Waste Dumping During Civil War Ignites Debate in Lebanon

By R. Clemente Holder

Two Lebanese men, Roger Haddad and Antoine Al-Amm, are charged with importing through the port of Beirut 24,000 tons of industrial waste from Italy for dumping throughout Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war. Judge Said Mirza also has issued a warrant for Arman Nassar, head of the company which imported the waste, and is reported to be questioning 27 others named in a secret 1988 Lebanese army report on the ecological disaster. Italian officials say only 9,567 barrels of waste entered the country and all were returned to Italy in 1988. However, Greenpeace and local environmental groups charge that several thousand additional barrels remain buried in Lebanon or sunk in Lebanese waters.

Discovery last fall of some of the barrels dumped in a mountain resort where the wastes they contained could have seeped into the groundwater reaching cities below has set off a major debate concerning environmental protection in Lebanon.

"We have all sorts of contamination and pollution," Muhammad Khawli, head of the American University of Beirut geology department, told Reuters news agency. "You name it and it's there. The government is giving great priority to redevelopment...which in Lebanon is synonymous to high-rise structures of concrete. But development should start with people...

"The government is hoping Lebanon again will be one of the touristic countries in the Middle East," Kawli continued. "They used to come for two things: Our mountains and our beaches. We are losing them both."

In response, Environment Minister Samir Mokbel said: "You can't tell me that things have not improved, say, from a year ago. The root of Lebanon's current environmental problem is the civil war when no control was done by the authorities." Now, he said, his ministry, created in 1992, has given each industrial establishment from one to three years to comply with environmental protection specifications, while new factories need approval for building permits.

His ministry's master plan, which will cost $2 billion to implement, will put Lebanon on the same sanitation level as developed states in six to seven years, he said "There are a lot of problems, but we are moving."

Saudi Arabia Experiments with Food Plant That Thrives on Saltwater

A food plant irrigated solely with seawater has been introduced successfully into a 370-acre experimental plot in Saudi Arabia. Successful cultivation of the plant over vast desert areas lying near the sea, such as those throughout the Arabian Gulf area, has enormous implications not only for the world's food supply, but also for absorbing some of the carbon in the atmosphere that is contributing to the greenhouse effect and global warming.

The plant, halophyte salicornia, was introduced in October 1993 into an area near Jubail, the planned industrial city built by the Saudi government near its major Eastern Province oil fields. The plants were irrigated solely with water pumped from the sea.

"We are trying to fine tune what we learned last year and once we get that worked out, we will move up to 11,000 acres," said project manager Daniel Murphy of Arizona-based Halophyte Enterprises (HEI). "This is the first time in the history of the world that a commercial crop is being raised with seawater as the only source of water." The plant's unusual qualities first were described by scientists at the University of Arizona in Phoenix.

Green fields are not new in Saudi Arabia, where heavily subsidized agriculture has made the country self-sufficient in wheat, barley and alfalfa, with large surpluses for export. However, environmentalists worry that these programs are depleting groundwater, much of it dating back to eras of heavy rainfall in the Middle East that accompanied the fluctuations of glaciers in Europe and North America.

"The resource for agriculture is water, which is a depletable resource," Prince Faisal Al-Sudairy, chairman of Arieb, a Saudi manufacturing company which has invested in the project, told a writer for the Wall Street Journal. "The resource for salicornia is the sea, which is not depletable."

The plant was featured in a television interview last year by Larry King with Marlon Brando in the actor's home. After sharing salicornia seed cookies with King, Brando showed the talk show host a potted salicornia plant, explaining that the tips are excellent in salad and the seeds can be used for edible oil or crushed into a meal, from which the cookies were made.

Brando pointed out that converting desert areas into biomass without depleting fresh water supplies can have a significant effect on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, which are increasing as tropical rain forests disappear.

Randy Lux, crop production manager in Saudi Arabia for HEI, explained the reason behind Brando's interest in the plant as an ecological tool: "Salicornia has got its own way of taking the salt out of the water. Because of that, it absorbs a tremendous amount of carbon."

The small, self-pollinating plant, whose white flowers bloom in May amid white salt spots on its stems, was featured at a major environmental display by 145 exhibitors in Riyadh sponsored by the Saudi Ministry for Municipal and Rural affairs. The exhibition, opened by Prince Sultan bin Abdel-Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia's second deputy prime minister, was designed to highlight increasing Saudi governmental emphasis on environmental protection.

UAE Center Bringing Houbara Birds Back From Edge of Extinction

The United Arab Emirate's National Avian Research Center (NARC) is conducting a program to release large numbers of houbara bustards bred in captivity back into the wild to bring this game bird back from the edge of extinction. The center was established five years ago by Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy commander of the UAE armed forces. With houbara bred at its research stations in the Al-Ain zoo and three other locations in the UAE and falcons from its captive breeding center in Wales, the NARC aims to preserve Arab falconry without endangering survival of the species involved.

The houbara is a desert bird which inhabits arid areas ranging from the Canary Islands in the west to China and Mongolia in the east. Houbara breeding grounds in Central Asia are endangered not only by hunting but also by overgrazing by domestic animals and overuse of pesticides. NARC efforts aim at augmenting the flocks of houbara which winter in the UAE and return to Central Asia in the summer.

NARC's falcon-breeding program in the United Kingdom aims at reducing the need by falconers to capture these birds from the wild. According to the organization's annual report for 1994, it "is also promoting the philosophy that exists amongst falconers that the true heroes of Arab falconry are not the men who at the end of the day have the largest number of dead houbaras but the men who have shown the wisdom of leaving some for tomorrow."

R. Clemente Holder writes on human rights and environmental subjects from Washington, DC.