A Poisoned Sea

Clinching a cleanup treaty

In Naples 19 people die in a cholera epidemic caused by eating contaminated mussels. In Istanbul fishermen complain that their catch diminishes with every voyage. In Spain an outbreak of typhoid fever in a coastal town sends 20 people to the hospital. And along France's famous Cote d'Azur black pollution flags and even police lines keep bathers off beaches.

Over the past decade, the alarms have sounded with ever greater frequency and urgency. Pollution in the celebrated body of water that was the cradle of Western civilization endangered those who make their home or living along its shores. Outbreaks of dysentery, viral hepatitis and typhoid have become common in some areas. Scientists in the know joke that to order oysters in a restaurant in Rome or Naples is to play "Italian roulette." And it is all happening in the world's most popular vacation playground: the Mediterranean, host to 100 million tourists a year.

The Mediterranean is a closed sea, its only significant outlet being the Straits of Gibraltar. Nearly 90% of the sewage that pours into its waters is untreated. The Naples sewer system is so antiquated that authorities cannot even locate the pipes. In Athens, 60% of the city is not connected to the central sewage system. Pollution is most severe along the French and Italian Rivieras, where the chemical wastes of thousands of factories are flushed directly into the sea or carried there by major rivers. The chances of getting all 18 countries that border the Mediterranean to agree on methods of controlling pollution seemed remote. But five years ago, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) decided to try. Last week at a conference in Athens that climaxed a remarkable feat of scientific diplomacy, the U.N. team won the approval of all but one of the Mediterranean nations (xenophobic Albania) for a treaty outlining ways to clean up the sea.

The environmentalists had to overcome the mutual mistrust of such traditional antagonists as Israel and Syria, Greece and Turkey. Shrewdly, the U.N. team put off seeking consensus on such volatile issues as costs and set about gathering evidence first. It designed and helped fund a regional pollution monitoring system that included 84 laboratories to document conditions in the waters. The labs turned up some hopeful signs: the absorption capacity of the Mediterranean proved to be greater than many experts had imagined, and pollution levels were not uniformly critical. Concluded Stjepan Keckes, the Yugoslav marine scientist who headed the U.N. team: "The Mediterranean is sick, but it is not dead and it is not even dying."

Some regions, like Greece's Saronic Gulf and the northern part of the Adriatic, were found to be hazardous, but others turned out to be relatively pure. The biggest polluters, not surprisingly, are France, Italy and Spain. Thus they will have to bear the biggest part of the cost of the more than $10 billion program. The proposed treaty includes a blacklist of banned substances (for example, mercury, cadmium, radioactive materials) and a gray list of those that will be tolerated in specified quantities. All factories and sewage systems will be required to install antipollution devices, and new installations will have to conform to treaty specifications.

The U.N. team was a bit surprised by its success. Most important was the fact that the countries involved had come to realize that they could not afford to procrastinate any longer. Said Keckes: "It will cost them less to take these antipollution measures than to pay for the consequences of pollution. Recognition of their own economic interests, especially the cost to their tourist industries if they don't clean up, was surely an incentive."

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