By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Oct 14 1995 (IPS)

With Japan now taking firm measures to clean up its own house, environmental campaigners are worried that industrialists will seek out greener pastures across Asia where ecological safeguards are not in place.

Japan’s auto industry and its power generating companies have in the past year come under increasing pressure from independent campaigners, and more recently as well, the official Environmental Agency has also begun to crack the whip.

Already, the Environment Agency has announced that more stringent controls on auto-pollution will be introduced by April next year. These will be followed by another set of restrictions in 1998, aimed at bringing down current pollution levels by as much as 60 per cent.

The next step that should be taken, say environmentalists, is for the Japanese authorities to help economically-weaker Asian nations to protect themselves from Japanese industrialists who may try to set up shop elsewhere — mainly to cut down on cost, but also to get away from the environmental pressure at home.

Environmental protection laws are still lax in most Asian countries and as a result Japanese companies do not install expensive pollution control measures in the their Asian factories, says scientist Hiroaki Ise, who heads the Japan Acid Rain Monitoring Network.

Even here in Japan, where the authorities have faced up to the fact that the country’s rapid economic growth has come at a high cost to the environment, industrialists are trying to sidestep the government clean-up programme by going into Japan’s less developed areas.

For example, Acid Rain Monitoring Network, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has initiated a major campaign to prevent industrial development in Ibaragi, north-east of Tokyo — one of the last bastions of natural environments in Japan.

Japanese power companies have targeted this mountainous region to build one of the world’s largest coal-fired powered plants because it has laxer environmental standards than those enforced by more developed areas, Ise explained.

No decision has yet been taken on the construction. However, the NGO will be able to make a strong case in view of documented evidence showing that acid rain, or rain contaminated by toxic chemicals, is taking a heavy toll on much of the country’s forests.

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