The practice of shifting toxic products and toxic wastes to third world countries is well established. The question of how this industry developed, can be largely traced to the activities of the World Bank. In fact, according to World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers, the economic logic behind dumping toxic waste in the lowest wage countries is impeccable and is a growth industry in recessionary times. While Summers claims he made this statement to be ironic and provocative, this has been the position of the World Bank, his employer.
In a memo, which criticized a draft of the bank's World Development Report, Summers was applying cost-benefit analysis, which measures the value of a human life by the stream of wages remaining to it. In an example Summers gave, suppose it may cost Global Megatoxics $1 million to install of a state-of-the-art scrubber in its chimney. If Global determines that not spending this sum will shorten the lives of five people by 10 years apiece, all that would be lost would be the present value of these 50 years of wages. At a wage of $1,000 a year, the cost of the five lives can be figured at $41,000--with compounded interest. At $30,000 a year, they're worth $1.2 million. As Summers stated in his memo, "health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages."
Since the costs of pollution--always priced in dollars or their equivalent--rise with development, Summers argued, it makes sense, costwise, to dump in Africa. If a pollutant is going to cause cancer, which shortens people's lives, why not locate it in countries where people aren't likely to live long enough to get it anyway? Summers concluded this section by saying that disagreement with this logic suggests the belief that things like "intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, or lack of adequate markets, could be turned around and u...