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Late in April the South Korean environment minister Huh Nam Hoon was
forced to resign after a national scandal over pollution. Such an event
would not perhaps have been surprising in an advanced industrial country.
But in Korea, where industrial growth and economic development have been
tenets of faith, the resignation was a political watershed.

What has happened in South Korea is in many ways a warning to other
newly industrialised countries advancing along the road of economic development.
Strong public opinion about the environment is challenging the foundations
on which three decades of progress have been built.

On 20 March eight officials of the Doosan Electro-Materials company
were arrested after it was discovered that some 300 tonnes of phenol had
been dumped into the Naktong river. Phenols, used in the production of printed
circuit boards, are known to cause cancer and to damage the nervous system.
The Naktong river downstream from Taegu, where the plant was situated, supplies
drinking water to around 10 million people and is the main water supply
to Korea’s second biggest city of Pusan in the far south.

In an unprecedented reaction to industrial pollution the citizens of
Taegu took to the streets, shouting that it was an ‘act of homicide’. They
seemed intent on lynching seven local government official, who were also
arrested for trying to cover up for the company.

Throughout southern Korea people stopped drinking tap water and were
forced to drink imported bottled water. The water purification plants along
the river were ordered to stop adding chlorine to the water in an effort
to prevent the formation of chlorphenol.

The political timing could not have been worse for President Roh Tae-woo.
The incident happened on the eve of South Korea’s first local elections
in 30 years. It also followed a bribery scandal involving nine senior members
of the ruling Democratic Liberal Party. Roh Tae-woo’s electoral and political
base included the Taegu region, which also did not help matters.

The environmental protest grew to the point where Roh was forced to
make a sacrificial offering of his environment minister. But this was not
the end of the matter.

The Doosan corporation, like the other great trading companies, or chaebols,
consists of an extraordinary diversity of corporate enterprises. Doosan
makes 80 per cent of the country’s circuit boards and South Korea’s most
popular beer and whisky. Included within the conglomerate are franchises
for Coca Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a number of foreign consumer goods.
The environmental protesters called a boycott of these products, which cost
the corporation dearly. Doosan was also forced to pay around $30 million
in compensation and its chairman Park Yong-kon was forced to resign.

The polluting of the Naktong river started a bush fire of environmental
activism in Korea. Within days of the protest campaign being mounted at
Taegu, public protests in Taejon, in the west of the country, led to the
closure of three food factories charged with polluting the Kum River.

There is now a bill before the Korean parliament which, if passed, will
allow individuals who break environmental laws to be jailed for life. This
has been regarded as symbolic. There appears to be no government commitment
as yet to raising environmental standards to conform with those of Europe,
the US or Japan.

What happened in Korea was perhaps inevitable, a consequence of the
country’s growing affluence, which has been accompanied by a higher level
of education, a more liberal press and greater political freedom.

In reality, Korea’s industrial revolution depended on the Korean people,
under military rule, accepting industrial conditions, environmental damage
and levels of pollution that no one in the West would be prepared to tolerate.
In Korea’s case the benefits speak for themselves. Koreans have the highest
standard of living in the region after the Japanese. The course they have
taken and the price they have paid is one many other developing countries
are prepared to pay in the hope of catching up.

In 1962 South Korea was a poor war-torn agricultural country with a
per capita GNP of around $82 and a trade deficit of $335.3 million. By
1989 per capita GNP had risen to $4968 and the country had a trade surplus
of $4.6 billion. In 1990/91 this surplus will disappear and growth will
fall to around 9 per cent.

As a consequence of rapid industrialisation the population of the ancient
capital Seoul has grown from 3.4 million in 1962 to just over 10 million.
Inevitably the city’s infrastructure cannot cope. Traffic jams seem to be
a permanent feature of the inadequate road system. Making a simple journey
of only a few kilometres can take hours.

A pall of photochemical pollution hangs over the city and in recent
years has restricted vision to an average of one kilometre. The Han River
which in the 1960s provided residents of Seoul with fresh water for domestic
use and for bathing in summer, is now so polluted it is unsafe. Many of
the streams running into it from the surrounding suburbs are little more
than sewers. The level of sulphur dioxide in the air over residential districts
of Seoul in 1987 was 0.183 parts per million, well above that of comparable
cities in the developed world and significantly higher than the 0.02 that
the WHO recommends.

Until recently concern about the environment was regarded as a luxury
of rich countries. An editorial in a national paper The Choson Daily News
reassured its readers. ‘As there is a lot of humidity and it often rains
torrentially in Korea, garbage and toxic wastes naturally rot or are washed
away. Therefore they are not likely to be harmful to the environment.’

Given that Korea’s industrial development has come about as a result
of the transfer of technology primarily from Japan and the US it is somewhat
surprising that this technology did not reflect the increasingly stringent
pollution controls demanded in these countries. In reality, as Jung Wk Kim
from the Graduate School of Environmental Studies at Seoul National University
has shown, South Korea in the 1960s offered not only a cheap source of labour
but also an ideal location for highly polluting industries.

Jung’s study was performed in the Ulsan/Onsan industrial complex, on
the southeast coast. The region was chosen as a site for industrial development
in 1972. The object was to attract foreign investment and the transfer of
technology from developed countries. In 1985 direct foreign investment in
Ulsan/Onsan was $170 million. Of this 75.2 per cent was from Japan, 13.7
per cent from the US. This investment was primarily in chemical and petrochemicals
plants. Twenty seven out of thirty-one of these foreign owned plants were
highly polluting. In other words 87 per cent of the foreign investment in
the Ulsan/Onsan complex was for industries which were becoming increasingly
costly in the developed world because of more strin-gent controls on their
emissions.

By the late 1960s Japanese industry was smarting from the public outrage
that accompanied the trial of the chemicals firms at Minimata. Chisso Chemicals
and Showa Denko were both found guilty of dumping mercury into Minamata
Bay. The mercury contaminated fish which were eaten by local people. The
resulting mercury poisoning caused appalling deformities in children and
what came to be known a ‘Minimata disease’.

As Japan tightened its controls on pollution in the wake of this case
it made economic sense to export the old technology to the Third World.

In South Korea, in the 1960s and 1970s, as in many under-developed countries
today, the government’s eagerness for rapid economic development led to
risks of environmental damage and impaired public health.

At the Ulsan/Onsan Industrial complex the pollution led to what became
known as Onsan disease, a condition which attacked the nervous system. The
condition became so bad that by 1988 the government was forced to evacuate
37 600 people living close to the complex. Companies in the complex have
also been forced to pay around $3 million in compensation to farmers and
fishermen whose livelihoods have been affected by the pollution.

It would in most cases be unjust to simply blame the South Korean government,
after all poverty is just as bad for public health as regular doses of industrial
pollutants. Hyung-Kook Kim the author of a study of environmentalism in
South Korea commented recently: ‘When polluting smoke was emitted into the
surroundings, all the media considered the smoke as a symbol of prosperity
instead of a danger to their habitat.’ South Korea’s development-oriented
dictatorship, which continued until early 1988, generally took no preventive
measures and anyone drawing public attention to environmental pollution
was usually stigmatised as ‘an antisocial person’.

After the 1960’s, the decade of development, political power rested
on economic growth. ‘It was common practice to con-sider political interests
in environmental policy as a drag on economic growth,’ says Hyung-Kook.

In the 1990s the game has begun to change. First, because of a shift
in the political character of South Korea’s government from a military dictatorship
towards a pluralist democracy. This has brought with it open public distaste
for the choking atmosphere of the major cities and the very real risk to
health from polluting industries as witnessed at Taegu.

The South Korean government and other newly industrialised countries
face a real dilemma as demands for tighter environmental controls grow in
Europe, the US and Japan. For instance, the European Parliament’s proposed
legislation to clean up waterways is likely to lead to a 20 per cent increase
in the cost of waste disposal. This will be passed on to consumers in the
form of higher prices for industrial goods which could bring advantages
to countries like Korea which have less stringent controls.

If this happens there could be further demands for tariff protection
by European and American companies fighting for survival against the Japanese
and South Korean, whom they accuse of unfair trading practices such as ‘dumping’
or selling goods at uncompetitive prices to capture markets. It could also
strain still further the Uruguay Round of the GATT talks, which are already
bogged down over European agricultural subsidies.

This change in the global economic climate may have the effect of discouraging
transnational corporations from exploiting the ‘low cost’ environments of
the Third World for their dirtier industries. But movement in this direction
would be liable to hit hardest poorer countries where industrial infrastructure
is now based on low standards of pollution control. Fortunately for South
Korea its level of economic growth – at around 10 to 12 per cent a year
– has been so impressive that improving emission standards would not be
too great a burden. The same may not be true for other struggling economies
such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and even China.

Although the situation has come to a head in South Korea, there is a
crisis of industrial pollution throughout East Asia which has led to some
interesting proposals for cooperation. In the same way that the West Germans
have decided it is in their own best interests to help Poland to clean up
its power stations and factories to reduce acid rain, the South Koreans
are now proposing to help the Chinese. The prevailing winds that blow fine
dust from Western China across the Yellow Sea to Korea now bring with them
sulphur and nitrogen. There is growing evidence that the resulting acid
rain is causing serious damage to South Korean forests and agricultural
land.

As the new wave of environmental consciousness sweeps through South
Korea, the country’s chaebols are moving offshore to take advantage of the
cheaper environments of China and the Soviet Far East. It will be interesting
to see whether the environmental cost South Korea had to bear in the 1960s
and 1970s will now simply be passed on to the new kids on the block.

John Merson lectures in the School of Science and Technology Studies
at the University of New South Wales. He is a member of the Australian Broadcasting
Commission’s Science Unit.