Slashdot Mirror
Dark Cloud Over Good Works of Gates Foundation
theodp writes "Justice Eta, a Nigerian infant, has an ink spot on his tiny thumb to show he was immunized against polio and measles thanks to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But Justice still faces respiratory trouble, which locals call 'the cough' and blame on fumes and soot spewing from 300-foot flames at a nearby oil plant owned by Itallian energy giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Part one of an L.A. Times investigation reports that the world's largest philanthropy pours money into investments that are hurting many of the people its grants aim to help. With the exception of tobacco companies, the foundation's asset managers do not avoid investments in firms whose activities conflict with the mission to do good."
For those that are not familiar with Nigeria, this is not a standard case of industry versus activist.
The Niger delta is in serious trouble; the environmental contamination there is beyond anything you would believe. My company had been contracted by one of the large oil companies there to investigate cleanup of some of their contaminated sites. They gave us some project specs.
The sites were huge. Gigantic. The scale of the project was larger than anything we had ever considered, and we work on some pretty large projects. Our existing cleanup efforts include some of the largest contaminated sites in the U.S. and Europe. We went to the delta to do some investigating and preliminary tests, and were shocked with what we found. On average, each contaminated site was 10x larger than the specs we were provided.
The environmental "mess" there is huge, and terribly depressing. It's a beautiful region, but you cannot imagine the scale of the contamination. It would take decades upon decades of pouring billions of dollars into remediation to bring the delta region near the environmental standards of the U.S. or Europe, neither of which are particularly high.
Furthermore, in terms of economics; these giant oil companies are ugly, monopolistic ventures with high levels of foreign and domestic (Nigerian) government involvement. They do things no "sane" company would do.
Don't respond with the usual, "These people wouldn't be better off with no jobs" bullshit. These companies have literally destroyed the region, annihilating the local agriculture and local industry. Not through competition, but through force; the region is so polluted that nothing but a resource extraction company can survive there. As far as I'm concerned, this represents use of force; which should be prohibited under capitalist frameworks.
It's really sad what is going on over there.