IRC Americas Program Discussion Paper
The Environmental Right-to-Know Movement: Role and Agenda of Organized Civil Society in the Americas

By Talli Nauman | March 23, 2004

If Mexican President Vicente Fox stands behind his promise to increase access to government information and also behind his Environmental and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat), he will sign regulations this March enabling mandatory, public reporting of industrial toxic discharges.

With one squiggle of a pen, the president will have upheld Semarnat representative Sergio Sanchez' promise in February that the oft-delayed measure would be on the books within a month. More importantly, he will have responded to efforts of the environmental right-to-know (RTK) movement in all three North American countries over the past decade to bring Mexico's Pollution Release and Transfer Register (PRTR) up to par with those in the United States and Canada.

The registers are a fundamental imperative for monitoring and enforcement efforts to protect the environment and reverse natural resource degradation, as well as improve community health. What's more, the information they assure is a basic underpinning of participatory democracy.

The president's signature could make Mexico the first country in Latin America to require public disclosure of industrial chemical releases to air, water, and land on an annual, site-by-site, chemical-specific basis. The regulations will guarantee that Mexico lives up to its written commitments under the environmental side accord to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as in the UN.

Since Mexico is a developing country on the verge of joining fully industrialized nations in maintaining a mandatory public register, environmentalists in other developing countries are looking closely at organized civil society's experience in promoting the Mexican PRTR. The environmental RTK movement in Thailand is using Mexico's example to help analyze its own situation and create effective strategies for achieving a register. In the Americas, Costa Rica recently hosted a representative from a Mexican nongovernmental organization (NGO) to speak on pollutant registers in Central America. The Chilean government and the UN also invited Mexican NGO members to a meeting with Southern Cone nonprofits designed to spur a mandatory public register in Chile.

Grassroots activists in Mexico, the United States, and Canada have been working, both independently and across national boundaries, for more than a decade on increasing information on pollutants and providing data access through public registers, so their experience offers some important lessons to organizers in other countries. Based on this valuable experience, activists starting out today to attain national registers in their own countries will not have to reinvent the wheel, although conditions vary somewhat from one nation to the next.

Some Strategy Recommendations for Groups Promoting Access to Environmental Information in Latin America

U.S.-Canadian Experience

The United States initiated its PRTR, called the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), in 1987. Canada followed in 1993, with its National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI). The detonator of the registry process was the now-infamous explosion of the chemical plant owned by the U.S.-based Union Carbide Corp. in Bhopal, India. That deadly incident made diverse stakeholders aware of the dangers of having no reporting system. The systems now in place were fashioned after one that the chemical industry association imposed upon itself in the wake of the disaster.

Industry expressed little opposition to the advent of mandatory public reporting, finding it useful for its own purposes in saving money on energy, water, and other inputs. Very few companies have complained that the reporting threatens their trade secrets or security. On the contrary, facilities in the United States and Canada saved hundreds of millions of dollars from 1995 to 2000. The facilities with the largest pollution decreases saved at least $360 million in raw materials, while reducing emissions by 192 million kilograms through more efficient systems, according to the non-profit National Environmental Trust, based in Washington, DC.

U.S. savings from 1988-1995 were much higher, because reductions are greater in the initial years of a reporting program. Who knows how many industrial tragedies like Bhopal--or those that occurred in the Mexican cities of Guadalajara, Cordoba, and Salamanca--could have been avoided by the reporting and associated enforcement of safety measures encouraged through public registers.

Meanwhile, authorities and community members have been able to base their decisions and actions on the hard data collected in the inventories. With the inventories in place, the role of U.S. and Canadian environmental RTK activists today goes far beyond that of grassroots organizers in the developing countries, who are still trying to secure information gathering, verifiable data, and access to it.

Together with their Canadian counterparts, U.S. nonprofits and academics are improving the science of reporting, recommending better ways of logging information and expanding the list of chemicals reported. They take part in efforts to make sure the TRI and NPRI data is put to use by communities. For example, they provide websites, maps, educational packets, and other didactic materials to schools and civic groups, explaining the databases and how they can be helpful in improving local health and environmental conditions. U.S. RTK advocates are also holding the line against secrecy backers who would use the argument of the threat of terrorist activity, spawned by Sept. 11, 2001attacks on the World Trade Center headquarters and the Pentagon, to roll back the information access guaranteed by the TRI.

In Mexico, nongovernmental organizations are writing public letters and carrying out personal visits to prod the Mexican government and subsidiaries of the U.S. and Canadian corporations operating in Mexico to comply with the stipulations of the NAFTA environmental side accord for reporting to a PRTR similar to those in the rest of North America. The Montreal-based, trinational North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), set up by the side accord, has abetted this process. It has established a multi-stakeholder PRTR advisory council that foments cross-border efforts to strengthen environmental RTK. Among other things, the council provides oversight through an annual CEC publication called Taking Stock, which tabulates and compares the TRI and NPRI data. Ideally, Mexican data will soon be available to make the booklet an even better roundup of North American pollution information, once Mexico has a mandatory public register.

Mexican Experience

However, a decade of promises has passed without the Mexican PRTR coming to fruition. Industry representatives have opposed it, claiming compliance will be too cumbersome or costly. Under the voluntary reporting system in Mexico, only 5% of sites provide information for the PRTR--known as the Registro de Emisiones y Transferencias de Contaminantes (RETC) in Spanish. Transnational businesses have done little to support their Mexican partners in the proposed transition to mandatory, public reporting. The Mexican contingent harbors unfounded fears about revealing trade secrets or attracting sensationalist publicity.

Turnover in the Mexican government has also been to blame for the delays. Every time a new administrative team takes the helm, the PRTR staff capacity has to be rebuilt. Funding has to be requisitioned anew. Bureaucratic reshuffling shifts responsibilities, as has occurred under the new federalism of Fox's administration. Recent moves to decentralize the federal government resulted in reforms to the environmental law that requires states and municipalities to take over responsibility for administering the PRTR, as these jurisdictions develop the capability. Currently state governments' efforts to participate in the PRTR process show varied levels of progress in developing capability.

The only consistent support in Mexico for the PRTR has come from the NGO sector. It got a boost from the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), which funded a multi-sector National Coordinating Group to initiate the process. Later, NGOs received piecemeal support from the CEC for such important tasks as developing a website, operating a listserv, holding conferences, conducting workshops, meeting with U.S. and Canadian counterparts, providing training to corporate executives on inventories, and expanding public outreach through community organizing as well as through media events. An important lesson learned in the process was that the need to collaborate with other sectors, rather than limiting efforts to confrontational tactics.

Currently Mexican NGOs are laying the groundwork for their first joint proposal for seed money to institutionalize their efforts. They are seeking alliances with promoters of Mexico's new freedom-of-information act as part of a broader right-to-know movement. They also are helping their counterparts in Latin America understand the steps to take to achieve their national registers.

Mexican activists won a first battle in 2001, when the environmental law was reformed to call for the mandatory public register. But authorities have failed to fulfill promises to implement regulations time and again since then. Advances include establishment of a federal PRTR advisory committee on the regulations, filing rules, and a list of standards on chemicals and thresholds. But the committee was heavily weighted with industry opponents, federal funding for travel to meetings has been non-existent, and meeting announcements often were made at the last minute. All this has made participation difficult.

Moreover, sensitive decisions about substances and quantities to be reported remain to be made and cast into law. Even if Fox signs the regulations this March, as pledged, the results of the first reporting cycle would not be made public until 2005 at the earliest. Even then, the results will not be as accessible on the Internet as U.S. and Canadian data. Mexican legislation doesn't require it, and resources are too scarce to go much beyond requirements. Making real use of the register is still a dream for the future. Much work remains to be done before it can be realized.

Thailand's Analysis

The Thai right-to-know (TRTK) movement has analyzed Mexico's efforts as part of its own fight for a publicly accessed pollutant register. Their conclusions could be instructive as an example for Latin American NGOs examining ways to tip the political balance in favor of their demands.

Thai organizers wrote a baseline document dissecting the situation of Mexico's PRTR. The document entitled "RETC Summary Report" states: "While the drive to implement the RETC was heavily influenced by the U.S. and Canada, Mexico's PRTR differs vastly from its North American counterparts'. However, it is useful to compare the systems in order to get a sense of the challenges of PRTR development in countries with limited experience and resources."

It continues: " Mexico's experience can be important for Thailand's efforts to develop PRTR, to the degree that Mexico's political, economic, and social contexts resemble Thailand's. In this way, aspects of Mexico's PRTR experience highlight both potential and challenges for PRTR in Thailand.

"In Mexico, there was little public awareness of the PRTR work. Despite the work of NGOs, the media did not take the issue up. This is one area where the TRTK campaign will be crucial. The media systems in Thailand are generally more developed and the Thai media has generally a more sophisticated readership. Thus the Mexican experience highlights the importance of public pressure for generating a strong PRTR system. Further it underscores the importance of media in generating mainstream support for PRTR.

"As far as the UNITAR process was concerned, the NGOs consistently complained about being either outweighed or ignored all together. For example the National Coordinating Group set up by PRTR to steer PRTR policy formulation consisted of 38 groups, four of which were NGOs or academics. Thus any NGO involvement in a UNITAR project should happen with the stipulation that there be relatively equal standing with industry. It is speculated that the imbalanced nature of the National Coordinating Group is behind the relatively weak provisions for reporting and the slow process of formulation.

"Of course the make up of the National Coordinating Group reflect the relative strength of industry and weakness of NGOs in Mexico. This is an aspect where Mexico and Thailand have a lot in common. The inability of Thailand's Pollution Control Department (PCD) to complete a voluntary PRTR Pilot Project in the Map Ta Phud Industrial Estate in 2000 and 2001 is symptomatic of a larger problem of the ability of government to enforce environmental regulations. However, in Thailand the level of sophistication and enforcement is much better than in Mexico. Further, the infrastructure for reporting is much further developed than in Mexico."

From Thailand to Chile , the bottom line advice to activists approaching the PRTR is the same as it is for officials creating new national PRTRs or industrialists facing reporting requirements for the first time: "Learn from experience." The experience gained by members of each sector in other countries provides valuable lessons.

Objectives of the environmental right-to-know movement go beyond pollution control. By building access to information it seeks to empower community action and enhance corporate responsibility. For the cross-border NGO community, the PRTRs are a basic underpinning of equal access to environmental information, necessary not only for protection of health or natural resources, but also for strengthening participatory democracy.

Talli Nauman is the Interhemispheric Resource Center's editor at large and a staff member of IRC's Americas Program.

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