High levels of toxicity from the Mafia-led waste disposal system in the 'triangle of death' in Italy's Campania region are poisoning the population, writes Paddy Agnewin Acerra
In the fields around Acerra, the sheep do not so much graze as stagger about. Every now and again, one of them falls over, caught up in mortal agony. For their unfortunate owners, there is no compensation. The point is that these sheep are too poisoned to be slaughtered for meat.
Acerra, which lies about 20km northeast of Naples, was once an ancient Roman city of some renown. These days, Acerra still makes headlines but for all the wrong reasons. Four years ago, Alfredo Mazza, a young physiologist at the CNR (National Research Centre) published a study in the scientific journal The Lancet Oncology, in which he argued that, along with the towns of Nano and Marigliano, Acerra forms a "triangle of death", subject to a much higher than average death rate from cancer.
If the Italian national average for death by liver cancer is 14 per cent, those figures shoot up in the "triangle of death" to 35.9 per cent for men and 20.5 per cent for women, claimed Mazza. Nor does the World Health Organisation provide much comfort. In a study of 196 municipalities in Campania (the area around Naples) for the years 1994-2002, released in October 2006, it concluded that "significant excesses" (up to 12 per cent higher than the national average) for stomach, kidney, liver, lung and pancreatic cancer were to be found.
So what is killing the sheep and the people of Campania? Garbage or, to be more precise, toxic waste disposal, would appear to be the chief culprit. Dioxin poisons from legal and illegal waste dumps have become so prevalent that in certain parts of Campania, such as Acerra, the poison has entered the water table and the land has been poisoned.
And what has generated this shameful state of affairs? The widespread failure of various local governments, sometimes simply ineffective but often corrupt, to deal with the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia. For almost 20 years now, the Camorra has made serious money out of rubbish. Such is the link between organised crime and refuse that it has given rise to a much-used new term: "Ecomafia."
MOST OF THE time, the rest of Italy pays no attention to the ongoing outrage in Campania. For the last week, however, Naples and its rubbish problem have been front-page, prime-time news. Rotting, stinking piles of rubbish have piled up in the streets, sometimes blocking access to public buildings such as schools and prompting some Campania mayors to tell children not to go to school; protesters and police have clashed over the re-opening of an old rubbish dump, leading to both injuries and arrests; many of the improvised street dumps have been set alight, releasing highly toxic fumes into the atmosphere; centre-left prime minister Romano Prodi has held a series of emergency cabinet meetings, which concluded with the appointment of a new "garbage czar", a special commissioner for rubbish, the former head of police Gianni De Gennaro. Naples has not been putting its best foot forward, showing, as Prodi put it, a negative, ugly face of Italy to the world. It defies belief that a major city in a leading western European country, a founder of the European Union often regarded as the very cradle of civilisation, cannot deal efficiently with something as fundamental as rubbish collection. When you realise that this particular rubbish crisis has been ongoing since at least 1994, and that an estimated €2 billion of public money has been pumped into thus far ineffective attempts at solving the crisis, then you begin to understand the full scale of the catastrophe.
As with so many of Italy's modern ills, this story concerns the relative failure of the modern Italian state to effectively combat, let alone defeat, organised crime. It was back in 1992 when a Neapolitan state investigator, Franco Roberti - who is now head of the Naples Anti-Camorra pool - stumbled across one of the first indications that the Camorra had discovered a new and lucrative "business". In an interrogation in Vicenza prison in December of that year, Nunzio Perrella, a Neapolitan godfather turned state witness, explained to Roberti: "Your honour, I don't do drugs any more. I have another business these days, you earn more and you risk less. You call it garbage, your honour. For us that garbage is gold." Recalling that interrogation in Rome daily La Repubblica this week, Roberti pointed out that the investigation prompted by Perrella's testimony unveiled for the first time the entire mechanism of the Camorra's garbage business: "It was all there - Mafia firms in disguise, local-government figures corrupted by kickbacks, a lack of proper controls (of public and illegal dumps), poisoned land. It was an alarm bell that the political class ignored."
The point about the Camorra is that it is involved in every phase of the rubbish business - collection, treatment and disposal. In many parts of Campania, it not only directly or indirectly controls the firms that collect the rubbish, but it also controls the landfills. Worse still, the Camorra has played a sinister game in Campania, filling many dumps to capacity, often with toxic industrial waste from northern Italy, while at the same time sabotaging and frustrating attempts to open new incinerators.
MANY EXPERTS ARGUE that the Camorra has a vested interest in ensuring that Campania remains in the grip of a "permanent crisis situation". "Where there's an emergency, there's organised crime. Because, by its very nature, an emergency means that checks are less rigorous, that blind eyes get turned, you risk less and you earn more," explains Roberti.
Writing in the annual report EcoMafia 2007 (the phenomenon has become so established that the environmentalist group Legambiente now publishes an annual analysis), Italy's senior Mafia investigator, Pietro Grasso, gives a damning indication of just how the Camorra (and other Mafia groups in Italy) manage their rubbish business - above all thanks to collusion with a whole gamut of legal businesses: "We are talking about legal firms, wheeler-dealers, public employees, businessmen, garbage business operators, laboratory technicians, and people from the transport business. These people come from a perfectly legal background but soon they base their behaviour on corruption, systematic evasion of all regulations and rules, simulation and illegality." In other words, the Camorra dumps what it likes where it likes, with the silent collusion of a local authority that, thanks to kickbacks, will often turn a blind eye. Roberto Saviano, author of the award-winning analysis of the Camorra, Gomorra, estimates that the Camorra has a current annual "turnover" of €3 billion from rubbish. Saviano adds that there is practically nothing the Camorra will not dump, even the burnt-out wreck of the accident struck oil tanker, the Moby Prince.
Where now for Campania? Legambiente suggests that this week's government emergency plan, involving the building of three new incinerators and a temporary help-out from other regions, is a minimal first step. The introduction of differentiated garbage collection would be a major step forward, they say.
However, one aspect of the government's emergency plan makes perfect sense. The new commissioner for rubbish, Gianni De Gennaro, has no experience of local government or handling environmental issues, but he is a man with an extensive and impressive track record in fighting organised crime.