WE THINK it is contemptible that garbage should be elevated to the level of commercial transaction between nations. The contempt is even more offensive if it involves a rich nation taking advantage of the poverty of the receiving country; in short, the United States, for example, paying any willing Caribbean nation to take its garbage.
There is no indication, as far as we are aware, that this type of transaction is officially sanctioned. According to a report in Friday's Gleaner, the chairman of the National Waste Management Authority, Alston Stewart, said that two years ago US-based private interests had approached the Government with a proposal to dump its solid waste here. The proposal was rejected then.
Apparently, the proposal is being floated anew. Mr. Stewart's reaction this time is dismissive, but somewhat tentative. It is along the lines that the United States had more land space, technology and resources to deal with the disposal problem. Even more pertinent is the potential health risks that would be involved in accepting solid waste that can harbour unknown diseases and toxic debris.
We would have preferred the proposal to be spurned outright, without equivocation; which we think is what Mr. Stewart felt when he said that "something is wrong with the proposal".
As we understand it, both Barbados and Guyana have rejected similar offers from the United States.
At the official level a sense of superiority is to be expected from the world's only superpower in matters of diplomacy and international relations.
Perhaps the clearest exposition of that attitude came from President George W. Bush himself in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the subsequent declaration of a worldwide "war on terror", the President said with a touch of arrogance that the rest of the world should be either "pro-U.S. or pro-terrorist".
Matters of solid waste disposal is hardly the stuff of diplomacy. But private interests acting without diplomatic sensitivity can do harm to the relations which even a powerful nation must have with 'third world' nations in the shadow of its influence.
