By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Aug 20 1999 (IPS)

By relocating plants and upgrading technology, Cuba’s food industry, whose large companies are based in the capital, has joined the fight to clean up Havana Bay, considered one of the 10 most polluted in the world.

The bay is still used as a dumping-ground by slaughterhouses, distilleries, and fishing concerns. But food industry authorities are upgrading or shutting down and relocating the eight largest of 24 sources of industrial pollution in the capital.

Last year, one of the city’s slaughterhouses alone dumped two tonnes of toxic waste for every 30 tonnes of meat produced into the bay on a daily basis.

But authorities say that amount has been cut in half, due to more efficient use of by-products, as well as a drop in the number of cattle slaughtered.

The environmental problems caused by that particular slaughterhouse should totally disappear by year’s end, when a new plant in a town located to the south of the province of Havana should be finished, and the old slaughterhouse will be closed down, as have two others before it.

Such measures form part of the short and medium-term environmental strategy of the Ministry of the Food Industry, Carlos Arce, Vice-Director of the Ministry’s National Centre of Quality Inspection, told the press.

This year, the sector has been assigned 17.36 million pesos (on par with the dollar at the official exchange rate and 22 to the dollar in the government exchange bureaus) plus 11.9 million dollars for projects designed to curb damage to the environment. Sixty percent of the funds will go into projects in the capital.

Transferring or upgrading the three slaughterhouses, a meat- packing factory and a cooking oil factory should reduce pollution by 1,138 tonnes of biochemical oxygen demand, said Arce.

Biochemical oxygen demand is one of the measurements frequently used to determine the level of pollution in a body of water. The waste dumped into Havana Bay is equivalent to the waste produced by a human settlement of roughly 124,000 people.

Eradicating the smaller sources of pollution will depend now on internal measures, a more disciplined use of technology and small investments, Arce explained.

One experiment has been the use of biodegraders, or microorganisms capable of absorbing part of the organic material contained in waste products, in the Coppelia ice cream plant, whose grease traps are inefficient.

By using the microorganisms, the pollution dumped into the Almendares river, the largest – and highly polluted – river running through Havana, was cut by 30 percent, according to Arce.

Filters have also been installed in mills located near the bay, to reduce dust emissions and boost recovery of flour.

The installation of grease traps and septic tanks at a pasteurisation plant and the use of plastic rather than glass packaging to reduce the amount of caustic soda dumped into a small river that runs into the bay complete the conservation measures taken by the food industry in Havana.

Thanks to the measures, pollution in Havana Bay and the Almendares-Vento river basin has already been reduced, said experts cited by a Havana newspaper.

They acknowledged, however, that 25 percent of treatment systems were still deficient, and water was constantly wasted.

The food industry has also taken steps to protect the environment in other provinces. In Las Tunas, 739 kms east of Havana, a new slaughterhouse will replace a plant built in 1928, the waste emissions of which are increasingly polluting the Hórmigo river.

Population growth and the spread of the city have left the slaughterhouse – which attracts rodents and insects – virtually in the centre of the city, said the plant’s administrator Clemente Mora.

The new slaughterhouse, larger and safer and with better lighting and an upgraded waste treatment system, will be located on the outskirts of the city.

One of the factors conspiring against the environment is the low level of concern among business leaders, specialists and workers, due partly to scarce education on the issue, say analysts.

In 1997, Cuba passed a law on the environment aimed at regulating interaction between humans and nature, which made environmental licences a requisite for any construction and repair work.

The law, based on the principle “he who pollutes pays,” helped bring local environmental efforts up to date, while giving priority to prevention.

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