The NGO Shipbreaking Platform reports that at least five shipbreaking workers have been killed and five more severely injured in a series of fatal accidents in Bangladesh in one month only. The Platform calls on the Government of Bangladesh to investigate these accidents and to sanction yards with regular fatal and severe accidents. Moreover, the Platform demands that European ship owners stop selling their end-of-life vessels to the beaching yards of Bangladesh.
“This horrific series of accidents shows that occupational health and safety measures are absent”, says Muhammed Ali Shahin, the Platform’s local coordinator.
“We are witnessing the same accidents again and again: workers are not equipped with safety harnesses and fall to their death. Others are crushed under heavy steel parts as a consequence of the dangerous gravity method by which cut steel sections are simply dropped into the sea and on the beach. Gas cylinders cannot be handled safely on the beach and explosions cause death and terrible burn wounds. As long as ships are scrapped on the beaches, workers will continue to die.”.
Recently, representatives of the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), which is implementing a NORAD-funded project in Bangladesh to improve conditions in the shipbreaking yards, presented their work on assessing the social and economic impacts of the industry in Chittagong. Bangladesh members of the Platform assisted the presentation and are concerned that human rights abuses and pollution caused by the shipbreaking industry will be side-lined in the NORAD-funded study.
“Figures on GDP contribution, tax income and the amount of scrap steel imported through shipbreaking have always been used to legitimise this industry in Bangladesh. What is urgently needed is an honest cost-benefit analysis bringing environmental and human costs of beaching into the equation”, says Patrizia Heidegger, Executive Director of the NGO Shipbreaking Platform.
“What benefit remains once we deduct the costs for massive coastal pollution, the threatened livelihoods of local fisher folk, the accumulation of millions of tons of hazardous waste over decades, dead workers whose families are thrown back into extreme poverty, crippled young men without a future, occupational diseases, and illegal child labour keeping young workers out of school while exposing them so severe health risk?”.
Source: NGO Shipbreaking Platform
