SINGAPORE:
India is now the world's largest producer and smuggling source of
chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), the gas that has created holes in the earth's ozone
layer, says a senior UN Environment Programme
official.
Thanavat Junchaya,
UNEP's regional network coordinator for its CFC project, said: "India now
produces almost all the CFC that is still being produced in the world, and the
amount it officially exports is frequently far lower than the amount reported by
other countries to be imported from
India.
"As much as 55 per cent
of these goods are unaccounted for. After drugs, CFC is the most smuggled
commodity."
CFCs have created a
hole in the ozone layer on top of the earth's atmosphere and are not supposed to
be manufactured by any country by the end of 2009, as per the 1987 Montreal
Protocol. CFC, used as a refrigerant, has been phased out of use from most home
refrigerators and air-conditioners around the world now. But there are still
many car air-conditioners that continue to use CFC, despite rules to the
contrary.
Industrialised
countries have already phased out its manufacture, and many developing countries
have done the same. With China ending exports last year and left with only one
CFC producing plant, India and South Korea are the two major manufacturers left.
UNEP estimates these two countries now account for over 70 per cent of global
CFC production, which has come down from a million tonnes a year to
50,000.
As signatories to the
Montreal Protocol, both India and South Korea are committed to ending CFC
manufacture by Jan 1, 2010. Of the two countries, India now has the lion's share
of CFC production.
Junchaya
said on the sidelines of a recent media workshop organised by UNEP here that a
detailed study carried out in the Asia-Pacific region to trace CFC trade since
2000 had found CFC manufactured in India "being smuggled largely to Japan and
Thailand, and to a lesser extent to Malaysia and
Iran.
"Bangladesh, Nepal and
Vietnam were also being used as transit countries by the
smugglers."
The study, carried
out for UNEP by Liu Ning from the customs department in China, had found that
most often, the smugglers simply did not declare the entire amount of CFC being
exported in a legal consignment - they declared far
less.
Before China ended its
CFC exports, it was as big a source of the smuggled gas as India, if not bigger,
Junchaya said.
"Our study found
that in 2004, nearly 51 per cent of legal exports from China and 47 per cent
from India to Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Iran
are not found in the import statistics of the importing
countries.