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November 23, 2007
The Bhopal Gas Chamber
S. Anand, Tehelka, November 23, 2007
Union Carbide is now Dow Chemicals. Rid of the tainted name, it’s being wooed by both the Tatas and the PMO, reports S. ANAND
We may overlook the element not listed on the chart… The missing element is the human element.
—from Dow’s ad campaign
ON DECEMBER 3, 1984, Tank 610 on the premises of the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC)’s factory in Bhopal, containing 41 tonnes of methyl isocyanate, leaked. According to the UCC’s own technical report, 24.5 metric tonnes of “unreacted MIC” escaped along with 11.79 tonnes of “reaction products”. None of the six safety systems at the plant was functional. The gas, in its trail, left 22,000 dead and 1,50,000 disabled.
Warren Anderson, then American chairman of UCC, was charged with culpable homicide in India. Since his brief arrest and bail in December 1984, he has ignored summons from the Bhopal district court. The trial is yet to begin. In July 2004, the US refused to extradite Anderson.
Meanwhile, in 2001, Dow purchased Union Carbide for $9.3 billion as a wholly owned subsidiary. Dow has refused legal or moral liability for the Bhopal disaster. In ovember 2006, Industrialist and Investment Commission chairman Ratan Tata wrote to the Planning Commission, asking the $46-billion chemical giant to be absolved of all liabilities. Why would Tata bat for Dow? Both Ratan Tata and Dow Chemicals president and CEO Andrew Liveris are on the India-US CEO forum (established in 2005 at the PM’s behest). The two met last October in New York. Protestors in Bhopal targeted Ratan Tata and sought to boycott all Tata products. Earlier, JRD Tata had condemned the arrest of Anderson.
Kamal Nath, Union Minister for Commerce and Industry, backed the idea of an “industryled remediation arrangement”. Such collusion at the highest level came to light when Bhopal activists obtained certain documents from the PMO under the RTI Act in June.
Congress party spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi is Dow’s counsel. Unselfconsciously, the PMO’s file on Dow contains Singhvi’s “legal opinion”. Cabinet Secretary BK Chaturvedi’s note of April 6 indicated where the PMO stood: “Given the scope for future investments in the sector, it stands to reason that instead of continuing to agitate these issues in court for a protracted period, due consideration be given to the prospect of settling these issues appropriately.”
In May, Reliance Industries Ltd got the green signal to buy suspect Union Carbide technology, routed via Dow, for their 9 lakh tonnes-per-annum polypropylene production facility in Jamnagar (Flirting with the Bhopal Villain, TEHELKA, June 11, 2005). Despite its claimed status as “absconder from justice” since 1992, the UCC has managed to maintain healthy sales of its products, processes and services in India.
Why should Indians, not just Bhopalis, be wary of Dow? During the Vietnam War, Dow became the sole supplier of napalm to the US military. Along with Monsanto, Dow also supplied a herbicide, known as Agent Orange, which was used as a biological weapon in Vietnam. A lawsuit filed in a US court by the Vietnam Association for Victims of Agent Orange was dismissed in 2005. Dow has been successfully sued for various other excesses by Americans. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, Dow has some responsibility for 96 of the US’s worst toxic waste dumps.
In June 2006, Dow launched a clever ad campaign to clean up their image, in which it claimed to have discovered Hu, the Human Element — an accretion to the periodic table. Invoking Indra Sinha Animal’s People, Dow could well argue that the Bhopal victims are all animals. There is no Hu element in Bhopal, after all.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 46, Dated Dec 01, 2007
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November 12, 2007
Dow Chemical: A tragedy of errors
Derek Baron, Central Chronicle, November 12, 2007
One major controversy in the history of Dow misadventures is the ambiguity and sketchiness surrounding its production of Agent Orange for the Vietnam War
The Dow Chemical Company, which merged with Union Carbide in 2001, has become the face of the opposition in the campaign for justice for the Bhopal gas-leak disaster of 1984. Dow refuses to take responsibility for the criminality of Union Carbide, claiming that the 1989 Carbide settlement has taken care of everything and leaves all Bhopal-related liability - which includes both a criminal and a civil suit - out of Dow's hands.
Dow Chemical, founded over a century ago, enjoys the legacy of being a pioneer of chemical industry and one of the largest chemical manufacturers in the world. It has even been called one of the "founding fathers of the synthetic chemical revolution."1 While having a history of innovations, breakthroughs, and expansion, Dow also has a long record of misadventures and "global toxic trespasses." Dow has a history of denying, delaying, or withholding information necessary to understand many of the dangers and toxins in the products it manufactures.
Action was recently taken against Dow on bribery or "improper payments." Dow Chemical's DE-Nocil Crop Protection, Ltd., was found guilty of paying over $200,000 to Indian officials of the CIBRC, Central Insecticides Board and Regulation Committee.
One major controversy in the history of Dow misadventures is the ambiguity and sketchiness surrounding its production of Agent Orange for the Vietnam War. Agent Orange is a defoliant made primarily of two agricultural herbicides, 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T. Dow was the largest supplier of herbicides to the United States government during the war. Peter Sills, author of a book on Agent Orange, claims, "Dow...must have realized that the risks [of the herbicides found in Agent Orange] were much greater than normal."2 A study by Bionetics Research Labs showed 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T both caused significant deformities and miscarriages on rat and mouse subjects. As the war came to a close, thousands of veterans filed lawsuits against Dow and other manufacturers of Agent Orange. A compensation fund of $184 million was later settled upon, to be paid by seven major producers of Agent Orange, including Dow. Dow has never accepted any responsibility for the harm 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D can yield on the human body, despite thousands of cases of cancers, miscarriages, hemorrhaging, and other horrific symptoms. Dow has since admitted that it was aware of the hazardous effects of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D since the mid 1960's, but Dow's official statement on the issue reads, "Today, the scientific consensus is that when the collective human evidence is reviewed, it doesn't show that Agent Orange caused veteran's illnesses."3 The Dow blunders and mistruths did not stop there. Dioxin, a highly toxic chemical byproduct of many industrial processes - processes in which Dow specialized, including many reactions involving chlorine and plastics - is toxic, even lethal, and hard to retain or suppress. Dr. Matthew Meselson of Harvard University said in 1979 that, "If you feed a guinea pig one-billionth of its weight with dioxin, this will kill the guinea pig."
Dow's scientists have announced that dioxin is also to be found in many common products and circumstances, "refuse incinerators, fossil-fueled powerhouses, gasoline and diesel powered automobiles and trucks, fireplaces, charcoal grills and cigarettes."4 In the 1990's Dow was suspected of foul play when it withdrew dioxin-heavy products simultaneously with the anonymous leak of highly reliable information on the toxicity of dioxin.
Once again, no action has been taken by Dow to undo or counteract the damage already done by dioxin and by with the withholding of crucial information on dioxin toxicity. "Dow..." states its official position, "actively promotes improvements and solutions [to the dioxin problem] across industry."
Nor could a small trailer park in Plaquemine, Louisiana, escape Dow Chemical's chemical trespass. Overlooked by a massive Dow vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) factory, residents of Myrtle Grove trailer park received notice in 2001 from the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) that their groundwater may be contaminated, when state tests as much as four years old found alarming levels of vinyl chloride.
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