the Union Estate development. Photos: MARK MEREDITH

For the communities of Cap-de-Ville and Chatham, on the once idyllic south west peninsular, life may soon never be the same again. If residents of the area have any doubts about what is about to overwhelm them, they don't have to travel far to have them dispelled.

Their neighbours in nearby Vessigny, Sobo and Union villages awoke one morning last year to find their verdant river valley and surrounding forest being decimated by diggers and backhoes contracted by NEC, a subsidiary of the National Gas Company (NGC).

The creation of Union Estate for Alcoa's aluminium smelter and "heavy gasbased industrial tenants" is set to swallow 465 ha (1,149 acres) of countryside.

Today, hundreds of acres have been levelled and the landscape is one of shocking devastation, as desolate as the surface of Mars.

Soon it will be filled with factories producing hazardous substances and waste, but with no environmental laws enacted safeguarding the local population-the Air Pollution Rules and the Water Pollution Rules.

However, 1,149 acres at Union Estate was too small, or "unsuitable" for Alcoa's aluminium smelter plant as well as heavy gas-based tenants. The Government wanted the smelter super sized from a capacity of 250,000 metric tonnes per year to 325,000 metric tonnes; hence Cabinet Note 3072.

The people of Cap-de-Ville and Chatham are poised to lose twice what their neighbours did for Alcoa's smelter, stretching from the Gulf of Paria to the Southern Main Road, an area of 810 ha, or 2,000 acres, or three square miles; almost severing the Cedros peninsular in half.

Or, put another way, if you took the area of central Toco (17 ha/ 45 acres) that the UNC Government intended to carve up for an industrial port in 2000, that would fit into Alcoa's proposed new industrial estate at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham 48 times.

"One hundred per cent of the project area will be cleared of vegetation," says NEC's October 18 Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) application to the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) for the "establishment of industrial estates to locate gas-based industries from Cap-de-Ville to Chatham". It will cost an estimated TT$408 million, says the application.

It may be instructive to the thousands of people in these communities and beyond-Prime Minister Patrick Manning spoke last year of a necklace, or chain of industrial estates sweeping south through Cedros - to look at the experience of the first community to be super sized by his government.

At Union Estate, the sudden obliteration of their beloved forest, river valley and abundant wildlife shocked residents to the core.

Union Village Council wrote to the EMA on July 6, 2004, three months after work began. "During this period, residents have been forced to experience the whirlwind clearing of hundreds of acres of natural vegetation, destruction of our dams, damaging of our beaches and general disruption of our lives.

"Though we are still trying to cope with the drastic, apparently inevitable change that is to befall our serene communities, we expect the EMA to do something to effectively monitor and control the havoc that is now being called 'development'."

Writing to the Express, humanist and naturalist Ishmael Samad summed up many letters on the controversy. He was scathing in his condemnation of NGC and the EMA's decision to issue a CEC to NGC:

"Never in the history of this country have citizens been subjected to such an onslaught on their sensibilities. Their lives have been impoverished by the degradation of the landscape that has been a source of delight for generations.

"The mindless destruction of our natural heritage continues unabated, the socalled 'developers' armed with their Certificates of Environmental Clearance," he wrote.

The first that many Board members of the EMA knew of the destruction at Union Estate was when they read about it in the press.

Unbeknown to them, the EMA had issued a CEC to NGC on March 24, 2004.

Board members were said to be aghast and angry at the decision, one telling me that Union Estate represented a "total failure" by the EMA. Examination of available documentation/correspondence for Union Industrial Estate in the CEC National Register at the EMA, reveals serious concerns by the EMA and Town and Country Planning Division (TCPD) over the proposal.

If you want to develop an industrial estate, you first have to obtain a CEC to prepare the land. You must tell the EMA what industries will be located there, the specifications, how the land will be subdivided. The EMA will give you Terms of Reference (TOR) for preparing your EIA which, if accepted, will give you a CEC. Then, each separate industrial tenant must submit their own specific CEC application and a separate EIA according to the EMA's Terms of Reference.

NEC sent their EIA for the Union Industrial Estate, prepared by the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA), to the EMA on December 20, 2003.

By March 2004, the EMA still did not know what industrial plants, apart from "potential" ones and the aluminium smelter, would be located at Union Estate; where; and to what specifications. And, NEC could not tell them.

On March 15, the TCPD wrote to the EMA with three pages of concerns over the Union Estate EIA and TOR. The study area was not properly mapped, they said, lacking "precise acreage" of the development, scale, cadastral sheets and land use maps. There was no reserve proposed for the Vance River.

The estate was divided into three blocks, but it was "unclear if each individual block is to be further subdivided". There should be a conceptual plan for each block, the TCPD said, with plans indicating recreational areas, buffer zones, roads etc.

The three blocks comprised 305 ha that would be cleared and leveled, they

said. This represented a "substantial loss of primary and secondary forest".

The "significant impacts" were "not adequately addressed".

The TCPD were concerned about the loss of three dams in an area without a regular water supply. The proponents should consider preserving "at least one or two dams", but these have since been "dewatered" by NEC. They were also concerned about traffic, Vessigny Beach Facility, the Pitch Lake, stands of rubber trees, relocation of settlements and the influx of residential development.

"The Terms of Reference (for the EIA) did not address the wider and long-range impacts to the La Brea area and its environs resulting from the establishment of an 'industrial estate' of this magnitude," wrote the TCPD, recommending deficiencies be addressed by the proponent.

Nevertheless, just nine days later on March 24, without any record in the National Register to show these deficiencies had been addressed, the CEC was issued for a development the EMA has said is in an area of "notable seismic activity", and clearing began.

However, for the La Brea Industrial Development Company (LABIDCO) clearing the site, the CEC granted was inadequate. One of its conditions needed super sizing.

CEC Condition (iii) (o) was of great importance to the residents surrounding Union Estate. It provided a "buffer zone with a minimal width of 100 metres which should be maintained in a greenfield state at the perimeter regions of the estate in close proximity to the Southern Main Road and residential settlements".

These "buffers" included stands of mature rubber trees which were supposed to shield residents from the stark landscape opening up before them.

But on June 9 and 10, "residents woke up to the sound of chain-saws humming away at the meagre stand of rubber trees left . . ." complained the Union Village Council in their July 6 letter to the EMA. Residents contacted NEC's Mike Hamilton who assured them he would stop it.

"Our thanks were short-lived," wrote the Council. "It is now 5 p.m. on July 6, 2004 and trees in that same stand are being attacked."

They were not to know that LABIDCO, meanwhile, had written to the EMA a week before on June 28 "formally requesting a change to the wording" of CEC Condition (iii) (o) regarding the buffer zone.

"Factors" in the construction made "this provision impractical", wrote operations manager Mike Hamilton. In October he would tell the Union Village community at a public meeting that "entering" the buffer zone "was a misunderstanding between ourselves and the EMA".

In fact, a month earlier on June 1, the EMA had served a Notice of Violation against NGC on ten separate counts of violating CEC conditions, one of which was the removal of the buffer zone.

Other violations of the CEC conditions for Union Estate by NGC included: - inadequate security, barriers and signage; - no dampening of soil to protect air quality; - no deployment of sediment retention measures prior to commencement of works; - no submission of a schedule to the EMA prior to activities starting; - no liaison with natural resource agencies or NGOs prior to work; - a failure to submit approvals from other line agencies; and - the burning of vegetation.

NGC faces a possible fine by the EMA.

Indeed, NGC has spent many thousands of dollars on double-page, colour advertisements extolling a shining, gas-driven future and their own corporate responsibility towards the affected communities and environment of Union Estate.

"In the past, the onset of a major development has often been at the expense of the environment and built communities. However, today there is a greater environmental awareness and sensitivity among various levels of decision makers," the company claims in publicity material.

No such advertising space has been bought to tell the communities of Union Estate, Cap-de-Ville and Chatham of the consequences to their lives of the decision to clear the countryside to site dozens of potentially harmful industries next door.

To make up for the destruction of the Union Estate residents' rich, diverse forest and river valley wildlife habitats - 85 species of birds, 25 species of mammals, 35 species of butterflies and 100 floral species (42 of them rare and uncommon) - NGC has decided to embark on a reforestation scheme - in another part of Trinidad, the Morne L'Enfer Forest Reserve (south west conservancy) to be exact.

However, they will compensate the affected community with "recreational facilities", and "garbage bins" and a "nature trail" instead.

They advise in one such large advertisement (May 30, 2004), that in reaching its industrial position "there have been disappointments over the years but, as they say, 'no pain no gain'."

In Vessigny, Sobo, and Union Villages, there has been deep pain.

"If the EMA does not care for the people of the area they SHOULD care about the environment," wrote the Union Village Council in desperation in July. "We beg of you please do something to protect the little that is left. Enough bandages have already been used on these aching wounds."

But they may yet need more first aid.

At the October 27 public meeting at Union Village - seven months after the CEC approval for an industrial estate - residents still had to ask NGC/LABIDCO what type of industrial plants would be sited next door, and what the cumulative effects of these plants would be.

Mike Hamilton said he wasn't qualified to tell them about cumulative effects, and it was the EMA's job to determine which plants would come to the area.

The EMA, however, had only seen potential industries listed in the EIA for Union Estate.

Hamilton was vague, saying he knew of "two definite takers" for the estate, later mentioning methanol and downstream formaldehyde and plastics production.

The Alcoa smelter for La Brea was "not definite" and "we would not know until January...and then there would be debate about where the smelter would go", he told the community.

But his masters in Cabinet were quite certain about Union Estate's new tenants. There was no need for debate.

The very next day Cabinet Minute 3072 was issued declaring a super sized order of industry with trimmings.

Land would be acquired in Cap-de-Ville/Chatham for Alcoa, and "sites at Union Estate be reserved for: Two new ammonia plants; The Titanium Oxide Plant; The Syngas Refinery; The 750 MW Power Plant: The Iron/Steel Complex".

But wait, there's more. A CEC application for Union Estate, dated October 1, 2004, was lodged by the Ansa McAl group for a "Urea Ammonia Nitrate Complex: 1 ammonia plant, 1 urea plant, 1 nitric acid plant and 2 urea nitrate plants".

On December 15, 2004 a MOU was signed between T&T and Kansas-based Coffeyville Resources LLC in the US to produce 1.5 million tonnes of ammonia and 2 million tonnes of urea ammonium nitrate per year from Union Estate.

Meanwhile, some residents surrounding Union Estate had been trying to find out for themselves what was going on.

At the October consultation, one of them wanted to know from NGC why he couldn't access specifically Alcoa's application for a CEC for its smelter. He was told it should be available in the National Register and the EMA could not deny access - unless the client had requested confidentiality.

Last week I tried to access Alcoa's file for their June 2, 2004 CEC application and Terms of Reference for a smelter at Union Estate, and for their subsequent CEC application on January 7, 2005 for a smelter at Cap-de-Ville and Chatham. I was told Alcoa/NEC had requested confidentiality on both files.

Querying this denial under the Freedom of Information Act, I was only partly successful.

In part 2 of SUPER SIZE US next Sunday, MARK MEREDITH visits Alcoa's smelter site at Cap-de-Ville/ Chatham in the company of someone who has been warning the country of the unconstitutional and dangerous folly of an unregulated, super sized diet.

SMELTER WITH TRIMMINGS SUPER SIZE US — PART TWO

By Mark Meredith

Yvonne Ashby, second from right, and family on land her family have owned since 1887. She fears she will have no choice but to move if Alcoa’s smelter is built nearby.

In part one of SUPER SIZE US, MARK MEREDITH looked at the experience of residents surrounding Union Estate who had their lives super sized for Alcoa’s US$1 billion aluminium smelter and gas-based industrial processing plants.

Cabinet has since agreed to “acquire” lands in nearby Cap-de-Ville and Chatham in Cedros, and “one hundred per cent” of an area twice the size of nearby Union Estate will be cleared of vegetation and everything within it for Alcoa and other heavy, gas-based tenants.

But residents don’t want it. Are the Government and Alcoa acting within the law, with due transparency and procedure in their rush to reap the rewards of aluminium’s shiny sheen?

YVONNE ASHBY is 74-years old, bright-eyed, spirited and defiant. She has lived in her two-storey wooden house in Chatham most of her life, land her family have occupied since 1887.

Not surprisingly she doesn’t want to move.

Sitting on her porch with a cooling breeze blowing in across the rolling hills and meadows, with birds flitting in and out of the forest behind the house and the sound of human activity totally absent, it was easy to see why.

It is a very beautiful part of Trinidad, rural and unspoilt, quiet and serene, where the value of the surrounding environment is deeply ingrained in the psyche of the people who depend upon it.

But if the Government and Alcoa have their way, an alternative existence is certain. It is not that Yvonne Ashby’s land is to be acquired for Alcoa’s smelter plant but, as far as she’s concerned, it might as well be.

Houses, hills, valleys, forests and fields will be levelled over a 2,000 acre-or three-square mile area that will scythe the Cedros Peninsula in half; the effects of which will last long after the gas-based fires fueling Alcoa’s smelter have burned out. The impact will be felt not only by those who will lose their land, but by the thousands surrounding the industrial estate and beyond.

Yvonne Ashby worries that the breeze will blow her way once the smelter and other “gas-based industries” have been established nearby. She knows life will never be the same again and she isn’t prepared to let that happen. “Where would I go?” she asked.

She is the chairperson of a group of Chatham residents formed to fight Alcoa’s smelter called the Chatham/Cap-de-Ville Environmental Protection Group (CEPG).

“You think we’ll give this up just so?” she asked my companion and me, sweeping her arms over the idyllic landscape.

I was with former Independent Senator Professor Julian Kenny, a fierce critic of the way in which the industrialisation of rural Trinidad is being driven. We had come down to Cedros together in the hope of meeting Yvonne Ashby and other concerned residents. Professor Kenny was very familiar with the area, having studied its rich biodiversity since the 1950s.

We found ourselves experiencing déjà vu, of a kind. We had met in Toco in 2000 when Kenny was lending assistance to residents fighting the acquisition of their land for an industrial port by the UNC Government and I had been covering the story.

This time the area scheduled to disappear is 48 times the size of central Toco (17 ha/45 acres). Vigorous protests by the residents of Toco succeeded in making the Government back down from their super sized order of industry and trimmings for the quiet coastal village.

The view from Yvonne Ashby’s porch Like residents in Cap-de-Ville and Chatham, Toco people were surprised to find their properties were to be acquired for industrialisation. Like Toco, the proponents in Cedros, Alcoa/NGC, are now unilaterally conducting an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the smelter — based on the EMA’s Terms of Reference (TOR) for a smelter at Union Estate.

We were not initially well received by Yvonne Ashby, friends and family — two strangers at their gate. They met us arms folded, expressions betraying suspicion. They told us they thought we were from Alcoa.

Alcoa representatives had visited others before, with a questionnaire as part of the EIA, accompanied by men with guns, Yvonne Ashby told us. Random surveys of 800 households whose land would be required had taken place in these circumstances, she said.

According to a newspaper report, over 1,000 residents had received verbal notice from Alcoa that they would be displaced, with alternative accommodation or money offered as compensation. Notices stated surveys were part of the EIA process. Homes were said to have been visited by armed security guards, questions asked about “how much lands we have”, said the report.

Later, said Mrs Ashby, residents were told that only 700 homes would be required. “We don’t know what to believe,” she told me.

In a letter in the Sunday Express (January 23) replying to Julian Kenny’s column “Bhopalising Trinidad”, Randy Overbey, President, Primary Metals Development, Alcoa, wrote that they were “currently awaiting” the EMA’s Terms of Reference (TOR) for the EIA for Cap-de-Ville and “initiating the consultative process” with the communities.

On the evening of February 1, Overbey met a group of residents himself, Mrs Ashby told me. He promised between 600-800 jobs and that the plant would be built within the community, she said. They would plant trees, and recycle the red mud waste as concrete.

Overbey, in his letter in the Sunday Express, admitted Alcoa don’t yet know how they will deal with spent pot linings, the other waste derived from the smelting process containing fluorides.

On February 10 in Chatham, residents held their own meeting of about 300 people from across Cedros which confirmed the communities’ opposition to the smelter. Former Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj, who addressed the meeting, has taken up their cause.

I asked project manager John Jones of National Energy Corporation (NEC), a subsidiary of NGC and Alcoa’s partners, why they were conducting an EIA for the smelter before they had received the Cap-de-Ville TOR from the EMA. He told me they were working to the EMA’s TOR for the original smelter site at Union Estate.

I pointed out these were totally different areas, but Jones didn’t appear to agree.

He told me the areas of Union Estate and Cap-de-Ville/Chatham were “basically the same” in terms of the baseline data they were gathering, and that “it didn’t make sense” to start over.

They would “fine tune” and “fit” the EIA for Cap-de-Ville when the EMA gave them the TOR. Jones confirmed that the “social surveys” were part of their EIA process.

But, according to section 5 (2) of the Environmental Management Act, the proponent has to hold consultations with NGOs and the public on the Terms of Reference for the EIA, in this case the TOR for a smelter at Cap-de-Ville. Alcoa have not done this, moving straight to EIA “surveys” based on the TOR for another part of Trinidad.

Before Alcoa’s smelter can be issued with a certificate of environmental clearance (CEC), a separate CEC first has to be issued for the creation of the industrial estate at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham to fit Alcoa’s plant and other “gas-

based industries”. The EMA have to know who the prospective tenants will be in order to quantify the cumulative effects of many different plants.

The draft TOR for an industrial estate at Cap-de-Ville was issued on January 5 and is out for public comment. It calls on Alcoa/NEC to provide a “detailed explanation of land use”, the “type of industries/ tenants” expected to take up residence, their “density of occupation”, and “activities and components of the wider study area”.

I asked NEC’s John Jones what type of industries besides the smelter were planned for Cap-de-Ville. He told me that had not been determined, nor who would be carrying out the EIA for the industrial estate.

NEC must “indicate the acceptability of the proposed project to nearby community groups in the Cap-de-Ville area and environmental NGOs”, say the EMA. In this area, which is currently zoned for agriculture, they must take into account “customs, aspirations and attitudes of the local community”.

We were told by the Ashby family that “99 per cent of households were against the smelter”. Recounting a meeting called by Alcoa, Yvonne Ashby said that when residents were asked if they wanted the smelter plant most people said no.

Asked again, they were told “no, no, no! Again and again”.

Presently, the EMA are determining whether the Alcoa smelter needs a CEC, which I was told was “most likely”. If it is, CEC draft Terms of Reference for an EIA will be issued and the public will have 28 days to comment on them.

I asked a senior EMA official about the legality of the EIA Alcoa were carrying out in Cap-de-Ville based on the TOR for Union Estate. I was told it was a “free country”, and they could do as they wish, but Alcoa/NEC would have to abide by any new TOR set for Cap-de-Ville/Chatham.

John Jones of NEC told me they “would do everything the EMA demands of us”.

If the public wanted to access Alcoa’s January 7 CEC application for a smelter at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham in the CEC National Register at the EMA, as of last week they could not.

A proponent is allowed to request confidentiality on the file. For instance, they may not want to give away technological secrets, like a smelting process, perhaps. This request is still being determined by the EMA. However, I was able to access Alcoa/NEC’s original TOR for a smelter at Union Estate, later withdrawn and now being used at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham for their EIA.

Chatham’s beautiful beach

The EMA say that the “overall shelf life of the proposed facility would be 50 years with operations occurring on a 24-hour basis”.

Output of the smelter is “expected to be 325,000 metric tonnes per year of finished aluminium product and the preferred process train would utilise HeroultHall pre-baked anode technology”.

For every tonne of aluminium produced, a half tonne of coke and two tonnes of alumina would be required, they say.

The plant would require 400 megawatts of electricity for the smelting process, and “in excess of 300 cubic metres of potable water per day”. A dedicated power plant would be needed and the infrastructure for delivery of water and natural gas.

The EMA say that Alcoa’s smelter EIA “should focus on comprehensively documenting and demonstrating the impacts this activity may present to different aspects” of the social and natural environment (See box).

Alcoa’s smelter must be in compliance with local standards and guidelines, they say. “International standards or guidelines should be used where they have not been formalised locally for specific circumstances.”

The EMA’s Terms of Reference (TOR) for an Alcoa aluminium smelter at Union Estate in La Brea—which are currently being used by Alcoa/NEC for an EIA at Cap-de-Ville and Chatham—list potential impacts of the proposed project.

The EMA describe the potential effects as “significant adverse impacts” at Union Estate, an area half the size of the proposed site at Cap-de-Ville/Chatham, and have directed Alcoa to study the impact on the following: • Community (health, safety and socio-economic impacts); • Flora and fauna, terrestrial and aquatic; • Hydrology, drainage, sediment loads, the marine environment and potential of contamination from spills; • Changes to topography, such as leveling undulating countryside, changes in noise and vibration levels from the site and associated transportation networks, changes in soil contamination levels, and changes in sensitive habitats including forests, coastal zones and recreational areas; • Waste and its disposal, hazard mitigation in the event of gaseous or particulate fluoride release, and impacts on utilities and infrastructure; and • The cumulative impacts arising from the smelter and its associated industries, as well as unrelated industries.

Our two most important pieces of environmental legislation protecting us against pollution from smelters and chemical processing plants are The Air Pollution Rules and Water Pollution Rules. But they have not been formalised” — not laid in Parliament and passed by the House.

This means, according to a senior EMA source, that the EMA would expect to subject Alcoa to the same standards and guidelines that would apply in their parent country, the United States.

Though the EMA has long drafted legislation governing industry’s impacts on the environment and human health, the Government has been stalling the process for years, said the source. They now want to wait on the outcome of the revised National Environmental Policy, to see if the Air and Water Pollution Rules will “fit” it.

For former Independent Senator Julian Kenny, the delay in passing this legislation while the country is rapidly industrialising is unacceptable. But that’s not the only thing bothering him.

In a series of columns in the Express that began last June — “Smeltering environmental law”, Kenny has been a lone voice warning us about our diet.

For example: the dangers of our inadequate regulatory standards; our high population density; our capacity to protect pipelines and hazardous industrial plants; being able to cope with industrial disaster and adequate compensation to those affected; and that Parliament is being bypassed by Cabinet dictates in its efforts to industrialise us.

He was critical of MOUs being signed by the Government with foreign companies to establish smelters and industrial plants at specific sites without public debate or consultation, he told me.

“An issue such as the industrialisation of the country is of immense national importance and properly any communication on the broad issue must be to the fount of Cabinet’s authority and powers — Parliament,” he wrote.

Professor Kenny emphasised the law of the land in Trinidad and Tobago under the Town & Country Planning Act; that any change in land use can only come about after a submission by the Minister to Parliament for an alteration to the 1984 National Physical Development Plan (NPDP).

If the Government wants a change in the land use of a three square mile-area of currently zoned agricultural land under the NPDP in Cap-de-Ville/Chatham, to one set aside for industrial estates, then it must first do so through the parliamentary sanction of a reviewed NPDP. This NPDP “shall”, by law, be reviewed every five years and approved by Parliament, but this has not happened, says Kenny.

On Yvonne Ashby’s porch, taking in the peace of the breeze blowing from the direction of the forest wall and over the meadows, an ambience that generations of her family have enjoyed, Kenny read my thoughts.

“Mark,” he said, “just look at the quality of life these people have here,” and paused. “It will change everything,” he said softly, standing to face the wind blowing from the north.

SUPER SIZE US – PART 3

An icy blast from Karahnjukar Part 1 Mark Meredith (mmeredith@wow.net) Sunday, March 27th 2005

57 sq km o f Iceland's Karahnjukar, "the largest remaining pristine wilderness in Western Europe . . . a vast panorama of wild rivers, waterfalls, brooding mountains and moss y highlands thick with flowers", will be submerged beneath 150 m o f water to build a dam to power Alcoa’s aluminium smelter.

You may be hard pressed to imagine what Iceland and Trinidad have in common. You know it isn't the weather. The answer is aluminium. Smelting, to be specific, by Alcoa Inc, the worlds largest aluminium producer. In the last 20 years Alcoa has not built a new smelter, but now it is to build two: in Iceland and Trinidad.

In fact, there are plenty of similarities between that freezing island nation and our own sweltering one. But at the core is aluminium, the product of a process some believe deserves much greater scrutiny than it gets.

Alcoa's 322,000-ton smelter in eastern Iceland at Reydarfjoerdur which the company call Fjardaal ("aluminium of the fjords"), will be powered by what Alcoa call a "renewable" energy resource - hydroelectric power.

Our 325,000 ton proposed aluminium smelter at Cap de Ville/Chatham - which will be as advanced as Iceland's - will be powered by a limited and nonrenewable energy resource - natural gas.

According to Forbes Magazine, Alcoa is negotiating a rate in Trinidad of lower than 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus an average 2.5 cents in the United States.

Forbes headlines its June 2004 article "The Cosmopolitan Touch" on Alcoa and new chairman Alain JP Belda: "How to make money smelting aluminum: Shut down US plants and open operations in China and Trinidad."

A major difference between Alcoa's operation in Trinidad and the one in Iceland's land of glaciers and geothermal energy is that the Iceland project is well advanced and is due for completion in 2007. Though Alcoa have recently run into a hiccup or two.

It has been hugely controversial, in Iceland and abroad. The mother of Icelandic pop star Bjork went on hunger strike in protest in a blaze of publicity.

However, when people talk of Alcoa's US$ 1 billion-plus Icelandic project, they don't refer to it as Fjardaal - but Kárahnjúkar, after the land that is to be drowned to produce hydroelectric power for Alcoa's one aluminium smelter.

The electricity will be carried by powerlines over the Icelandic wilderness 50 km distant to Reydarfjoerdur.

The Kárahnjúkar Hydropower Project will submerge under 150 metres of water a 57 sq km swathe of what the UK Guardian termed "the largest remaining pristine wilderness in Western Europe"; describing the area as "a vast panorama of wild rivers, waterfalls, brooding mountains and mossy highlands thick with flowers."

The overall impacts of Kárahnjúkar, say its critics, will affect over 3,000 sq km, or three per cent of Iceland's total landmass.

Precious land and losing it to Alcoa's smelters is the big similarity between our two island nations, except that we have considerably less of it to spare Trinidad (1,864 sq miles) would fit into Iceland (39,756 sq miles) over 21 times.

As you might expect, the land to be lost in these islands of ice and humidity are very different in ecology, and size for that matter. Though each, it could be argued, is as important as the other. But that may not matter.

There's an icy warning from Kárahnjúkar blowing down the necks of the Cedros and Icacos communities, if they did but know it.

"Environmentalists in Iceland and abroad have looked on in disbelief as the project has proceeded, sidestepping one obstacle after another, driven by a government seemingly determined to push it through, whatever the cost to nature or the economy," says the 2003 UK Guardian article on Kárahnjúkar, "Power Driven".

If this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Both Iceland and Trinidad have governments in thrall to mega-projects, both possessing planning/regulatory agencies that sometimes have little say in final planning decisions; islands where sound advice goes unheeded.

"Kárahnjúkar - a Project on Thin Ice" is a 2003 report published by the International Rivers Network (IRN) in cooperation with the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, Friends of the Earth International, and the CEE Bankwatch Network.

It was used by 120 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from 47 countries to urge international financial institutions, such as the European Investment Bank, not to get involved in the Kárahnjúkar project.

The report condemns Kárahnjúkar "as an example of old-style, Governmentpromoted heavy industrialisation" with "serious environmental impacts". It faces "considerable geological, economic and legal risks", and will result in "annual losses of $36 million", they warn.

To power Alcoa's smelter, a series of nine dams are being built at Kárahnjúkar, the main dam being 190m high and 730m wide. The Joekulsa a Bru and Joekulsa and Fljoetsdal rivers and a series of smaller rivers to the North of the Vatnajoekull Glacier, Europe's largest, will be dammed or diverted.

Three reservoirs will be created, the largest of which is the Halslon that will cover a 57 sq km area. Seven channels, and 16 tunnels running for a total of 70km will divert rivers to the "powerhouse".

These river diversions and engineering works will impact an area over 2,900 sq km, say IRN, partially flooding one of Iceland's most spectacular canyons, Dimmugljufur, "Iceland's Grand Canyon". It was dynamited on live TV, just before elections. Opponents of Kárahnjúka say the message was, "this is something you cannot stop".

Some 60 waterfalls and "invaluable" geographical features will vanish in the reservoir or be spoilt by river diversions.

IRN say the area is one of the largest continuous vegetated regions over 5,000 to 6,000 metres above sea level in Iceland's Central Highlands, with examples of rare and protected vegetation and wildlife.

The Kárahnjúka project will impact the habitats of seals, reindeer, pink-footed geese, and migratory fish such as Atlantic salmon, arctic char and trout, says IRN. Rare and endangered lichens and mosses are threatened.

Erosion, siltation, and fluctuation of water levels in the Halslon reservoir leaving dried mud to be whipped up by wild Icelandic winds, will affect areas far

outside the actual project area, they warn. This will impact the grazing lands of Iceland's reindeer with the possibility of local extinction of the species.

The choice of a massive dam site at Kárahnjúkar was attacked by the former director of Iceland's Nordic Volcanic Insitute, Gudmundur Sigvaldson.

The dam site "is located near the most volcanically productive area on Earth", he warned. "Any prudent political authority would never consider to stake huge amounts of taxpayers' money on a project built on such dubious grounds."

Alcoa say the Kárahnjúka Project and smelter will combat global warming, since they are using a "renewable" energy resource, hydropower, rather than fossil fuels. IRN argue Alcoa's argument is "spurious".

They say that the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development does not include hydropower as renewable. Further, they say that the irreversible negative impacts to soil, water, vegetation, and wildlife are not sustainable or renewable in the case of Kárahnjúka.

They point out that because of Alcoa's smelter, Iceland was able to negotiate an exemption clause under the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

As Iceland's National Power Company Landsvirkjun - who are developing the Kárahnjúkar Power Plant at a cost of US$1,086 million - itself pointed out in January 2003, through this exemption "the international community has allowed Iceland to increase its emissions by up to 60 per cent (more than any other country), thereby accommodating the Alcoa project".

Tetrafluoromethane and hexafluoroethane, two greenhouse gases emitted by aluminium smelters, have global warming potentials that are 6,500-9,200 times higher than the carbon dioxide that they also produce in great quantities.

These PFCs can remain in the atmosphere for 50,000 years.

Iceland's Environmental and Food Agency had to raise the limit for the emission of fluorides - one of the most potent greenhouse gases - because Alcoa could not meet the proposed lower limit, say IRN. Flouride emissions around the world have caused serious problems for public health, agriculture and wildlife, they add.

In Iceland Alcoa has managed to achieve an environmental licence for sulphur dioxide emissions of 12 kg per ton of aluminium produced. In comparison, the World Health Organisation guidelines for Europe define a sulphur dioxide limit of 5 kg/ton, and the US EPA 8 kg/ton, say IRN. An aluminium smelter that Norsk Hydro planned to build at the same location would have emitted only 0.455 kg/ton - by using emission-reducing "wet scrubbers", which Alcoa will not be using.

Or put another way, Norsk Hydo's proposed 420,000 ton smelter would have emitted 190 tons of sulphur dioxide a year, while Alcoa's 322,000 ton smelter will emit nearly 3,900 tons per year, say IRN. IRN say that Landsvirkjun has plans to develop additional dams which would allow Iceland's smelting capacity to increase more than fivefold, making it the largest producer of aluminium in Western Europe. With Kárahnjúkar complete, 80 per cent of Iceland's total energy output would be used to smelt aluminium.

In part 2 in tomorrow's Express, MARK MEREDITH looks at other similarities these islands of snow and sunshine share.

SUPER SIZE US – PART 3

An icy blast from Ka¡rahnujkar Part 2 Mark Meredith Monday, March 28th 2005

The natural grandeur o f Kárahnjúkar being carved up to provide aluminium smelting power. The overall impacts, say critics, will a f fect o ver 3,000 sq km, or three per cent o f Iceland's total landmass

Mark Meredith continues his investigation from the Sunday Express into the strange similarities between Iceland and Trinidad.

In 1999, Iceland's government began preparing a Master Plan for Hydro and Geothermal Energy Resources. It was "basically ready" in February 2002, say the International Rivers Network (IRN), and was supposed to inform parliamentary debate on Kárahnjúkar.

But the report was not released until after parliament passed legislation approving the Kárahnjúkar project in April 2002. In the report, the conservation value of Kárahnjúkar was the second highest of any of the 15 project sites considered, and one of the least acceptable in environmental terms.

An "independent analysis" concluded that Kárahnjúka "might well cause massive financial losses to Landsvirkjun (Iceland's National Power Company) and Iceland's society", say IRN. While the University of Iceland said something those in sunny Chatham in Cedros might agree with: "that compared to the promotion of heavy industries,

government support for education, infrastructure and ecotourism emerges as a much better (environmental and socio-economic) solution".

Iceland's National Planning Agency (NPA) rejected the Kárahnjúka project in 2001, only one of 120 hydroelectric power projects it has opposed.

"It had not been demonstrated that the gains resulting from the Kárahnjúkar Power Plant would be such to compensate for the substantial, irreversible negative environmental impact that the project would forseeably have on the natural environment and the utilisation of land", they said.

But four months after the NPA turned down the project, the decision was overturned by Iceland's minister for the environment Siv Fridleifsdottir. In March 2003 Alcoa signed a deal for 40 years supply of power from Landsvirkjun.

The project´s construction has faced ongoing labour problems caused by Alcoa´s hiring of low-wage workers from Europe and China, it is alleged. The Karahnukar dam construction is expected to be delayed by four months.

The Icelandic labour movement is also involved in a dispute with the Italian dam construction company Impregilo, charging it of violating Icelandic law and agreements. IRN's report specifically warned of the dangers of using Impregilo, a company with a history of time and cost overruns.

In a new twist, an Icelandic court has just ordered Alcoa to undertake a new Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for their smelter.

Previously, the Icelandic Planning Agency had ruled that an EIA carried out by Norsk Hydro for a smelter at the same site was valid for Alcoa's smelter. Norsk Hydro were to develop a 420,000 ton smelter powered by Karahnjukar. But in 2002 they pulled out after a "strategic evaluation" and Alcoa stepped in.

Opponents of the project, like lawyer Atli Gislasson-one of a group of 26 citizens who in 2003 brought separate cases before the Icelandic high court and European Free Trade Association surveillance authority, challenging the government's lack of transparency-charged that if the government could force through Karahnjukar, "they figured they could get away with anything", and he said this is already happening.

"The minister for industry overruled an EIA and gave the go-ahead for a project on the Thjorsa river that will inundate part of a protected area-a project that had already been rejected by the local authority," he told the UK Guardian.

Critics among Iceland's neighbours say the island has a "democracy deficit". I

asked Arni Finnsson, Chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, Iceland's leading environmental NGO, if this was true.

"The way in which the Icelandic Government forced the Karahnjukar Project through is a sign of a democratic deficit as well as total disregard for environmental principles agreed in Rio 1992," he told me. "The incumbent government has waged a war against nature and environmental NGO's."

He added that the former Nature Conservation Agency, which opposed Karahnjukar, had been merged with another government institution, "thus paralysing it" - which, it might be argued, is not a million miles away from our own made-over Ministry of Public Utilities and the Environment.

Talking of democracy deficits, two weeks ago Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Patrick Manning announced that the Cap de Ville/Chatham site was "full" and that the Government were "scouting around" for new lands to level for industry without going to Parliament for approvals in changes in land use.

To rub salt in Cedros wounds, his statement was made some days after he had received a petition of 3,000 signatures delivered to Whitehall from Chatham and Cap de Ville residents opposing Alcoa's smelter in their area.

No one knows who their other new neighbours will be. Nor will Government divulge details about the proposed "second aluminium smelter", who wants to build it and where.

In a reply to emailed questions, NGC would only confirm what we knew all along, that with other "downstream industries" Alcoa was the proposed tenant at Chatham,. "However discussions with other investors are in progress", they added. The second smelter was undergoing a "feasibility" study and the size and location had not been finalised. "Investigations of other potential (industrial) sites along the southwest peninsula are ongoing", they said.

It is actually easier to find out what is happening on the roof of the world in Iceland than it is right here in Trinidad.

Efforts to extract signs, even the merest hint, of any physical planning by the Government for the rapid industrialisation of rural Trinidad and passing of environmental legislation protecting human heath and the environment-the Water and Air Pollution effluent Rules-were as rewarding as a skinny dip in Karahnjukar's icy reservoir.

Neither Energy Minister Eric Williams, nor Trade and Industry's Ken Valley, leader of Government business in Parliament, knew anything about either at a post-cabinet press conference a few weeks ago. I was told development would

be "sustainable" and instructed by Valley to speak to the Environmental Management Authority (EMA).

I told him I had already done that and knew that, like me, the EMA where waiting to hear about the fate of the Water and Air Pollution Rules they had so painstakingly prepared.

Williams told me afterwards that the government "had to grow the country". He would not comment on the second aluminium smelter and dismissed our contribution to climate change as "a blip" compared to other countries, which I thought strange.

A few years ago I saw a map of the world, with vertical red columns rising from those countries with significant per capita contributions to global warming through carbon dioxide emissions. Two columns soared high above all the others-the USA column and the Trinidad and Tobago column.

In tomorrow's Express, MARK MEREDITH meets Alcoa's President of Primary Metals Development Randy Overbey and talks to him about aluminium's not so shiny side. He also attempts to find out if the icy blast blowing Chatham's way from Karahnjukar will, like one of that region's freezing rivers, be diverted somewhere different.

SUPER SIZE US – PART 4

Smelter in a park Tuesday, March 29th 2005

Alcoa Inc is the world's largest aluminium company. It has 120,000 employees worldwide and in 2003 its income was US$ 21.5 billion.

Randy Overbey is Alcoa's President of Primary Metals Development and the man leading the Trinidad smelter team in Chatham and Cap de Ville. MARK MEREDITH met him in their offices on Stanmore Avenue.

Randy Overbey MM In Chatham and Cap de Ville the residents are quite clear that they do not want to have your almuminium smelter in their area and handed in a petition of 3,000 signatures to that effect to the Prime Minister. Will Alcoa take note of that and act upon their wishes?

RO Alcoa is taking full note of that. We want to reach out to the community and answer their questions as fully as we can. I believe that the broader issues of

industrial development, taking care of the environment and needs of people who may be affected by such a project can coexist. That’s the outcome we would like in Chatham.

Alcoa has a high Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) ranking. Doesn’t this obligate Alcoa to seriously take residents’ “no smelter” views into consideration?

As I said, we are taking their concerns into account. I believe they have been given information that is inaccurate, misleading, and has added to their concerns unnecessarily.

What sort of information?

There was a flier that was handed out to several hundred residents. When we looked it we felt, quite clearly, that the flier was full of inaccuracies, misleading and inflammatory information which has helped drive our neighbours in a direction which is unnecessary and inappropriate. So we brought in a physician who is truly an expert on health effects of an aluminium smelter to answer residents’ questions.

It’s a process we want to continue, of being honest. To find answers that allow industrial development, the environment and people to coexist.

How do you think you will find those answers in Trinidad? You are coming into a country that has no physical plan for its rapid industrial development, and that has no environmental effluent standards legislation in place either. Some might say our lack of standards is an attraction for Alcoa.

We are committed to abiding by the EMA process, without fail. Beyond that, we have our own standards and vision for a smelter plant like this, and we want to build it to world class standards even if those don’t exist here. We wouldn’t look at standards here and say those are the minimum so we’ll spend the least capital possible. That’s not our approach at all.

I’m proud of our alignment with the government, and NGC/NEC on the vision we bring of a facility that is as fully integrated as possible into the ecosystem existing there. I’ll be candid. We can’t build a facility and keep every tree that’s there today. However, there is a way that looks at the facility and existing ecosystem of the region in a holistic way, keeping as much green space as possible so it looks as attractive as possible. Are there species living there we can even enhance, to additional wetlands, types of plants or crops?

But your facility is only part of a much larger industrial estate, which might not exist, It could be argued, if your facility wasn’t going to Cap de Ville/Chatham. Your smelter is the flame drawing the moths.

I suggest you talk to the government. I won’t try to speak for them.

I’d like to make a comparison with Iceland and here, where the hugely controversial Karahnjukar project was pushed through regardless by the Icelandic government, driven by Alcoa’s plans. Won’t you just piggy back on our Government’s unconstitutional plans to develop forest and agricultural lands in rural Chatham to accommodate your smelter?

Again, I can’t speak for the Government, but the suggestion we have made, and one I see NEC endorsing, is a land use strategy for this region where our smelter will be. We endorse that because we want our smelter to fit into the ecosystem.

We are having conversations with the government and it’s my understanding that they themselves are pursuing this.

We do have a land use plan already, you know, the 1984 National Physical Development Plan.

I’m talking about something specific for that region. That’s what we endorse.

In any EIA Alcoa will have to do, there will be “An Analysis of Alternatives”, meaning you have to look for alternative sites. Are you doing that?

We’ve done quite a bit of work on possible sites. As you know we already considered La Brea (Union Estate) but that was too small. I’ve stressed before that Union Estate was designed and approved to be an industrial estate with or without the smelter. We looked inland in the Pt Lisas area but Pt Lisas is fairly full. We’ve looked at potential sites on the east coast and the south coast. But it appears to us that that Cap de Ville is the best site.

Why is it the best site?

It’s adjacent to the coast which is important to us as we’ll bring a great deal of raw material in, which we desire to do by ship. A port setting is critical, as is adequate size. We want green space around us, not be right up against other industrial developments. We very much want it to appear as a smelter in a park.

But you’ve driven through Union Estate. A wasteland. Do you think it will be any different in Cap de Ville/Chatham?

Yes. Our aim of integrating the smelter into the ecosystem, and sponsoring the ecosystem to the fullest degree possible, that’s our view coming into the region.

To compare Union Estate to mine or Alcoa’s vision is not correct.

Let’s talk about the people of Chatham and Cap de Ville. They have a particular way of life and have done for generations. It will change and never be the same again. The whole of Cedros will change, and the gas will eventually run out. So I ask about sustainability. Would not investment in education, health, infrastructure and ecotourism be more sustainable in this case?

Our goal, again, is to integrate our facility into the ecosystem. Our goal, in cooperation with NEC would be for those residents who need to relocate that they would be relocated to settings that are as similar to what they’re used to as possible.

You’re going to build housing for them?

Well, um, I would answer it this way. The government fundamentally has the responsibility for relocation. But we are working with them on the possibilities of that relocation in terms of the outcomes. That they be relocated in as similar way as possible to what they have enjoyed. It’s my understanding people can choose between relocation or financial settlement.

Well, some people have been waiting decades for compensation in this country. And how can anyone replace the rural beauty of Chatham? Won’t residents end up in tiny National Housing Authority plots?

All I can say is that we want people relocated into a similar setting as possible. If we and the government take a financial decision and move forward with this project, Alcoa wil begin almost immediately on the implementation of an educating, training and workforce selection process. We expect about 750 well trained permanent employees.

Forbes magazine reports Alcoa is looking at a rate of lower than 1.5 cents per KW hour in Trinidad.. Is this correct.

I can’t comment on that, but to be competitive we need long term, low cost power.

Your facility is supposed to have a shelf life of 40-50 years, correct?

I would phrase it this way, Mark, That we expect to operate for 30-50 years.

Some people say they’re not sure we have enough gas to last that long.

Now government is talking about a second smelter, both consuming vast amounts of energy. We’re not Quatar, after all. What happens if it’s used up in, say, 20 years? What happens to the area when you leave?

We’re seeking very clear assurances from the government about their commitment to supply natural gas to support the facility before we make the investment. We must have those assurances are deliverable and know the

reserves are adequate.

Do you think they are?

At this point I do, yes.

As long as 30-50 years?

Uh, yes, I think so.

Let ‘s turn to the broader issue of aluminium production and Alcoa’s claim on your website that it is a very sustainable product. Is it really when you consider what it takes to produce aluminium?

The vast energy use, clearing of tropical forests for bauxite strip mining, the damming of ecosystems and displacement of communities, and the documented health and pollution problems associated with alumina refineries and smelters. All of this instead of concentrating on recycling, which takes just 5% of the energy needed to smelt new aluminium. The US, the largest consumer of aluminium recycled just 44 per cent in 2003, the lowest rate ever. Instead of destructive dam projects and more mines and smelters, shouldn’t Alcoa be concentrating far more on recycling?

Pause – We would like to see higher recycling rates, so we don’t disagree with you on that. We think its good, we endorse it, and will continue to promote the recycling benefits of our product. In order to supply aluminium demand we believe will exist in the future, new facilities will need to be built, but we would like to see a higher recycling rate. . .

Alcoa are pressing ahead with several destructive projects besides Karanhnjukar. In Brazil the displacement of 16,000 people at the Bela Monte dam. In Suriname the Tapanahani River Dam, with the loss of 1,200 km of forest and six indigenous villages, and 13,500 ha of endemic jarrah forest already cleared for the Huntley bauxite mine in Australia. These are all extremely harmful to the environment and communities, are they not?

I think there’s a general point to made, Mark, and one we may simply disagree on. I agree with you on recycling. I think there’s an issue of the coexistence of development and protection of the environment. I don’t see the world economy being wiling to give up on future development of industry. . .

I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that. . . (continuing) and power to support that industry. Those who seem to object to all sources of power probably don’t want their lights turned off either.

But deforestation is a big issue, especially here in Trinidad where we are losing trees hand over foot. With your various deforestation plans, how are Alcoa helping combat climate change by destroying these carbon sinks while burning vast amounts of energy?

Let’s talk about climate change a bit. Starting with the base of 1990, which is what we’ve chosen for measuring our greenhouse gas emissions, Alcoa has reduced those emissions by — do you know what percentage?

About 25 per cent.

In fact it’s about 26 and a half, a reduction of over 25 pr cent since 1990 Your greenhouse gas emissions from smelters are much more potent and there are much more of them than most, so you really had to, didn’t you?

You now have major new smelting operations plans worldwide, too.

As we approach growth in Iceland, Trinidad, and other places, and growing our system, we will come up with a goal that also reflects that growth. I currently chair of our climate change strategy team worldwide and am quite familiar with a lot of these issues. As we approach growth on the primary side of our business, it will be done also in the context of climate change and greenhouses gases.

Let’s come back to the contentious issue of health and smelters. There are reports of fluoride poisoning, osteosclerosis, sinus trouble, chest pains, anaemia and “pot line asthma” among illnesses mentioned. An Australian study reported smelter workers have a greater chance of contracting and dying from stomach, kidney, and prostate cancers than average Australians. In 1999, Alcoa warned workers of elevated chances of contracting lung and bladder cancers as a result of using coal tar pitch in the smelters. Are we going to use coal tar pitch?

Yes So what can you tell people here about the risks of using the same substance?

We recognized that there was the potential of an elevated chance because of coal tar pitch. We took immediate measures worldwide to better protect our employees in terms of clothing they wear, the frequency with which they shower, the exposures themselves and took immediate steps to mitigate that risk.

So you would admit there’s a risk working in an aluminium smelter.

There is a risk working in an aluminium smelter. I agree with that. It’s a plant, a manufacturing facility. There’s moving equipment, the process has a molten bath.

I’m thinking of something more insidious, not falling into a vat of molten metal.

That’s why we had Dr Taiwo come from Yale to deal with these specific questions. Perhaps we need to send you a summary of that information.

Yes, you should.

It’s information we’re happy to share

Living on the edge Super Size Us-Part 5: Union Estate's $20 million second helping

By Mark Meredith Sunday, April 24th 2005

An unplanned, super-sized diet is not good for you. Ask the residents of Union Village in La Brea and they will tell you. A giant helping of industry is being served upon a huge platter called Union Industrial Estate which will affect many thousands of people in the four communities which surround it.

An order that size should sate the hungriest of appetites, you might think. But the Government and their National Energy Company (NEC) are ravenous entities, and are about to swallow Union Village whole.

Their menu is being made up as they go along; for residents of Trinidad's south west peninsula this means a force-fed extravaganza of junk food all the way to Icacos. Union Estate is merely the appetiser. The most expensive and filling items on the main course will be two aluminium smelters, one prepared by Alcoa Inc, the other by a mystery chef.

Last Sunday, MARK MEREDITH helped himself to some of the first course.

BE QUICK about it and you can sample something quite extraordinary in the rolling countryside of La Brea. It will only take little more than an hour to get to Union Village from Port of Spain on Sunday morning roads, with no speeding.

Once there you will begin to understand the true meaning of the phrase, "living on the edge".

A visit will provide you with a window to the future as well as the past, and a family weekend excursion like no other, with high educational value. Here, you will experience unbelievable scenery and the Manning Government's version of "land planning" and "sustainable development" - in action.

Head south from the Pitch Lake on the Southern Main Road to Vessigny. You'll reach it in a few minutes. You can tell it's Vessigny because on your left, beyond the houses, the countryside has disappeared.

If you are there early, about 8 a.m., you may be able to do what my companions and I did: drive through non-existent security and give yourselves a tour of Union Industrial Estate, Site B. Last Sunday we entered another world: an evolving place of freshly created canyons, cliffs, plateaus, pillars and stacks glowing in the morning sun; straggly clumps of lonely vegetation the only islands of green upon an earthy sea.

The far boundaries of this vast new world are marked by frowning walls of dense, tropical forest which like the "Ents"- the avenging trees in Lord of the Rings - have every reason to be angry. Stacks of broken brother trees lie scattered before them upon the ugly landscape, as though felled for Saruman's furnaces by "Orcs".

We passed a latter-day Orc, in blue overalls. He was strolling along with a pack of dogs, armed with a rifle and telescopic sights. He came from the direction of a work compound busy with fellow workers and a prominent "No Hunting" sign.

It was the second violation of Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) conditions we would see that day. The first breach, obviously, was no security.

It is hard to grasp the sheer scale of the earth-moving project that is Union Estate, even after driving around site B. This is hilly, forested country with valleys. To level it for industry over 465 ha (1,149 acres) requires massive cutting and fill - which brings us to Site A, Union Village and the highlight, or low point, of your excursion.

Leaving Vessigny you will notice the large Vessigny School on your right, built a few years ago. Make a mental note of its location. You will then pass through an area of rubber forest. This suddenly ends on your left, revealing the desert of yet

more Site B. Turn right by the bus stop above the playing field and you have entered Union Village.

It consists of a single road that climbs the crest of a ridge, ending after a large mango tree. Beyond it, a path leads down to a sheltered beach of powdery sand and a calm, blue sea.

Each side of the road is lined by homes of varying sizes and shapes, with tended gardens, fruit trees, shrubs and pots of bougainvillea blossoms waving in the cooling, swirling breeze. The hill drops swiftly on both sides giving residents left and right views all of their own. Very different views.

Park your car and walk, and inhale the ambience. You will be warmly welcomed by the residents of Union Village, a proud and resourceful community of over 300 people who established their village over a 100 years ago; building it themselves, "brick by brick", putting down the infrastructure, too.

But generations of pride in their village and the location in which it once sat is now laced with resignation and despair, and it shows.

We visited the home of Elijah Gore, a committee member of Union Village Council. There, on his verandah, we met other members of the committee and his daughter Nadia who, ironically, was once a CEC compliance officer with the Environmental Management Authority (EMA).

Ironic, because from Elijah's verandah we were watching a violation of another CEC condition, directly below us - dust control. Earth swirled around in a wind that seemed to come from everywhere, clouds of it whipped up by backhoes and an army of noisy lorries scurrying backwards and forwards like giant beetles across the arid landscape of Site A. The dust is getting into residents' water tanks, homes, affecting them and the plants and trees in their gardens, we were told. Residents in Sobo Extension by Site B are said to be experiencing similar discomforts.

Site A below Union Village is well advanced, a bare, flattened expanse that stretched out of sight towards the sea to our right. In front, vegetation had been cleared up to the foot of the drop below us, buffer zone and all, and what was once an area of meadows, cows and fruit trees is no more.

The southern boundary of this levelled area comprises gentle rolling hills separating Site A from Vance River, a community of about 4,000 people who live just the other side of the hills. Well, they were hills, until the end of last year.

In September 2004, NEC began adding ingredients to the menu for Union Estate. "Additional investors were identified subsequent to the application," say NEC. They applied for a new CEC (817) for 20 ha (50 acres) more land: "to increase space available at Site A to allow works to proceed without

compromising the current CEC for that site".

Residents told us NEC needed more fill. Later, I sent NGC/NEC 20 questions.

Translated by them, that application means: "That works should proceed with (sic) interruption to existing works."

They underestimated the quantity of ingredients the super-sized order for Union Estate would require. The EMA gave them their CEC on November 16, 2004.

The hills were shaved like a punk haircut: trees on one side, bald on the other, save for a few tufts. Chunks have been gouged from the gentle contours, leaving an oily black stain visible in the earth.

Once, there was an oil sand quarry there, which is quite unsuitable for fill. And now the hills are unsuitable for anything. Should NEC have known? The residents knew it was there. Strange geology in these parts - Pitch Lake is just up the road, the direction they are going for more land and industry.

More ingredients are required: "additional plants", say NEC, and have sent off another CEC (973) application to the EMA, dated February 2005, this time for 50 ha (120 acres) more land, but with a special topping - Union Village.

"Increasing available space for Site A . . ." is the reason given again in the application. Like the previous application, "100 per cent" of vegetation will be cleared. However, in reply to the EMA's question in both CEC applications: "Will the project have adverse effects on the aesthetics of the area. i.e. radical changes in landscape", the NEC's answer is "no".

I asked why. They said: "NEC would ensure that as far as possible the estates are developed with attention to aesthetics."

Few people have a view like Elijah Gore's. He and his community can see the future opening up beneath them, in slow, noisy, monotonous motion, seven dust-filled days a week, morning till night; a black hole from which nothing can escape, not even the hill upon which they sit.

The village their ancestors began building with their bare hands over 100 years ago, and the history of their entire lives are to be super-sized for fill and chemical processing industries. How do you put a value on everything you have ever known? How do you value clean air, your natural environment, and the crime-free communal upbringing that is Union Village today?

The answer is simple: in Trinidad and Tobago today, you don't. You value the bricks and mortar and don't disclose details of any valuation. Instead, you tell Union residents to wait for the "final package".

NEC told me, "a community will be formed".

Elijah Gore, left, and fellow committee members o f Union Village Council take some shade beneath a mango tree. The wooded valley behind and the hill on which their village sits will disappear i f a new CEC application for more land by NEC is granted by the EMA.

The valuation is being done by Raymond & Pierre on behalf of the landowners, Palo Seco Agricultural Enterprises Ltd who, say NEC, "are responsible for the relocation exercise".

The residents have been shown four possible areas for relocation, three of which they have turned down. One was near the Pitch Lake and another near the LNG refinery. Boodoosingh Village near Rousillac is a possibility.

Union villagers want to move somewhere the infrastructure is laid down, and see that first. Somewhere nice. And they want to choose the location themselves, moving as a community, as one, not scattered like dust on the wind.

Even if they could stay, they are uneasy about doing so. You can't blame them for wanting to reluctantly depart. It is an option the much larger communities of Vance River and Vessigny may want to ponder, too.

Into the dustbowl of Site A separating Union Village from Vance River residents, will be dropped industries the European Union (EU) will no longer allow to be built in residential areas.

Ansa McAl's US$457 million "world-scale" chemical fertiliser processing facility will be the new neighbour over the fence. Final Terms of Reference for a CEC have just been issued by the EMA for a: "Five Plant Complex consisting of one Ammonia Plant, one Urea Plant, one Nitric Acid Plant and two Urea Ammonia Nitrate (UAE) Plants". Ansa McAl have already agreed on a deal for a "long-term supply" of gas from NGC. And into the dustbowl which will exist between Union Village and Vessigny, if a

CEC is granted, will drop two other chemical processing plants, US-based Coffeyville Resources and the La Brea Nitrogen Company. The Kansas company will produce 1.5 million tones of ammonia, and two million tonnes of UAE annually. (NEC say no industries are decided for Site B.) The EU's Seveso II Directive, controlling hazardous industrial development, was recently amended to take into account the devastating explosion at another nitrogen-based fertiliser plant in France in 2001.

The AZF complex in Toulouse exploded one night that September with the force of a 3.2 magnitude earthquake. It killed 30 people and injured 2,000 others.

Thousands of homes were damaged and millions of dollars of damage caused.

As a result, the Seveso II Directive's amendment calls on member countries to implement strict "Land-use Planning Policies", that "shall ensure that appropriate distances (their italics) between hazardous establishments and residential areas are maintained".

They instruct: "The most important extensions of the scope of that Directive are to cover risks arising from...pyrotechnic and explosive substances and from the storage of ammonium nitrate and ammonium nitrate-based fertilisers".

How close by are Ansa McAl, and their two US partners' mega- complex? Its shadow could fall across areas of Vance River, in particular over Vance River RC School's red roof, whose anxious vice-principal was with me on Elijah's verandah, pointing it out.

Remember the new Vessigny School you passed earlier before you entered the rubber forest? Stand on Union Village's hill and look north to their past: their other valley, the pretty one of fruit trees, wooded glades and walls of towering rubber forest.

Now turn 180 degrees and look into the future. Not only will the village and hill on which you stand be flattened for hazardous industry, but also their wooded valley, and the next hill crowned with rubber forest too; all the way to the boundaries of the new Vessigny School, whose future now lies in the balance.

Cabinet and NEC/NGC are preparing a giant and compulsory feast of heavy industry with all its consequences for thousands of citizens living in Trinidad's fragile south west peninsula, right down to its tip at Icacos, gathering ingredients as they go. Ask any caterer, an unplanned menu of such magnitude will lead to disaster.

Next Sunday, MARK MEREDITH continues south to aluminium smelting country in Cedros,making a nostalgic return to Icacos.

Fantasy Island Super Size Us-Part 6: Cedros - diet of doom, or delight?

MARK MEREDITH Sunday, May 1st 2005

Columbus Bay, one o f Cedros’s secret jewels, threatened by the march of massive industrial estates down the length o f the fragile peninsula.

An idyllic tropical peninsula of outstanding natural beauty, attracting long-term tourism-based investment, or one attracting short-term heavy industry based on a wasting resource? Cedros people would like to choose.

MARK MEREDITH continues south.

"We wove our way through coconut plantations fringed by sweeping yellow sand and blue sea. Cows and buffalo grazed among fallen palm fronds and coconut husks while cattle egrets pecked around their feet. The sun was low, the light and warm breeze of late afternoon soft and soothing. I was entranced."

"Parrots from Icacos", written in 1993, detailed a visitor's first day in Trinidad in

1986, when the island captured his heart. Mine. An invitation to join two new friends on a journey from Port of Spain to purchase parrots from a man in Icacos had been too good to turn down.

Funny how things turn out.

Two nostalgic Sundays ago I headed south from Union Village in La Brea with two more recent friends, returning for the first time to a part of Trinidad earmarked for something I never, in my wildest imaginings, would have believed possible.

As a tourist, back then, the potential of under-developed Cedros for the pleasure of people like me was as plain as our conspicuous absence. I knew there were hundreds of thousands only too eager to tear themselves away from northern urban living - to be somewhere interesting.

It didn't matter if it was only a week. What mattered was - the experience. I know. I sold them holidays. Today, the affluent young of the developed world and their retired parents, with more disposable income than ever, are looking to experience a world that is fast disappearing.

They appreciate nature, the more exotic the better; an unspoilt environment that they themselves are losing; and a sense of place: such as standing at the tip of the Caribbean archipelago at dusk, gazing out towards the mangrove fingers of the mother continent.

Twenty years on, I wondered what impact a visit to Icacos would have. I found it was regret. Regret that I haven't spent the last nine years driving down the peninsula enjoying its rare beauty, persuading others to do the same.

Cedros has all the raw ingredients for a sensational and sustainable diet for all its residents, paid for by foreigners and Trinis alike. Some Cedros people know this and, unlike the Government, began planning their menu some time ago.

Ecotourism, employing ingredients found nowhere else in the Caribbean, is the special recipe the Cedros Harmony Community (CEDHARM) has been preparing. The NGO has received backing from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the form of funding for their menu of restoration and conservation of wetlands in Cedros, through the Global Environment Facility.

The south-west peninsular is home to a number of beautiful and fascinating wetlands, in particular the Fullarton Swamp, the 11 sq km Los Blanquizales, and the 6 sq km Great Icacos Lagoon, now called the San Jose System. There is also the 6.7 sq km Hicacos System, and the 4 sq km Fibre Factory System with active mud volcanoes.

Fullarton Swamp, one o f se veral beauti ful and fascinating wetlands in Cedros, threatened by the march of massive industrial estates down the length of the fragile peninsula.

There's much more to this countryside than swaying coconut plantations and golden bays. The vegetation is rich and varied, with red, white, black and button mangroves, reed marshes, swamp forest and littoral woodland, seasonal evergreen forest and herbaceous swamps. The Cedros Bee is a wondrous orchid found only here.

Living amidst this undiscovered paradise may be found: scarlet ibis, herons, egrets, wattled jacanas, yellow-chinned spinetails, tyrants, yellow-hooded blackbirds, Carib grackles, savanna hawks, southern lapwings, gallinules, ducks, and many more. There are also caimans, iguanas, rainbow and water boas, sea turtles, and any number of exotic butterflies and insects. Try adding that lot to your list in Barbados or Bournemouth.

To get a flavour, head towards Fullarton, the village before Icacos. The road will take you right through the middle of Fullarton Swamp. You don't even have to get out of your car. Stop and gape at the amazing avian spectacle though the windows, using your vehicle as a hide.

Dr Raphael Sebastien, a CEDHRAM project member, told me the area's location, just an hour's boat ride from the Orinoco Delta, also presented tremendous ecotourism potential: excursions there via Soldado Rock for adventurous tourists and nature enthusiasts.

Cedros fishermen are seeing declining catches, exacerbated by illegal shrimp trawling which is damaging seabed breeding areas. The coconut industry is in the doldrums - yet from it can come a variety of natural, organic products in great demand in the trendy, health-conscious west.

It is hardly a surprise that some down here turn to more profitable products

instead, evidenced by the sprinkling of rather grand residences among the modest edifices of the peninsula.

Tourism, handled with imagination and sensitivity, provides a sustainable, legal alternative that will enhance employment opportunities and the environment which supports it.

The enjoyment of such would not just be the preserve of international thrill seekers, but Trinidadians, citizens of San Fernando and environs, not to mention the growing army of well-heeled, sun-loving expats working in "booming" energy-related industries.

Why should infrastructure like ports, improved roads and water supply be put down only for Alcoa and other heavy industrial investors? Why not put it down for modest hotels, lodges and guesthomes, restaurants and beach bars with views to die for; or for a golf course winding through an unproductive coconut estate? Or to service fishing and agro-industries to service those accommodations? Or to support swamp tours, mountain bike trails, horseback riding, jogging trails, hiking, birdwatching, photography and turtle viewing?

To sell Cedros to the world, in the most holistic sense?

Because this is all a fantasy on our part, according to the Manning Government.

Reality lies further north at Union Industrial Estate. That is no fantasy, but the first giant slab of industrial estates running like crazy paving through the idyllic scenery of Cedros, all the way to that place of parrots.

The eventual size and impacts, including relocation, of these slabs remain unknown quantities. In 2004, the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) gave a Certificate of Environmental Clearance (CEC) for Union Estate to the Government's National Energy Corporation (NEC), based on specific criteria such as size and impact.

The destruction of Union Village for an extra 150 acres of land was not on that original menu. Not part of the deal. Nevertheless, NEC want the order supersized and have applied for a new CEC to do so.

Yet, the even larger Site B of Union Estate, say NEC, has no tenants.

In which case, where are all those proposed Union Estate industries listed in Cabinet Minute 3072 going to fit - "The Titanium Oxide Plant, The Syngas Refinery, The 750 MW Power Plant, The Iron/Steel Complex".

Are they to fit in NEC's proposed 2,000-acre "Cap de Ville to Chatham" industrial estate? It will be twice the size of Union Estate and will also house Alcoa's smelter.

Alcoa's application for a CEC for an aluminium smelter at Union Estate has been withdrawn at the request of the EMA, verbally, Alcoa told me. As of Thursday, they were yet to deliver it in writing. Alcoa also have a CEC application for a smelter in Chatham and Cap de Ville, but have yet to finalise the specific site.

Energy Minister Eric Williams' talk of a "second aluminium smelter" is causing concern in Cedros where rumours are rife among residents about the sale of large coconut estates. If not Site B Union Estate, and not Chatham, it must be on the lands Manning said the government is "scouting around" for in their neighbourhood, they figure.

NEC have now made an application for a port at Cap de Ville: "To construct pier and dock facilities and reclaim sufficient land for the land-based storage requirement for the proposed smelter project at Cap de Ville." What "sufficient" means is not stated.

We visited Alcoa/NEC's port site on our way south. It is reached through rolling terrain of secondary forest, and some agricultural land with fruit-bearing trees.

The area itself, just south of Irois Bay, comprises secondary forest sitting on a crumbling, eroding coastline. Clifton Beach, up the road, has already disappeared as a result of LNG activity. The smelter port will require a cleared area of "1,240,000 sq metres" (one-and-a-quarter million square metres), and need 240,000 cubic metres of "selected dredgefill".

However, like the proposed disappearance of Union Village and its hill, NEC say the port project will not "have adverse effects on aesthetics of the area, i.e. radical changes in the landscape".

Will there be "radical changes" in the landscape of hills and secondary forest in Chatham when Alcoa's "smelter in a park" goes up? It is to fit into a three sq mile industrial estate where "100 per cent of vegetation" is to be cleared. "Yes," say NEC. Alcoa have said they are trying to persuade the Government/NEC of the value of a specific land use plan for the immediate area.

Well, thanks guys, but we could use one for the whole country. We have three examples that I've seen. The only one that is law is the 1984 National Physical Development Plan that zones Chatham and Cedros as agricultural areas. The 1995 Tourism Master Plan designates it for scenic touring, agriculture and forestry.

While the extensive $14 million National Conceptual Development Plan produced in 1999 by the British Halcrow Group, appointed for the task by the UNC government, says: "the attractive areas of the peninsula offer local and

international tourism opportunities".

Where do Halcrow envisage heavy industrial expansion? Not here, but Wallerfield, Carlsen Field, Galeota, Point Fortin and Pt Lisas/Couva.

They advise against granting planning permission for development on prime agricultural land, and say that land allocated should "not lead to deforestation or soil erosion and not adversely effect the environment".

Specifically, they warn: "Once developed, land cannot revert to agriculture, forestry or open space."

Planning and advice are not the only things the Government are ignoring. While Manning was able to get his Cabinet and the national media to the Breakfast Shed to eat the stewed chicken of 15 vendors who are to be moved a few hundred metres, he has said he "cannot interfere" in the issue of thousands of Chatham residents petitioning him against relocation and the smelter that his NEC is facilitating.

This is not going down well in Cedros where people feel insulted by his behaviour.

"Madness" was a word I heard uttered more than once at a meeting of Chatham and Cedros residents in Bonasse that we had been invited to attend.

"We going to play football and cricket - in a smelter plant park?" quipped one speaker.

Anti-smelter sentiment, and the dangers of industrialising and polluting their beloved peninsula heated the afternoon like the baking sun above the school recreation ground. A priest, the audience were told by one speaker, had preached against such a diet of doom in his morning sermon: "We are on the verge of being destroyed!"

However, they don't intend to let that happen and are to send an "army" of maxitaxis filled with residents to Port of Spain to tell Manning that, as far as they are concerned, if anyone is living in fantasyland, it's his Government. hatever happened to Trinidad & Tobago "Political leaders and environmental planners must decide whether they will simply preside over the ultimate demise of the nation's natural environment, or take bold steps to avert impending disaster."

Vista Research Corporation of Florida, USA - ENVIRONMENTAL SITUATION ASSESSMENT: TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO, September 17, 1995, by J. George Caldwell, Ph.D.

Sometime later, Mr Caldwell wrote this: "A few years ago, I was invited to an interview for a contract position to do some environmental work (programme planning, monitoring, and evaluation; policy analysis) in Trinidad and Tobago, so I took a couple of days to examine the environmental situation there.

"It was pretty disheartening to see how much that country has already 'overshot' its ability to feed itself from its own rich agricultural resources. During the interview, I showed my analysis to the government official. It was rather evident that he did not like what he saw, and that he did not appreciate my publicising the fact that his country had already passed the point at which it could support itself from its own food sources (as many other countries have also done).

"I didn't get the job, but the paper I presented to the official is still interesting reading. The country's population now exceeds its carrying capacity, and when fossil fuels run out, many Trinidadians will die of hunger."

Read the 1995 report at http://www.foundation.bw/Trin3.pdf.

Now, ten years on, consider the subsequent boom in the energy sector, increased economic growth and energy consumption; our accelerating deforestation and loss of agricultural land; rising population (260 people per sq km); and Government's new super-sized menu.

Scary, huh?

Display of dismay Super Size Us - Part 7 Mark Meredith Sunday, July 3rd 2005

Flashback: Residents o f the Cedros south western peninsula protest on the Brian Lara Promenade, Port o f Spain, against the smelter plant to be built in their area.

IT IS five months since Professor Julian Kenny and I were shooting the breeze on Yvonne Ashby's Chatham verandah. On that sunny day, the 74-year-old chairperson of a newly-formed, small group of Chatham and Cap de Ville residents opposed to the Alcoa aluminium smelter and the National Energy Company's (NEC) 2,000-acre industrial estate proposed for their communities, asked us: "You think we'll give this up, just so?"

Looking out over the idyllic landscape, we knew they would not. But what none of us knew was that the ominous winds of change blowing from the north would so soon be challenged by a beneficial breeze from the south-west.

On June 22, this invigorating breeze blew into Port of Spain's Woodford Square accompanied by sheets of life-enhancing rain. Yvonne Ashby's original group has grown beyond recognition. Today, they form part of Cedros Peninsula United, a coalition of 12 villages in Cedros opposed to the Government's forcefed industrial diet.

Incessant showers did not dampen the spirit of the red-clad hundreds gathered from Cap de Ville, Chatham, Union Village, Point Coco, Granville, Coromandel, Lime Field, Bamboo, Bois Bourg, Bonasse, Fullerton, Los Gallos or Icacos.

Cedros's united display of dismay at Government-imposed plans for their

future is not the only significant development since February.

Local issues have broadened to national ones, with growing support from diverse sectors of civil society that now include Rosemond Montano, wife of Government minister Danny Montano, and Dr Asad Mohammed, chair of the National Physical Planning Commission from 1997 to 2005.

"I am against the process of rushed and unplanned industrial development that is taking place, and support the rights of citizens and communities to have a say in the development that takes place nationally and around them," Mohammed told me.

Mrs Montano has declined comment on her presence in the protest.

But Wendy Lee Yuen, the normally placid president of the Agricultural Society, now incensed by plans for paving Caroni and 'smelting' Cedros, was more forthright: "We are not going to allow 15 idiots, the Cabinet, to dictate to 1.3 million people," she promised angrily.

"No!" roared representatives of the peninsula and their new allies, the Federation of Independent Trade Unions and NGOs (FITUN), the UWI Biological Society, National Food Crop Farmers Association, Association of Professional Beekeepers, T&T Youth Council, Junior Environmentalists of T&T, Fishermen and Friends of the Sea, T&T Field Naturalists Club and the Fondes Amandes Reforestation Project.

The Carenage Protection Committee were there too, represented by Augustine Noel, the only community in Trinidad to have lived next to Alcoa. They have been in dispute, on and off, with the company's Tembladora alumina transfer station since the 1980s.

Some months ago I visited residents of Seaview Road, which is dwarfed by the complex opposite. They told me they had suffered Alcoa's dust for years; that it settled on their cars, getting into their homes, making them ill.

Noel showed me a 1985 medical report on his son Brent, which showed he had regularly been in and out of hospital with bronchitis, upper respiratory infections, and broncho pneumonia. He also suffered conjunctivitis and gastroenteritis.

A 1989 air-monitoring report by Cariri, commissioned by the Carenage group, showed Alcoa exceeded US emissions standards for residential areas at three monitoring sites in Carenage on each of the five days of monitoring.

Imposition of aluminium smelters and giant industrial estates of heavy, gasbased, "world scale" chemical processing plants in the rural south-west are the primary winds funneling this current vortex of discontent. And, now,

Government has stepped in to send the thermometer soaring.

Its proposed unravelling of the Judicial Review Act 2000 - a public interest law will, say critics, prevent people of Cedros, or any other private party or organisation, from challenging the decisions of the executive - Cabinet. FITUN says this undermines society's role to act as a watchdog. Julian Kenny described the move as "sinister".

FITUN president David Abdulah, who sits on the EMA board, has said there are also plans to alter the Environmental Management (EM) Act by removing the independent, professional process of approvals, giving the Minister rather than the EMA power to grant certificates of environmental clearance (CECs) This is "a deliberate move" to facilitate projects like the two smelters, says FITUN. FITUN also "understands" that proposed amendments to the EM Act will result in "removal" of the public consultation process from the requirements of an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). No denials have come from Government to date.

Kenny noted that Cabinet's "contempt of Parliament" by changing land use plans laid down in law by the 1984 National Physical Development Plan (NPDP) without parliamentary approval, and granting approvals and CECs in such circumstances was providing further fuel for critics.

A major source of anger is what Independent Senator Professor Ken Ramchand called the "deliberate neglect" of laws and drafted legislation: Air Pollution Rules, Water Pollution Rules, Solid and Hazardous Waste Rules, the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2003, the Green Fund, the Beverage Container Disposal Bill, and the big daddy of all recent planning legislation, the lapsed Planning and Development of Land Bill (PDLB).

Asad Mohammed, responsible for ensuring the PDLB was passed in Parliament in the UNC term, told the Sunday Express that the PDLB "should be reintroduced with priority". He praised the "robust" public dialogue which had led to important amendments being made to the bill by the Senate. These limited the power of the Minister to overrule decisions of the EMA and Town and Country Planning Division.

He was scornful of Government's performance in the field of planning: "What planning?" he asked. "If it is taking place it is a well-hidden secret. To my knowledge the process of planning reform, institutional strengthening and devolution that was well on track has stalled if not stopped in the last three years."

His National Physical Planning Commission was unceremoniously disbanded by the Government in April, with no reason given.

Beyond Government's legislative plans and inaction, other winds driving this

storm are being felt and easily understood by ordinary people: the alienation of agricultural land for built development and a 27 per cent rise in food prices over the last year.

Chairman of the Coconut Growers Association, Philippe Agostini, warned the smelter plant was "too overwhelming" for Cedros and would destroy "whatever was left" of agriculture there.

Senator Ramchand, born and raised in Cedros, laments that the advent of the industrial plans will result in the break-up of the communities, stressing the importance of "social capital" to the country and the negative effects a breakdown in community life would have: "crime, kidnapping and banditry". It was time "to recover the governance of the country", he said.

It is a central message this strengthening breeze is bringing: democracy and civic participation protecting the rule of law and our own self-determination.

What Julian Kenny called "people power".

Not since citizens of Toco descended on Port of Spain in 2000 to successfully protest against the industrial coup planned for their community by a private consortium backed by the UNC government, has the capital city seen such a united display against Government plans. That wet Wednesday, several hundred noisy citizens were intent on disturbing the peace of Woodford Square and, more specifically, those sitting in the Red House opposite.They had been told their request to march from Brian Lara Promenade around the streets had been denied, but were given no reason. They wanted to know why.

So they borrowed a leaf out of Government's book and disregarded the law, marching in a flowing red column of hoisted placards to Woodford Square from the promenade. The placards said it all: "Manning-Did you leave your heart in Cuba?; Save rural culture; Industrialisation is a dead end; No chemical plants for Chatham/Cap de Villeonly living green plants; Keep polluters out of the peninsula; Manning and Alcoa-weapons of mass destruction."

What of Alcoa and the Government in the last five months?

The Government has been virtually silent - to the puzzlement of Alcoa. Publicly, any information coming from Government has had to be squeezed out like an aluminium ingot. The only statement by Prime Minister Patrick Manning has been that he "cannot interfere" in the concerns of thousands of his subjects in Cedros.

This writer has been in fairly regular touch with the giant multinational. In April, I spent a day watching Brian Lara score 150 against South Africa in the company of Alcoa's Australian spokesperson and cricket fan, Wade Hughes. Brian's

brilliance was about the only thing we saw eye to eye on.

In May, I sent Alcoa "Bottom of the heap", the Sunday Express article on the 2005 Yale/Columbia Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) which showed Trinidad and Tobago has the worst percentage of negative land impacts of 146 countries. I put it to Alcoa that their plans for Chatham were unsustainable and something the country could not afford.

Hughes told me: "This is a challenge that should be put to citizens and policy makers in your country. We can only respond to sites that we are offered."

That Wednesday citizens took up the challenge.

On Friday, Hughes told me Alcoa has been "dismayed" at the "outright lies" being peddled in the T&T media regarding the health effects of aluminium smelters - this newspaper excepted.

The week of the protest, I put it to Alcoa that their President of Primary Metals Development, Randy Overbey, had stated that they would take "full note" of the wishes of Chatham/Cap de Ville communities, and that the protest clearly demonstrated Alcoa were not wanted. I asked the company if they would therefore withdraw their plans for Cedros.

A lengthy response from Overbey sidestepped the direct answer to the direct question. Instead, he put his faith in our threatened EIA process and wide participation by stakeholders. He said Alcoa's "manufacturing facilities are the safest of their kind in the world", cataloguing in detail Alcoa's record in countries which bear no resemblance to our own.

Hughes said he would be inviting me and a "few unnamed" journalists to the vast expanses of Canada and Brazil to view Alcoa's operations there.

Sign me up, mate.

- MARK MEREDITH is a freelance journalist

Wish you were here Super Size Us-Part 8: The man with the golden name MARK MEREDITH Sunday, July 10th 2005

"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." A Lakota Sioux proverb delivered by Robert F Kennedy Jr at CHIC 2005. Standing proudly with him are journalists Indiana Monteverde, le ft, o f Solocaribe.com, and Janet Silver

The most important regional tourism industry meet of the year, the Caribbean Hotel Industry Conference (CHIC), was held in Miami at the end of June. MARK MEREDITH repeats his invitation to a certain somebody to visit this country.

I GRASPED his hand and he flashed that Kennedy smile at me; the famous one that charmed a previous generation. But this grin wore a hint of surprise: "Who is this guy?" it seemed to be saying.

I had bided my time, waiting for an opening, hanging around the periphery of senior Caribbean tourism and hotel industry figures crowding in to have their photos taken with the man with the golden name.

Robert F Kennedy Jr had just delivered a spellbinding "keynote address" on the environment and its importance to the Caribbean to a standing ovation. He's a log off the old block, is Bobby Jr. Get under his spell and you'll understand why people elected his uncle, Jack, the President, and probably would have elected his father, Bobby, too.

The cameras flashed, and the dazzling Kennedy smile bounced back at us from the tanned and handsome face; a look of confidence that knows the power of one's own aura. Charisma enveloped the foyer of Miami's Hyatt Regency Hotel like a vice.

I plunged into the melee from the rear. "Mr Kennedy," I said, rather loudly into the back of his right ear. He spun around, a distinct expression of hesitation etched upon his bright-eyed countenance. I thrust my hand forward.

"I just wanted to tell you how much your speech meant to me," I blurted out, as his hand closed firmly around mine. He looked at me inquisitively through a beaming smile, so I volunteered: "I'm an environmental journalist from Trinidad and Tobago. I really wish you would come and give your speech to our government. They need to hear it from you. In person."

The smile broadened and he said: "Trinidad and Tobago, I've been there. It's a beautiful country."

He was being pulled back into the sea of dark suits.

"It's in trouble, Mr Kennedy," I replied, raising my voice in desperation as he began to disappear.

"I know," he said tantalisingly, turning his head to look me in the eye one last time before being swallowed up by the crowd.

This Kennedy made his name fighting for the environment with a "take-noprisoners approach", successfully winning 300 lawsuits against Hudson River polluters; turning a fouled and putrid waterway into the "most productive river in North America".

You can see why Kennedy wins; he knows how to make a passionate, common sense argument, even when suffering from laryngitis. He told, and croaked to, an enraptured CHIC audience of how the organisation for whom he is chief prosecuting attorney, Riverkeepers, beat the polluters "by channeling anger into legal warfare". He used laws, like the US Clean Water Act, to make polluters pay and clean up their act-what the EMA wants to do with our own missing Water Pollution Rules.

Time magazine named him one of their "Heroes for the Planet" for leading Riverkeepers' legal crusade for the Hudson. Riverkeepers, a group formed to fight the Hudson's chronic pollution, has since spawned 125 Waterkeepers organisations to defend rivers and shorelines around the globe. Kennedy is their president, as well as the successful senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), and he is a clinical professor and supervising attorney at Pace University School of Law's Environmental Litigation Clinic. Not someone you really want to upset.

Which is why I asked him to come to Trinidad and Tobago. You know, show him around a bit; somewhere like Alcoa's Cedros peninsula in Trinidad, or the Tobago House of Assembly's L'Anse Fourmi/Charlotteville Link Road. That should wind him up a bit. Then put him in front of our parliamentary representatives and industry CEOs and let him go...

"Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy" was Kennedy's message at CHIC, aimed squarely at the entire Caribbean. Lapping up this emotionally charged wisdom were a record number of 1,100 delegates, including Caribbean prime ministers, premiers, and tourism and development ministers and officials, including our two representatives.

Kennedy warned them: "political and economic sustainability of the Caribbean islands will be destroyed by the degradation of the environmental resource which brings your visitors... environmental injury turns into economic collapse", reminding them, "investment in the environment is an investment in health".

And, he warned about a certain mirage, a message that could have been delivered entirely for T&T's benefit: "Pollution-based prosperity-which our children will pay for."

Kennedy's war for the environment brings with it admiration of St Francis of Assisi, his "hero", and incontestable truths.

"What we are fighting for is not just the fishes and the birds. We protect nature not for nature's sake but for our own sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to meet the obligations of our civilisation and our culture-which are to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us-we've got to start by protecting that infrastructure; the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the landscapes that enrich us.

"We're protecting nature because it enriches us; yes, it enriches our economy and we ignore that at our peril. But it is also enriching us aesthetically, recreationally, culturally, historically and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money. And if we don't feed them, we're not going to grow up... we're not going to become the kind of beings that our creator intended us to become."

But even Robert F Kennedy Jr, with all his eloquence, training and charisma, might struggle to make his voice heard in Trinidad and Tobago, even face to face. But I wish he'd try.

Kennedy's victories over the Hudson River polluters showed what can be done when you have a regulatory authority with power, the US EPA, and laws which are enforced. You can turn a toxic toilet into a clear river filled with spawning fish.

Kennedy, and his Waterkeepers, couldn't use our laws to prosecute polluters to clean up our Caroni or any other river, or our hydrocarbon-laced Gulf of Paria because... we don't have any laws. All we have are standards which are not enforced, but flouted.

The Gulf of Paria is a good example. It receives everything urban Trinidadians throw at it, and everything industrial plants pour away. The Gulf has become a lagoon of pollution "hotspots", according to EMA chairman John Agard in an April UWI magazine report. The pollution is worst in the south-west, shows his graphic, just to the north of Chatham/Cap de Ville-where Alcoa wishes to begin industrialisation south, and north.

This pollution is seriously affecting the fishing industry, say locals-and that is perfect Waterkeepers territory. Dr Raphael Sebastien, recent protest organiser against Government plans to industrialise the eco-tourism promise of Cedros, said that even before Alcoa's 325,000-tonne smelter and NEC/Sural's "Chinese"-made 200,000-tonne smelter and new industries have gone up, the Gulf of Paria is already experiencing serious contamination: thick, oily mud weighing down fishing nets, with species disappearing, destroying livelihoods.

He said the honey shrimp, normally so abundant even in the shallowest of shallows in Cedros, failed to show at all this year. Not one shrimp.

It would take someone like you, Mr Kennedy, to reverse the social and environmental impacts of the collective interests of those profiting in T&T's industrial/energy/construction/quarrying sectors today. So if you're listening, Mr Kennedy, Sir, here's what I'd like to have told you at CHIC-after all, I know of your successes fighting for the lands and rights of native American Indian communities.

There are 12 village communities in rural Cedros, and others to the north, protesting about being industrialised and swallowed up by multinational smelters and chemical processing plants without their consent. Losing their heritage, Mr Kennedy, which I know you abhor.

They are facing formidable odds: a spendthrift Government withholding environmental legislation and wishing to curtail the right of appeal; State companies given carte blanche to seek out and exploit land; an Environmental Management Authority (EMA) which hardly says no; and powerful interests of large local conglomerates and multinationals, including your countrymen from Alcoa.

A report carried in another newspaper this week, headlined "Alcoa is a scapegoat-Chatham is a good site (for Alcoa's smelter) say National Energy Company (NEC) officials", quotes NEC's president, Prakash Saith, as saying, "I am almost certain that we can get the EMA's approval for those areas"-three new industrial sites, including Chatham/Cap de Ville in Cedros.

Yesterday the paper carried a three-page full colour advertisement by Alcoa with a letter to the people of T&T from their president of Primary Metals Development, Randy Overbey, telling us to have faith in our Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process. But this process is threatened, Mr Kennedy, says someone who sits on our EMA board, and he should know.

On Friday, Sir, Prime Minister Patrick Manning said that Alcoa's "US$3 billion" aluminium smelter in Cedros would go ahead. Peoples' attitudes were being based on emotion, he said. He told these thousands there was "no need to worry".

So, Mr Kennedy, I hope you and your team at Waterkeepers can come and visit T&T rather soon. I know you love a challenge. You'll get a great welcome, especially in beautiful Cedros. And, after you've saved our peninsula, perhaps you could tackle our Gulf? Not for nature's sake, you understand...

-Mark Meredith is a freelance journalist

A CHATHAM COUP Mark Meredith Sunday Express, January 1st 2006 The coup is underway. There may be no official curfew in force but, for citizens in Cedros and La Brea, freedom of choice is just one of many options now being curtailed beneath Government's industrial jackboot.

Chatham would appear to be a religious community. But they have little faith that Government is doing what is best for them.

Chatham Youth Training Centre sits above the Southern Main Road on a breezy hill, affording sweeping views over rolling meadows and green forest canopies towards the Gulf of Paria. A more peaceful and pleasant location to hold a public consultation you could not imagine.

But a few Fridays ago, as the sun sank beneath the trees filling the hall with heavenly light, neither pleasantaries nor peace could be found at the National Energy Corporation's (NEC) presentation of its industrial estate to house Alcoa's aluminium smelter. Amplified, angry voices sailed into the sunset, tumbling over hill and dale, filling the inky night that followed with indignation and hurt.

For, even as citizens gathered to express their concerns and to hear the Terms of Reference (TOR) for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) presented

by Dr Judy Rock of the Institute of Marine Affairs (IMA) on the industrial estate earmarked to fill the very countryside described above, they, like the IMA, received a nasty shock.

A map placed by the NEC on the wall showed that land earmarked for the industrial estate had suddenly doubled. Worse, the new "proposed Chatham

Industrial Estate Expansion,' which borders Alcoa's site, included central Chatham itself. Residents of Chatham and surrounds gathered in morbid fascination around the map which outlined their future: details of homes, pastures and tropical forest due to be swept away shaded in red on the blueprint.

Now, it's one thing looking dispassionately at an area on a map due to disappear, the stark and clinical representation of "development" outlined by those it won't affect, but quite another if you call the area home. For residents, this unexpected turn of events is the newest chapter in their unfolding nightmare, and they are angry. Just as you would be if your ancestral land or lovingly-maintained house, for which you had worked so hard and paid your taxes, was taken away; you having no say in the matter.

Chatham would appear to be a religious community. But they have little faith that Government is doing what is best for them.

I explored some of the Chatham area now added to the NEC's industrialisation "master plan"prior to the meeting, guided by the map in CEC application no 1264.

This shows homes both sides of Chatham Road earmarked for the estate NEC's map on the wall has those to the east affected, but at the second consultation the map had been removed.

One property affected is 74-year old Yvonne Ashby's home, where Julian Kenny and I once shot the breeze on her porch, revelling in the clean air, silence and serenity of the retired district nurse's rural idyll. There are many homes in Chatham's intended industrial estate like Mrs Ashby's; neat, comfortable homes with generous gardens dripping extravagant foliage, where children play carefree cricket in the road, and the air is fragrant, filled with birdsong and the squawks of passing parrots.

I met two teenage boys at the crumbling shoreline of Irois Bay that forms the northern boundary of the proposed estate. They had been swimming. Sometimes they fish here, they told me. I learned it was a nice beach, once, completely different to the eroded sandy cliff it has become, where trees toppled into the ocean. The erosion reason is the LNG plant we could see silhouetted up the coast on the horizon, that destroyed Clifton Beach whose EIA, like Union Estate's, was also carried out by the IMA. It seemed strange, standing there, on a four foot high cliff shrinking beneath my feet, knowing Alcoa planned a port next door requiring a cleared area of 1,240,000 sq metres; especially having just read that the Greenland icecap was "irreversibly" melting, and that when it finally did sea levels would rise 20ft,

devastating the coastal cities of the world.

The irony of exploring an area whose "heavy gas-based industries" would fell the forests needed to soak up the carbon dioxide produced by this output that was melting the glaciers which would flood these plants, hit me with such force I nearly drove off the narrow pitch road I had suddenly taken, leading me into the depths of the doomed forest, as though I had been winged by an aluminium bullet.

The Irois forest was dark and thick, silent and mysterious, the tips of the trees golden in the waning afternoon sunshine, birds flocking in the branches as the shadows lengthened. I found a modest home in a clearing, boys and their father on a veranda with a caged songbird. Of course, they had no idea their forest existence was earmarked for industry. As I left, I urged them to go to the meeting, their expressions of bewilderment and disbelief reflected in my rearview mirror as I drove away.

At the meeting, Dr Rock and the IMA found their presentation severely compromised. They were there to present the TOR of an industrial estate of 810 ha, and were ignorant of the fact that, meanwhile, their own client, the NEC, had suddenly reduced its size to 603 ha, simultaneously creating an adjeacent new site of 530 ha in Chatham, divided into lots of 368.42 ha and 193.6 ha.

Confused? So were the IMA. This week, I put it to the Environmental Management Authority (EMA) that, "the current EIA process for Alcoa's industrial estate in Cap de Ville is now fatally flawed, and that a new TOR will have to be prepared to take into account CEC 1264, the new industrial estate at Chatham whose boundaries touch Alcoa's smelter estate? In fact, should not a new TOR be prepared for what is clearly now one huge estate?"

"The EMA is giving this serious consideration and it is being evaluated," they replied. But in Trinidad, one vital element of an EIA does not seem to be properly evaluated, nor its findings given serious consideration: the public consultation process itself, a procedural requirement that seems grudgingly carried out within the minimum the law demands.

Public consultations are supposed to be advertised by those carrying out the EIA. In the case of Alcoa's industrial estate, one advertisement was placed by the IMA in Newsday the Friday before, and leaflets and a loudhailer used in Cedros.

But it obviously didn't work because, with just a few days to go before the consultation, hardly anyone knew about it, apart from Newsday readers, maybe.

Even Cedros Peninsula United, the umbrella group opposed to Alcoa's smelter and the industrialisation of the south west, were in the dark. They were eventually alerted and word spread and people crowded into Chatham's Youth Training

Centre.

Surely the national issue of building a very large aluminum smelter in a very large park as part of an even larger estate in tiny Trinidad deserves more than two meetings way down south on a Friday night, in the rush hour, along bad roads in the dark?

My turn at the microphone was a demand for national consultations in Port of Spain, widely advertised, which everybody can attend, including the media. The same should apply for Chatham, I argued, and for Union Estate's "world scale" UAN plant, and the Chinese smelter for which Patrick Manning has publicly signed a deal, in defiance of all the people who so vociferously shouted down the smelter at Alutrint's consultations, and before the EIA has even been received by the EMA. Will the EMA's "special CEC unit", set up to deal with energy-related applications, in their consideration of Alutrint's EIA and CEC application, take citizens' opposition seriously? The PM certainly doesn't, and has put public pressure on the state agency with his high-profile signing with the Chinese, telling us that the EMA have a system of decision making that will guarantee no undue time is lost processing CECs. How little time or consideration will be given to take into account the overwhelming "no" given to the NEC by citizens opposed to Alcoa's "smelter in a park"? Given the cynical manner in which residents found out about the Chatham estate at a meeting called for a different project, not much, one would have to assume. However, NGC's Dr Reeza Mohammed has urged residents who do not want Alcoa's industrial estate in their midst to pursue Section 69 of the Environmental Management Act: "Any private party may institute a civil action in the (Environmental) Commission against any person for a claim of violation of any of the specified environmental requirements identified in Section 62 . . ."

So, for instance, if you do not believe public concerns have been addressed, or that Alutrint's or Alcoa's EIAs do not have an environmentally acceptable solution to the disposal of fluoride and cyanide-laced spent pot linings, try out the law designed to protect human and environmental health.

If, like Father Wilfred John, parish priest of Cedros, you wonder out loud, as he did to the IMA: "How can you do an EIA for an industrial estate when you don't know what's going on it?"-try Section 69.

At the consultation I attended it was not explained why an industrial estate in Chatham was suddenly being added to the NEC's menu. All we got was the map.

So what is the reason?

My theory, and the one I have put to Alcoa's Wade Hughes, who has not

responded, is that their 1,500-acre "smelter in a park" is so big and ambitious that it has forced the NEC to gobble up Chatham, in order to locate the other "heavy gas-based industries" -note the plural - originally projected to share the same industrial estate with Alcoa in Cap de Ville, in CEC application 0851.

Alcoa have repeatedly told me that I cannot look at their "smelter in a park in isolation".

Quie so