Lack of sustainable environmental policy obstructs Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy (IPRS), and growth 

 Thursday, November 8, 2007   

             By Francis W. Nyepon

The quality of the environment is crucial to the well-being of Liberians and should be the driving force to advance our recovery, reduce poverty and promote economic growth. 

Each year, hundreds of thousands of pristine beaches, coastlines, agricultural lands, mangroves and residential lands are destroyed due to a lack of protective legislation, financial support and environmental awareness. 

On the one hand, unregulated mining, hunting, farming, and deforestation cause enormous ecological imbalance in our ecosystem and biodiversity, while on the other hand, heavy downpours of rains, beach erosion and inappropriate dumping of solid, medical and hazardous wastes, including the inadequate management of excreta and wastewater threatens living standards and devastates the environment. These conditions are causing some of our richest natural habitats to become damaged beyond repair, and sustainable sanitary environment blight.

This lack of interest in the environment causes an unenthusiastic commitment to promulgate and deploy comprehensive environmental policies, decentralize the sector or vigorously enforce existing laws. Liberia needs effective legislation, which deals with preventing pollution, contamination and causing severe environmental degradation in order to provide a better, more stable and productive living standard for Liberians. Such legislation should provide a mechanism for implementing environmental policies, and not avoid steps to improve the environment on grounds of cost. For instance, if Liberia had effective environmental law enforcement and better supervision, many of the preventable illnesses and disasters would not be taking place at current levels.

The government’s Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy (IPRS) is meant to describe programs and policies for promoting growth and reducing poverty, as well as influencing how donors direct aid. In essence, IPRS function as a wish list that is intended to assist in directing aid to where it can be utilized most effectively. But, IPRS needs to also bring greater attention to the services that healthy ecosystems provide, especially to the poor. These services include provision of sanitation and waste management, safe water, mitigation of erosion and floods, control of deadly disease carrying vectors, including conservation, which can become the platform from which the IPRS springboards into action and serve as the driving force behind attempts to reduce poverty. 

With effective environmental legislation, absent and comprehensive strategy on sustainable sanitary environment not in attendance, some of Liberia’s worst sources of pollution continue to go unchecked. For example: waste management policies and effective practices needs to rapidly be developed to ensure that public and occupational health risks are minimized so that sanitary environmental resources can be protected. One of the driving forces in shaping waste policy, along with many other aspects of life in Liberia, should be the over-arching goal of sustainable development. In many ways, Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), is the most significant waste stream because it stems from all Liberians, reflecting our lifestyle choices, our consumption and resource recovery decisions.

Liberia’s worst environmental disasters are occurring through erosions, floods, mudslides, and the lack of sanitation, safe drinking water and unsanitary environmental degradation. These recurring phenomenon have long been a problem. But over the past 10 years, their occurrences seem to have grown more severe without adequate laws, national response and action; thereby impacting the environment more ruthlessly. These incidents have displaced many inhabitants; wiped our hectares of agricultural lands; destroyed scores of villages; crumbled earth walls, knocked out trees and toppled bridges and footpaths. For many residents in Grand Cape Mount, Grand Bassa, Sinoe and Maryland Counties, the absence of environmental protection laws and effective response is all but painfully clear as beach erosion continues to disrupt lives, destroy properties and provoke land cave-ins. For instance, in Monrovia, Sinkor, West Point Township, Bushrod Island, Banjor and Hotel Africa in Virginia the threat is real and deadly as communities have been mercilessly devastated and lives disrupted with what appears to be reprisal to many.

Over the past 10 years, hundreds of thousands of tones of refuse from homes, factories, hospitals and slaughter houses have been piled high in makeshift dumps, near public markets, in wetlands and around water bodies. Household waste reflects our population density and economic prosperity, seasonality, housing standards and the lack of waste minimization initiatives. For instance, the disposal of hazardous waste materials from medical facilities and slaughter houses is not regulated. According to the Monrovia City Corporation (MCC), Monrovia generates well over 5,000 tons of medical related waste and 3,000 tons of waste from slaughter houses each year. But with no specialized facilities for disposing of the hazardous material, the majority is dumped with municipal solid waste, even though this author recognizes and applaud the effort of a few committed individuals and entities currently dealing with medical hazardous waste in the country.

Throughout the Monrovia Metropolitan Area (MMA), children suffer more from insect bites, rodent infections, not to mention asthma and other respiratory problems than children anywhere else in the country, which many visiting international doctors say is directly linked to untreated municipal solid waste and makeshift dumps, which contaminates ground and drinking water; pollutes the environment; and cause severe public health risk. For example: Ill-supplied and ill-equipped hospitals and clinics cannot keep up with the demands made on their services. Needles are used and reused without sterilization. Medicines are lacking or too expensive for many poor families to afford. According to the Monrovia City Corporation, municipal solid waste make up about 90 percent of total solid waste generated in Liberia. The main sources of municipal solid waste are households, commercial establishments, public markets and street cleaning operations including street markets.

One of the most serious questions which many Liberians refuse to ask but secretly acknowledge is ‘what happens to discharges and runoffs from the Liberian Petroleum Refinery Corporation (LPRC) and the Liberian Electric Corporation (LEC)? Bushrod Island, Gardnersville and WestPoint, have substantial increases in deadly illnesses caused by hazardous chemicals trickling into the sea, rivers, lagoons and groundwater from petrochemicals and waste oil. Because Liberia lacks enforceable regulatory regime; respiratory, eyes, skin, even gastrointestinal and urinary illnesses have become prevalent, but many times their causes are link to sorcery.

Liberia needs material and resources to prevent or fight erosion, inappropriate dumping of solid, medical and hazardous wastes, including the inadequate management of excreta and wastewater; unregulated beach mining, deforestation, all of which threatens living standards and devastates the environment, not to mention the lack of widespread access to anti-venom serum to protect against snakes that emerge in flood waters. The environment should be incorporated as a baseline platform from which our recovery ought to be launched, and not relying entirely on money generating enterprises to propel social transformation. 

A national conference on the environment needs to be called and a comprehensive strategy developed with appropriate laws promulgated and policies implemented to better organize and decentralize the sector.

Francis Nyepon is managing partner of DUCOR Waste Management in Liberia. He is a policy analyst and Vice-Chair of the Center for Security & Development Studies, and serves on several boards of humanitarian, environmental and human rights organizations in the United States and Liberia. He can be contacted at francis.nyepon@Gmail.com.