OVER the south pole, this year’s hole in the ozone layer has opened to greet the stratospheric spring. At the equator, a matching hole has been revealed in the world’s attempt to do something about it: a money hole.

At a meeting in Kenya earlier this month, the executive committee of the Montreal Protocol—the international agreement on limiting various ozone-eating chemicals—announced that it was distinctly strapped for cash. The protocol says the world’s rich countries should pay for the transfer of ozone-friendly technologies to small countries. However, of the $393m pledged for this purpose between 1991 and 1994, only $216m has been received.

This failure is to some extent hidden by another one. The money that has been paid remains to be spent. Only $25m has been released to approved projects by the main agencies involved: the World Bank, and the United Nations’ development programme, environment programme and industrial-development organisation. That is a sixth of the cash allotted to those agencies for needy projects; the World Bank, the slowest, has disbursed less than 6% of its allocated $90m.

The official reason for such dilatory disbursement is the difficulty of finding and approving suitable projects. Pressure groups such as Greenpeace suspect more sinister motives. At the moment, the third world provides a substantial market for ozone-eating chemicals made, but not sold, elsewhere. So the status quo has its beneficiaries. India’s environment minister, Kamal Nath, worries that the poor disbursement record will make donors much less likely to stump up the $510m deemed necessary for the next three-year programme under the protocol.

According to officials overseeing the payments, the shortfall will become painfully apparent when the rate of disbursement improves. Coupled with the lack of visible long-term commitment—three-year budgets are too short-sighted—the money problems are hardly encouraging for would-be recipients. Industries that might benefit have little reason to ask their governments to secure the money if the money is not there.

This threatens to undo much good work. Protocol scientists say the production and release of the most damaging chemicals— chorofluorocarbons (CFCs), carbon tetra chloride, methyl chloroform and halons—is slowing down thanks mainly to the 1996 phase-out deadline set by the protocol. The trend has pleased scientists, who have now turned their attention to the chemicals used to replace cFcs—principally hydrochorofluorocarbons (HcFc.s) and hydrofluorocarbons (H FCS)—and to a food-fumigation agent, methyl bromide, that was only recently identified as a serious ozone threat. The protocol's scientists are eager to curb the production of HcFcs, which still have an appetite for ozone, amen a mess voracious one than that of the CFCS.

In poor countries, however, companies are not yet ready to phase out CFCS, let alone their less voracious substitutes. The rich world’s promised technological beneficence is not yet reaching them, while the demand for technologies that currently use CFCS is growing fester than anywhere else on the planet. The director of the UN environment programme, Elizabeth Dowdeswell, says that many programmes that might help are simply not going ahead. Perhaps there is a hole in the world’s will, as well as its roof.

-By Nairobi

Source : The Economist, Oct 15, 1994

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