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Concern in Russia over Chinese toxic spill

Vladimir Radyuhin

THE IMPACT from a Chinese chemical plant accident on neighbouring Russian territories has proved less serious than expected, but Russian officials and environmentalists are sounding alarm over what they say is a looming ecological catastrophe.

About 100 tonnes of chemicals, including benzene, were dumped into the Songhua River (Sungari in Russia) following an explosion at a chemical plant in China's northeast on November 13. By the time the toxic slick reached the Russian city of Khabarovsk with a population of 580,000 last week, the concentration of nitrobenzene in the Amur river was diluted to a fraction of the dangerous levels. However, the long-term effects of the spill pose a serious threat to people and animals because the spilled chemicals, benzene and nitrobenzene, are heavier than water and are settling on the river bottom or sticking to the ice. When spring comes, the melting ice will pollute not just the river water, but also the banks, according to Yevgeny Rozhkov, an engineer from the Far East Meteorological Agency.

Russian authorities have already banned fishing on the Amur, and the ban may last up to two years.

Serious ecological hazard

Environmentalists and officials have long been warning that China's booming economy across the border presents a serious ecological hazard for Russian territories. The Songhua winds its way through 1,500 km of densely populated Chinese territory before crossing into Russia, where it joins the Amur, a source of drinking water for over one million people. According to Russian estimates, about 80 per cent of all waste in the Amur comes from the Songhua-Sungari.

The Songhua disaster highlighted the catastrophic ecological situation in China. Six weeks after the chemical plant explosion in the northeast, a toxic spill of cadmium poisoned the Bei River in China's southwest. However, the bulk of pollution comes not from industrial accidents, but from the waste-disposal practices in China.

"Chinese factories consume four times more water per unit of output than the world average, and most of them just dump their wastes without any purification," the leading Russian economic journal, Expert, said. It cited a survey carried out by China's State Environment Protection Administration (SEPA), which said that a third of all Chinese factories had no purification equipment, that another third had some but did not use it to reduce costs, and that only one third exercised some kind of waste control.

Russia's Deputy Minister for Natural Resources, Valentin Stepankov, accused China of dragging its feet over a bilateral pact on protection and rational use of cross-border waterways. "Moscow has repeatedly proposed signing the pact, but Beijing has invariably declined under various pretexts," he said.

Russia is also concerned about plans to siphon off the waters of the Irtysh River into water-scarce western China. The Irtysh flows from the Altai Mountains in China to Russia through the territory of Kazakhstan. In 1997 China began diverting 10 per cent of the river's water and plans to double the offtake by 2020, according to Mr. Stepankov.

"This is another ecological challenge to Russia, because our Omsk Region [in Western Siberia] totally depends on Irtysh," he said, adding that Beijing prefers to discuss this problem separately with Kazakhstan and Russia. "Russia and Kazakhstan believe that the problem of Irtysh must be dealt with in trilateral format."

Growing water shortages in China have prompted Russian experts to suggest exporting Baikal water to China. They have drawn up plans to build a pipeline, several thousand kilometres long, to pump up to 10 cubic km of water a year from Lake Baikal, the world's biggest reservoir of fresh water, to China. The deal may help encourage China to sign the long-overdue environment pact with Russia and to address the problem of pollution along the Russian border.

If no measures are taken to rectify the situation, experts warn, the ecological problem may become an even bigger irritant in Russian-Chinese relations than the illegal migration of Chinese nationals to Siberia and the Russian Far East.

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