People's Assembly Passes Landmark Environmental Law

By James J. Napoli

Many Cairo residents last fall went through what seemed an endless succession of colds, flus, allergies and general physical funks. They blamed the air, which, even to people inured to the city's normally high level of pollution, had become particularly foul.

Some days, you couldn't see the Egyptian Museum across Tahrir Square, the city's center, because of the rich, yellowish mix of smoke from burning garbage, industrial emissions, auto and bus exhausts and plain old desert dust that sat on the city. It was too hot and the air didn't move. People got sick.

In its preoccupation with development, Egypt has been slow to do anything to protect the quality of its air or any of its other physical resources. A clean environment seemed expendable, even a luxury, in its headlong effort to build its economy. As a result, the country is staggering under a burden of horrific pollution problems with serious repercussions on public health and the natural environment.

But the environmental movement, which goes back at least three decades in the United States and elsewhere in the West, now seems to have caught on in Egypt. There's light suddenly peeping through the smog.

After four years of debate, the People's Assembly in January overwhelmingly passed a sweeping, 103-article law intended to clean up Egypt's air, land, and water, as well as protect the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts. It also affords greater protection for wildlife.

"I'm very happy," said Elmohamadi Eid, who has been working on environmental legislation since 1985, when he began his seven-year stint as chairman of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency. "This is very, very important."

The former chairman, now a consultant on occupational safety and health problems, told the Washington Report that Egypt's new law is patterned after clean air acts and other environmental legislation in the United States. Most notably, it criminalizes and imposes stiff fines on polluters, and requires environmental impact statements for major government and private projects.

The biggest polluter in Egypt today is the government. Emissions from state industries in Helwan, for instance, have turned the once beautiful winter resort just outside Cairo into a noxious city, where residents are continuously covered in calcium and cement dust. Thousands of people in the area suffer from respiratory and other problems ranging from chronic bronchitis to eye infections, and rashes to emphysema.

A clean environment seemed expendable, even a luxury.

The catalog of environmental problems facing Egypt is imposing:

**The Mediterranean Sea is heavily polluted, and the water in some coastal areas, such as Alexandria, is sometimes so contaminated with sewage that bathing is a major health risk. The water line at beaches in some seemingly clear areas, such as El Arish near the Gaza border, is caked with tar and oil. Many of the date palms that once made El Arish so lovely have been cut down to make way for development.

**Development along the Mediterranean and Red Sea has run riot, cluttering previously pristine areas with ugly cement buildings and summer homes. The new law prohibits construction within 200 meters of the water.

**The Nile River and various lakes have been damaged by industrial pollutants, pesticides, sewage and fertilizers dumped into them. Thousands of felaheen, the rural farmers, are afflicted with debilitating bilharzia because of contact with contaminated rivers and canals.

** Cairo is strangled by cars and trucks spewing pollutants—including lead, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, ozone and particulates—that account for a high incidence of lung diseases and other health problems.

Just to take one pollutant as an example, lead has been reported at more than six times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standard in the center of Cairo in mid-summer. The excessively high lead level in Cairo's children can lead to such problems as mental retardation, anemia and kidney failure.

The city already has something like two million vehicles slowly crawling through its streets, and the number is expected to more than double by the turn of the century. Lead-free gasoline is generally not available in Egypt, and there have been—until the new law set the stage for them—no emission controls.

**Vegetables and fruits have been found contaminated with heavy residues of pollutants and poisons that can contribute to retardation, renal diseases, sterility, and miscarriages, among other problems.

**Prime agricultural land, particularly in the Nile delta, is being ruined by salinization, partly because of poor field drainage. Soils also are being damaged by excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides.

**People living in poor urban areas, such as the El Gayyar district in Old Cairo, generally are living without adequate sanitation, and in an overcrowded environment where sewage flows in the streets. Urban areas, especially in Cairo, also are under severe strain from the immigration of rural people from the north and south.

The country already is overpopulated with nearly 60 million people living in the narrow green band along the Nile. That number is expected to reach 90 million by the year 2000.

Flora and Fauna

The natural environment of Egypt also is suffering. The Sinai desert, with its limited fresh water resources, already is being overused. And the spectacular Red Sea coral reefs, which draw thousands of divers from Europe and elsewhere to the Sinai, are under stress.

The new law also prohibits the hunting of rare animal and bird species. But some species of endangered owls, gazelles and foxes have been protected previously, to little effect.

Vendors in markets like Sayyeda Aisha near the Citadel in Cairo openly sell endangered animals that are legally protected from hunting and capture. Skeptics point out that many laws that protect one aspect or another of the environment were on the books even before passage of the new legislation, but have not been enforced.

Others, including Eid, are optimistic. He believes that once implementation schedules are approved—probably before the end of the year—then the law should have quick effect because penalties for violators are substantial.

The law only catches up with "what all civilized people already have done," he said. "We hope it will do what we want."

James J. Napoli chairs the department of journalism and mass communication at the American University in Cairo.