Quezon City—Two broad coalitions of citizens’ groups today called on both the national government and the Austrian government to annul a half a billion peso “toxic debt” that financed a failed Department of Health (DOH) project involving the importation of twenty-six medical waste incinerators for DOH-run hospitals in the country.
The Ecological Waste Coalition of the Philippines (EcoWaste) and the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) during the public launch of the “Stop Toxic Debt! Campaign” said that the loan, which was contracted in 1997 between Bank Austria and the Philippine Department of Finance (DOF), will have to be paid until 2014.
But the incinerators had all been retired in 2003 when the incineration ban promulgated by the Philippine Clean Air Act of 1999 (CAA) took effect. Said incinerators were substandard and did not meet the emission levels guaranteed by the supplier, which Greenpeace Southeast Asia claimed in an earlier report.
The loan financed the DOH’s project dubbed “The Austrian Project for the Establishment of Waste Disposal Facilities and Upgrading of the Medical Equipment Standard in DOH Hospitals.” It was originally intended to provide development assistance to Philippine hospitals in the area of medical waste management.
With capacities of 300-500 kg of waste/day, the incinerators were set up in 1997-1998in the various DOH-run hospitals throughout the country.
The payments on the loan’s principal have commenced in 2002 and the loan now represents a two-million dollar per year debt burden for the Philippines until 2014.
Toxic technology transfer
According to Von Hernandez, Campaigns Director of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the incinerators exported by Austria to the Philippines were of such low quality that they would never have been allowed to operate in Austria. The incinerators, however, were granted an exemption from the Environmental Impact Assessment process by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
A subsequent assessment of the incinerators’ emissions, jointly conducted by the DOH and the World Health Organization (WHO), revealed extremely high emissions. According to Ronnel Lim, EcoWaste Coalition researcher: “Even if the incineration ban of the CAA never took effect, the incinerators’ emissions were outrageously high there was simply no way to defend them. In the joint DOH-WHO emission test conducted on one of the incinerators, the dioxin emission was a whopping 870 times the limit set by the CAA.”
Money to burn
FDC secretary-general Milo Tanchuling pointed out that the incinerator loan is a classic example of an illegitimate debt that was “incurred to finance an ill-conceived development project that posed danger to our environment and the people, rendering the project itself dissonant with the global call for the protection of Mother Earth.”
“Such debt is unacceptable and must not be honored. We call on the Austrian government to cancel and on the national government to repudiate the said loan,” added Tanchuling.
Hernandez also called for the deal to be rescinded: "Filipinos will not tolerate being at the receiving end of toxic technologies. It is totally outrageous that we are paying for an obsolete and deadly technology. We are being cooked in our own juice."
Bishop Julio Labayen, joining the two coalitions, also vowed to bring the campaign to cancel the incinerator debt to Austria.
The groups said that what makes the loan unconscionable is that the Philippine government is practically throwing money away at the same time that it is progressively cutting back on health outlays.
In the past 10 years, the DOH's budget as a percentage of the total national budget has decreased from about 2.53 percent in 1998 to just over 1 percent this year. Health expenditures have perennially lost out to debt service payments and national defense on the government's priority list.
About the loan
The total cost of the whole project amounted to ATS199,860,000 or PhP503,647,200 in 1996. The Waste Disposal Component of the project cost ATS95,904,076 or PhP241,678,000 in 1996. The incinerators, which amounted to PhP133,208,662 in 1996, were delivered and installed in 26 DOH-controlled hospitals in 1997-1998. The loan, with an interest rate of 4 percent per year, is to be paid off by the government until 2014 in 24 equal semi-annual payments.
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