The fuel scandal for Africa

Editorial of "World . " The scandal has been going on for decades. Multinationals trading petroleum products legally deliver an invisible poison in Africa. These are low quality fuels voluntarily mixed with chemicals with well-known toxicity. The result is a sinister cocktail of diesel and highly polluting gasoline, emitting high grades of fine particles and sulfur content sometimes 1,000 times higher than European standards.

The environmental police of the Netherlands has just published an investigation report on "dirty diesel", confirming the results of a rigorous study published by the Swiss non-governmental organization (NGO) Public Eye two years earlier. The business of toxic fuels is running at full speed and is practiced without restraint by major oil groups and trading behemoths, as unobtrusive as ruthless in their unethical business practices. It's Africa, they say to themselves, no doubt. The fact that brokers use the terms "African quality" is not trivial.

A poison that spreads everywhere in West Africa

Their firms do not just produce this "dirty" diesel "at the dock or at sea, to be more discreet. They export it aboard their most dilapidated tankers, distribute it through their networks of gas stations, sometimes set up after opaque negotiations with the leaders, from whom they obtained shares in oil fields and

This poison then spreads throughout West Africa as it is spewed out as pollutants by over-age cars that Europe is disposing of because they are no longer Western standards. This scandal is added to other scourges: wars, coups d'etat, corruption cases, environmental tragedies, whose black gold is systematically at the origin. This is, for example, what is happening in southern Nigeria, in the Niger Delta region, ravaged by oil, a source of potential wealth that has become venomous. Thousands of leaks from the operations of the giant Anglo-Dutch Shell have perhaps forever sullied one of the continent's most fragile and valuable ecosystems.

Behind the "dirty diesel" business, large corporations that do not are concerned about the environment and the health of the populations and take maximum advantage of the low standards in force in Africa. Here applies the cynical law of supply, which adapts to a low demand, because less solvent. Nothing illegal in all this, because, until now, it is not forbidden to export highly sulphured fuels.

See also:
        
    
                Oil giants deliver toxic gasoline to West Africa
    

However, things are finally starting to move. Most West African states, spurred by the United Nations Environment Program, have pledged to drastically reduce the sulfur content allowed in diesel and are gradually implementing international standards. But this movement is still too timid because it is facing pressure from oil lobbies and the higher price at the pump it implies.

On the European side, we must focus on the fear of bad publicity for that the oil players stop engaging in these unsavory practices and that governments stop turning a blind eye. There is no need for Africa to be condemned to use harmful fuels made by unscrupulous groups, encouraged by lax standards.