First I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to be in England to present the work we are developing in my country, Brazil, one of the world's largest producers and consumers of asbestos. Special thanks to the TUC who are supporting my visit here.
I believe that this co-operation between North and South will be mutually beneficial in our joint struggle for a world free from the commercial use of asbestos.
Asbestos in Brazil
Brazil is the fifth largest producer and one of the principal consumers of asbestos in the world. Brazil produces 237,000 tons of asbestos per year. The great part of the Brazilian asbestos production is mined by the European consortium created by the Swiss Eternit group and the French Saint Gobain group. Both these countries have banned the use of asbestos in their home countries and territories overseas.
Brazil exports about 70,000 tons of asbestos per year, principally to Japan and the developing countries around the world.
Until the 1980s, the production, consumption, and diversification of asbestos-containing products were unregulated and occupational and environmental exposures were not controlled.
While the use of asbestos has been prohibited in the majority of the developed countries in the North, the developing countries are increasing the use of asbestos by around 7% per year. In the State of São Paulo, the most industrialised state in Brazil, the use of asbestos is increasing at the rate of 12%/year which clearly shows the transference of risks in the international division of work, double-standard practices and the Environmental Injustice supported by the asbestos industry.
During the 1960s and 1970s, when Europe and the United States were acting to limit asbestos exposure, no trade unions and no social movements could express themselves in Brazil because of the military dictatorship.
The producers use the lack of official statistics on asbestos-related diseases for propaganda that chrysotile in Brazil is not harmful. The
causes of the social invisibility of asbestos related-diseases in Brazil are:
· the lack of unbiased information for workers and general population on asbestos associated risks and diseases; · 25 percent of the deaths in Brazil have no defined cause;
· no epidemiological studies of asbestos workers have ever been conducted in Brazil;
· the great majority of low-income workers exposed to asbestos have no access to medical care;
· a very high rate of employee turnover (reaching 90% per year in some asbestos plants) together with the long period of latency of these diseases means that the workers' symptoms only appear when they are no longer working with asbestos and when it will be more difficult to be recognised as an occupational disease; · the informal work, the child labour, the increasing deregulation of the world's work and the unfair dismissal of sick persons aggravate this invisibility.
After an inspection by international observers in an asbestos brake-shoe factory, during the International Asbestos Seminar in São Paulo in 1994, 80 temporary workers were fired by the enterprise that didn't comply with the Brazilian Asbestos Regulations based on the ILO Convention 162;
· doctors in the public health care system have extremely limited training in occupational medicine;
· there is no systematic medical follow-up for dismissed and retired workers. An example is the English Lucas Group in Limeira, State of São Paulo, where asbestos was used in their Freios Varga brake factory until 1995. No asbestos medical monitoring has ever been carried out, and the workers suffering from asbestos-related diseases have never been recognised and never been compensated.
Thus, in Brazil, occupational diseases resulting from asbestos exposure are almost never identified, reported or compensated.
The Myths of Asbestos Companies
The asbestos industry uses the following basic MYTHS about asbestos in order to maintain the industry's commercial survival: · the asbestos mined at Cana Brava mine near the village of Minaçu, the only commercially active mine, is pure chrysotile without amphibole contamination. Chrysotile is less harmful than the amphiboles, and for this reason our situation is better than that in Europe and in the United States. The consequence of this is that we don't have sick persons like the developed countries;
· spraying technology in the application of asbestos have never been used in Brazil;
· asbestos is only an occupational problem, not an environmental one; · there are no asbestos risks associated to the controlled use of asbestos adopted in Brazil.
I'd like to contest these arguments point by point::
Besides the Cana Brava mine, there are several other clandestine mines producing asbestos which is contaminated by amphiboles. The production of these mines is destined to the informal economy which is not controlled by the authorities. In addition, the majority of industrial talc produced in Brazil is contaminated by amphibole type asbestos.
Important studies have consistently demonstrated the incontestable relationship between asbestos-related diseases and non-occupational and environmental exposures. The 1996 INSERM report from France, which resulted in a ban of the industrial use of asbestos in that country, concluded that asbestos in all of its forms is a carcinogen.
As with all countries where asbestos has long been in use, there are asbestos-related diseases in Brazil. In a study we are carrying out in Osasco with the 645 ex-workers from a closed Swiss Eternit plant, we have the following preliminary data: 57 cases of asbestosis, 130 pleural plaques, 82 impaired respiratory function.
There is one case of confirmed pleural mesothelioma, one of retroperitoneal mesothelioma under investigation, 3 surviving lung cancer cases and many suspected cases are under investigation.
We have also 8 cancer fatalities(4 pulmonary and 4 gastrointestinal) and another 20 death cases under investigation. In the Cana Brava mine, the Saint Gobain multinational group confirms only 6 cases of asbestosis in almost 50 years of exploration of asbestos in Brazil. We learned from the newspapers from that region that there are asbestos-related cancers among the people of the village near the mine.
The patented "LIMPET" asbestos spraying technology was in fact marketed in Brazil by the British Turner & Newall Co. and used in the refineries in Rio de Janeiro and Cubatão controlled by the state petroleum corporation, in addition to buildings and railroads.
The purported controlled uses of asbestos in my country can be seen in the following transparencies. I leave them to the judgement of the honourable MPs whether these situations could be considered to be controlled and free from risk.
What was then called the "controlled use of asbestos" is, in fact, a fiction or even better a mystification. The asbestos producers are systematically obstructing our work to inform the Brazilian people about the asbestos-related risks and make the problem visible.
They have eliminated the word asbestos from the packages (changing to the less notorious word, chrysotile) and even from the name of the mining company which was changed to SAMA-S.A. Crisotila do Brasil(Chrysotile of Brazil). It used to be called S.A. Asbestos Mining.
They paid a mesothelioma victim's family from the ex-Eternit factory in Osasco(in Greater São Paulo) the miserable sum of US$25,000 and forced the family to move to a city 500km away and did not mention anything about this incident. In Brazil at the moment all research into asbestos carried out by public universities and public research institutes on health, environment, technology etc. is financed by the asbestos industry.
A double-standard is practised by the brake lining companies which export asbestos-free products but keep the use of asbestos-based products for the Brazilian home market, especially for the replacement market.
Governmental Protection
In 1986, the official workplace exposure limit for asbestos in Brazil was 4 f/cc, twenty times higher than the 0.2 f/cc limit in the United States. Since 1990 we have adopted the threshold limit of 2.0 f/cc for chrysotile and the prohibition of the amphiboles.
The asbestos-cement industry employers signed a national agreement with the Ministry of Labour and workers' representatives, for the progressive use of asbestos. A more recent agreement limits the exposure to 0.30 f/cc and also forbids the use of subcontracted workers in the production plants. Similar regulations have been adopted by the mining sector.
A private member's bill to ban the use of asbestos in Brazil was submitted to the Brazilian Parliament in 1993 . The proposal was rejected in less than six months. A substitute bill was approved by the President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which guarantees the continued "controlled use" of asbestos. Very recently (on 15/10/97) a Regulation was approved allowing further chrysotile exploration in my country under certain rules. This was the proposal advanced by the multinational asbestos industries and their many well-funded lobbyists, as well as some segments of the trade union movement from the asbestos-cement and mining sectors threatened by unemployment blackmail.
The health and safety for workers is promoted by the Labour Ministry, which only has 628 inspectors all over Brazil, where 1,219,389
enterprises are based. This corresponds to only 26.6% of the inspectors necessary to guarantee one visit per year to each factory.
In all those asbestos factories which were inspected by the Labour Ministry, the situation was found to be completely out of control. It
was only after these inspections that the situation improved, and a lot of sick persons were able to learn about the asbestos risks and about their own health conditions.
The Social Movements
Despite our efforts to make the asbestos-related diseases in my country visible, especially in Osasco city where the Swiss Eternit group had their largest asbestos-cement plant in Brazil for 50 years, we are having a lot of difficulties obtaining independent diagnoses for the occupational and non- occupational exposures to asbestos. Now our biggest challenge is: to have an independent medical and research centre to examine and follow up people exposed to asbestos, run by specialised doctors and supported by international laboratories and medical centres, and managed by an elected council composed of members of the victim groups organised by the ABREA-Associação Brasileira dos Expostos ao Amianto(Brazilian Association of Asbestos Exposed Victims) and renowned experts.
Conclusion
The world's experience with the industrial use of asbestos leads to the conclusion that the only way to assure an end to asbestos-related diseases is to ban it all over the world. We are sure that the UK's decision, as the last G-7 European country to ban asbestos, will have direct repercussion throughout Europe and in the rest of the world.
On behalf of the people in developing countries throughout the world I beg the honourable members of this House to support the ban of the use
of asbestos in the UK to save lives of British people and also those of other people around the world. I ask you to prohibit British companies from continuing the practice of the double-standard outside the UK, in the same way that the French Saint Gobain group does in my country, exploiting asbestos, the health of innocent Brazilian lives, while they are prohibited from doing the same in their home country."
Il giorno 17 febbraio 1998 ha avuto luogo a Londra un meeting promosso dalle TUC per la messa al bando dell'amianto. In Gran Bretagna vi è una campagna con questo obiettivo. Al meeting ha partecipato Fernanda Giannasi , rappresentante della Associazione Brasiliana per la messa al bando dell'amianto. Riportiamo il suo intervento al meeting.
" Speech presented to the MPs at the House of Commons in London in17/2/98
by Fernanda Giannasi/Brazil
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