ENVIRONMENT-CUBA: Slow Progress in Cleaning Up River Basins

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, May 16 2001 (IPS) - Despite recent clean-up efforts, Cuba’s rivers continue to be threatened by human activity like the dumping of thousands of tonnes of untreated waste.

The government-monopolised media admitted last weekend that nearly 18,000 tonnes of waste are dumped annually into the Zaza river which along with its nine tributaries irrigates a large part of the island’s central region.

The main sources of pollution in the Zaza river, which runs into the Caribbean sea, are industries and human settlements lacking effective sewage and waste treatment systems.

The Zaza river – Cuba’s second largest, after the Cauto river in the east – runs through the provinces of Villa Clara and Sancti Spíritus, located 300 to 400 kms from the capital.

Over the past four years, a clean-up programme has reduced the quantity of waste dumped into a 155-km-long stretch of the river by 4,000 tonnes a year.

Although modest, that result was achieved by the installation of three new waste treatment plants, reparations of two existing ones and the elimination of several sources of pollution, according to the press.

That 2,413-sq-km area is the hardest hit by deforestation in Cuba, a problem that is compounded by inappropriate usage of the banks of rivers and water reservoirs, say experts.

The ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment reported that just three percent of the Zaza river basin was forested. Meanwhile, 93 percent of the land in the basin suffers erosion, and 60 percent is planted in crops that are counter- indicated in such areas.

Forests, which serve as the habitat for a broad range of fauna and flora, are of vital importance to the conservation of biological diversity and water resources, the protection of soil from erosion, and the absorption of gases that produce the greenhouse effect.

Environmentalists say the Zaza river basin is home to more than 100 kinds of plants and 163 species of animals, 25 of which are native to that area and five of which are endangered.

The creation of a National Council on Watersheds in 1997 led to a more integrated approach to the country’s environmental problems.

Eight of the island’s 632 river basins have now been designated “areas of national interest”: the Cuyaguateje, Almendares-Vento, Ariguanabo, Hanabanilla, Zaza, Cauto, Guantánamo-Guaso and Toa rivers, which run through 11 provinces that are home to 40 percent of Cuba’s more than 11 million people.

Studies identify deforestation, the degradation of the soil and the contamination of rivers and coastal areas as the main environmental threats to those ecosystems.

The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC) latest report on Cuba stated that 2,355 sources of water pollution were documented in late 1997.

Around 46 percent of those sources completely lacked waste treatment systems, while in the rest of the cases, the systems were defective or inefficient.

However, ECLAC reported that thanks to several measures adopted by the government of Fidel Castro, 18 percent of the sources of pollution have since been resolved, while partial solutions have been found for another 30 percent.

In the future, the gradual reduction of pollution will be linked to the growing adoption of cleaner production practices, and increased recycling and treatment of waste, said the regional UN agency.

The stipulation that any new enterprise, whether financed by local or foreign capital, must first obtain an environmental permit was one new measure that took a big step in the right direction, according to ECLAC.

The strengthening of the licencing system and of inspections of forestry, water and soil resources led to a 6.9 percent reduction in biodegradable organic waste pollution in 1999, when the annual average of around 400,000 tonnes was reduced by 24,000 tonnes. Contamination of the country’s watersheds, meanwhile, was cut by 10 percent.

ECLAC reported that Cuba contained 42 distinct ecosystems, 6,500 species of plants – half of which are endemic – and 16,000 species of fauna.

The UN agency warned that the fragility of the ecosystems, along with the ways in which natural resources have been exploited, has severely damaged the habitats of Cuba’s plant and animal species.

That problem, which is shared by the rest of Latin America, was aggravated by the economic crisis that had Cuba in its grip throughout the 1990s, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, says ECLAC in “The Cuban Economy: Structural Reforms and Performance in the 1990s”.

Over the past decade, the Cuban government has created a legal, institutional, economic and social framework that paved the way for authorities to address the country’s environmental challenges, to the extent possible given the limited available resources.