Windows [on] Nigeria: Is Bioethics' New Benefactor Conflicted?
Where there is money there are conflicts. Accepting money from the Gates Foundation carries ethical consequences, as noted in the LA TImes:Ebocha, Nigeria — Justice Eta, 14 months old, held out his tiny thumb.-Art CaplanAn ink spot certified that he had been immunized against polio and measles, thanks to a vaccination drive supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
But polio is not the only threat Justice faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it "the cough." People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Justice squirmed in his mother's arms. His face was beaded with sweat caused either by illness or by heat from the flames that illuminate Ebocha day and night. Ebocha means "city of lights."The makeshift clinic at a church where Justice Eta was vaccinated and the flares spewing over Ebocha represent a head-on conflict for the Gates Foundation. In a contradiction between its grants and its endowment holdings, a Times investigation has found, the foundation reaps vast financial gains every year from investments that contravene its good works.
In Ebocha, where Justice lives, Dr. Elekwachi Okey, a local physician, says hundreds of flares at oil plants in the Niger Delta have caused an epidemic of bronchitis in adults, and asthma and blurred vision in children. No definitive studies have documented the health effects, but many of the 250 toxic chemicals in the fumes and soot have long been linked to respiratory disease and cancer.
"We're all smokers here," Okey said, "but not with cigarettes."
The oil plants in the region surrounding Ebocha find it cheaper to burn nearly 1 billion cubic feet of gas each day and contribute to global warming than to sell it. They deny the flaring causes sickness. Under pressure from activists, however, Nigeria's high court set a deadline to end flaring by May 2007. The gases would be injected back underground, or trucked and piped out for sale. But authorities expect the flares to burn for years beyond the deadline.
The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.
Labels: Conflict of Interest, ethics of bioethics, Gates Foundation, Nigeria, pollution, vaccination
contribute a comment
Comments have been closed for this post.
comments
This is so unnecessary, and in that way it reminds one of the WHO's drinking-water wells in Bangladesh that poisoned the population with naturally-occurring arsenic.
We have regulations in this country to prevent this sort of thing from happening to Americans. Allowable limits. Testing protocols. Reporting requirements. It wouldn't be reinventing the wheel to start holding these overseas companies to the same standards we hold our own to. If they aren't doing it because the culture doesn't allow it, then they need to stay the hell out of the culture. If they aren't doing it because it would cut into their profits (which is why some of these places are overseas in the first place) then SHAME on them.
- by Laura(southernxyl) on Jan 7, 2007 at 12:38 PM | link
Interesting. Do you suppose this is a new form of carbon neutrality? Send your foundation in to "do good" in areas the countries your foundations business interests are "doing bad" in?
- by Kelly on Jan 7, 2007 at 4:32 PM | link