A Green Future In Private Hands
|
|
MALAYSIA
AT LEAST prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is honest. His argument has always been that while the West can afford to go green, a developing country like Malaysia cannot. In the past he has rubbished the fashionable idea that environmental protection and economic growth can go hand in hand.
Mahathir expects his ministers to be honest as well. A year ago, environment minister Datuk Law Hieng Ding stated that the government was against signing the Montreal Protocol on ozone-gobbling chloro-fluorocarbons (CFCs). If Malaysia used the environmentally-friendly but more expensive alternatives, he said, its products would be uncompetitive.
But now, Mahathir is starting to accommodate environmental concerns. And so are his ministers. The switch is in response to pressure from abroad: As a trading country, Malaysia cannot simply stand aloof from international efforts to clean up the world.
Environment minister Law now says that Malaysia will abide by the Montreal Protocol. And, in another sign of a new willingness to meet environmentalists’ demands, the forestry authorities say they will reduce the rate of logging.
Malaysia is also changing its approach to dealing with pollution. It is leaving the job of providing environmental services to the private sector arid so letting the market decide the price. With government subsidies absent, companies can put a realistic value on services — and make a tidy profit too.
Leading economics professor Mohamed Ariff thinks the change of tack makes sense because: ‘It goes to the heart of the problem, which is that natural resources are un-owned, un-priced and unaccounted for in the market.’
The theory says that if environmental assets such as clean water, clean air and unpolluted rivers are brought into the economic equation and given a price in line with their value, consumers will take greater care of them. Governments seldom price properly; markets always do.
Many of Malaysia’s 143 local authorities have sold their waterworks and water-supply networks to private firms some of them joint ventures with foreign partners. Eventually, all the authorities are expected to follow suit.
Last December, the government awarded a 28-year concession to Indah Konsortium to operate the country’s entire sewage system. Indah, a joint venture between Malaysia’s Berjaya Industrial and Britain’s North West Water, estimates its capital investment at M$6.2 billion (US$2.4 billion) making this the country’s largest privatized project.
Also in private hands is Malaysia’s first centralised toxic waste management facility. The company behind the project, Kualiti Alam, hopes to complete the waste management centre and its related storage and collecting stations in the outlying regions later this year. The M$200 million (US$78 million) project links Danish companies Chemcontrol and Enviroplan with two big Malaysian finns, Arab-Malaysian Development Corp and United Engineers.
But privatisation alone won’t solve Malaysia’s environmental ills. Unless there is strict supervision, there is no guarantee that private firms will offer better environmental services than the state-owned outfits they replace.
‘We have the legislation and to a certain extent we are enforcing the regulations,’ say Hasim Daud, head of the Department of the Environment’s Kuala Lumpur office.
So long as enforcement remains lethargic, the government’s new policies on the environment are likely to be no more successful than its old ones.
Sid Astbury
Source : Asian Business Feb 1994
Recycling Point Dot Com
(C) 2000 All Rights Reserved