Over the last decade, many developing countries have managed to phase out leaded gasoline. Many of these phaseouts have been easier and faster than in places like the United States. Why has this been possible? Answering this question helps explain why ecological shadows of consumption can—and do—sometimes quickly fade away, even in the world’s poorest places. To that end, this chapter analyzes the phaseout of leaded gasoline in sub-Saharan Africa from 2002 to 2006. Broadly, it shows how global environmentalism—combined with international aid, corporate interests, and local political will—was able to accelerate environmentally friendly change in the region.
Although this success story in no way excuses the hypocrisy of corporations or states flooding this region with leaded gas, even after all were well aware of the dangers, it does reveal how actors and forces that once deflected ecological costs onto poor people and into weak states can later act to reduce and even eliminate those costs by helping alter local consumption to improve living conditions. (Chapter 24 will return to this ground for optimism when discussing possible strategies to reform the global political economy.)
The phaseout of leaded gasoline in sub-Saharan Africa took place in record time. Many factors explain why this was so. Knowledge and experience inspired some local governments and consumers to act. Global institutions such as the United Nations Environment Programme and the Global Environment Facility, lending organizations such as the World Bank, international meetings such as the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, and national agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency helped both to provide much-needed financial assistance and to maintain a scientific consensus to act. But, as this chapter will show, the principal reason was the shift among the most powerful corporations and states away from leaded and toward unleaded gasoline (and the automobiles that run on it).
Partnering for a Phaseout in Sub-Saharan Africa
At the conclusion of a regional conference hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Senegal, the 2001 Dakar Declaration called for a phaseout of leaded gasoline in sub-Saharan Africa. Delegates were alarmed by studies in Africa showing that lead from leaded gasoline exhaust impaired brain function in children and increased the risk of health problems in adults. They agreed to aim for a full phaseout of leaded gasoline “as soon as possible,” but no later than 2005. This was an ambitious timeline. At the time of the conference, Sudan was the only one of the 49 countries in the region to rely solely on unleaded gasoline. And Sudan’s reasons were primarily economic. The year before the conference, the government had switched to unleaded gas after opening a new refinery able to produce unleaded gasoline for both export and the domestic market.1
The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannes-burg spurred the regional phaseout process along. The Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles, a nonbinding public-private initiative taken at this summit to reduce vehicular air pollution in developing countries, became the core of a collective effort to phase out leaded gasoline from the entire sub-Saharan region by the end of 2005. The partners—who would eventually number over 70, including African governments, NGOs, research institutes, oil companies, private donors, the UNEP, the WHO, the EPA, and the World Bank—agreed to support cleaner fuel standards and cleaner vehicles, with the UNEP also agreeing to act as a clearinghouse for collecting and exchanging information as well as creating and distributing “fact packs.”
After Johannesburg, members of the partnership began to provide technical and policy advice to African governments. The partnership raised money to assist these governments ($500,000 was already pledged by March 2003), held conferences and workshops with the support of the World Bank and UNEP, and ran campaigns to raise awareness in sub-Saharan Africa about the health consequences of leaded gasoline. The research findings were disturbing. According to Robert De Jong (a program officer at the UNEP), one study found that exposure to lead from leaded gasoline exhaust was lowering the IQ scores of children in major cities in Africa by 4 to 5 points.2
Progress was swift after Johannesburg. By 2004, seven more countries in the region—Cape Verde, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Mauritius, Nigeria, and Rwanda—had phased out leaded gasoline. Some, such as Ethiopia in January 2004, simply banned the import of leaded gasoline with little public debate or knowledge. This forced consumers to use unleaded gasoline for older cars without catalytic converters (which, at the time, constituted the bulk of cars across Africa). Other countries, such as Mauritius in 2002, first launched a campaign to educate the public about the benefits of a phaseout (including charts at filling stations to help consumers choose the best gas for older vehicles) before imposing a full ban on leaded gasoline. International agencies also worked to convince consumers to use unleaded gasoline.3
Phasing out was harder in countries where consumers could choose between leaded and unleaded gasoline. In Kenya, for example, many consumers continued to use leaded gasoline, believing it made older cars run better. This was a significant cause of air pollution. Thus, according to tests in 2005, emissions from an average car in Nairobi were 16 times greater than from an average new car in the United States, even though 70 percent of the automobiles in the capital had catalytic converters. A key reason was leaded gasoline, which had ruined most of those converters. Although the Kenyan government banned leaded gas imports in 2004 when imports accounted for some 30 percent of the country’s total gasoline pool, the main source of domestic gasoline, a 1960s refinery in Mombasa owned jointly by the government, Caltex Oil, Kenya Shell, and British Petroleum, could process only leaded gasoline.4
As of May 2004, the prospects for meeting the ambitious end-of-2005 deadline set by the Dakar Declaration did not look good: 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa were still using leaded gasoline, and just under half of all gasoline in the region still contained lead. In Kenya, just 4 percent of motor fuel was unleaded. Yet, with the assistance of the Partnership for Clean Fuels, countries like Kenya and Senegal did manage to keep their promises to phase out leaded gasoline by the end of 2005. The Mombasa refinery in Kenya stopped producing leaded gasoline as of 1 December 2005 and was handling enough unleaded gasoline by early 2006 to meet domestic demand (with government support for further upgrades). Cameroon, which exported leaded gasoline to countries like the Central African Republic, Chad, and Equatorial Guinea, also kept its promise to stop by the end of 2005.5
No country in sub-Saharan Africa was importing or refining leaded gasoline by the beginning of January 2006; 16 countries in the region, including South Africa, had stopped importing or refining leaded gasoline in the previous month. It was just 10 years earlier that South Africa first gave consumers the option of purchasing unleaded gasoline, at a time when the country had some of the highest levels of lead ever recorded in children. It cost refineries in South Africa $1.6 billion to convert their facilities to handle unleaded gasoline. Like many other countries in the region, South Africa also introduced lead replacement petrol (LRP), charging the same price as unleaded gasoline for the same octane, with additives to protect the valve seats of older vehicles designed to run on leaded fuel.6 If the U.S. experience is any guide, decreases in blood-lead levels will occur rather quickly and will have many long-term societal benefits, especially for at least 600,000 children in South Africa whose blood-lead levels were above 10 micrograms per deciliter at the beginning of 2006.7
The overall result a half decade after the Dakar Declaration is impressive. The sub-Saharan region, despite suffering some of the world’s worst poverty and social chaos, has become the first developing region to neither produce nor import leaded gasoline. Although it took many months to remove all of the leaded gasoline from circulation in the last countries to act—Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe— it’s reasonable to characterize 2006 as the year the gasoline in subSaharan Africa became virtually lead free.8
The Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles arising out of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development sees the success in sub-Saharan Africa as the first step in the global phaseout of leaded gasoline. It launched a plan in 2006 to eliminate leaded gasoline from the rest of the developing world by 2008, including economies in transition, with an initial focus on the countries of the Middle East, North Africa, and western Asia. The partnership will then face one of its greatest challenges: the small island states of the Pacific.9 Assuming the partnership’s campaign succeeds, the world will be finally rid of the ecological shadows of Midgley’s tetraethyl lead—85 years after the first public sale of ethyl gasoline.