August 24, 1999                                                                      REPRINT

Environmental Groups Persuade
Mexican Firm to Modify Project

By JONATHAN FRIEDLAND
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

GUERRERO NEGRO, Mexico -- Environmental groups seeking to protect the gray whale have forced a major Mexican company to modify a project after public consultations -- an action no other company in this country has ever taken. The victory is particularly ironic since a cadre of scientists from around the world asserts that the whale is in no danger from the project.

At the heart of the controversy is a salt-making operation in this Baja California town owned by Exportadora del Sal SA, or ESSA, a joint venture between Japan's Mitsubishi Corp. and the Mexican government.

The Laguna San Ignacio project involves the construction of a 116-square-mile system of dikes and ponds where sea water will be evaporated as well as a mile-long dock to load cargo ships. No one disputes that the project would sully the aesthetics of a desert lagoon or that it would bring more traffic to a remote area abutting one of the few United Nations-protected nature reserves on earth. But Jorge Urban, a professor of marine biology at the Universidad Autonomo del Baja California Sur and a leading authority on the gray whale, says the operation "won't affect the distribution or behavior of the gray whale."

He adds, "Nor does it represent a threat to their health."

Mr. Urban, and his colleagues from the Scripps Institution and other top schools, will deliver shortly to Mexico's secretary of the environment, or Semarnap, a multivolume, four-year study on how the salt plant can best be built and operated without hurting the environment. And this week, a team of U.N. scientists is visiting Laguna San Ignacio to make a final recommendation to the world body on whether the salt works endanger the ecosystem of the area.

In consultation with the scientists, ESSA has already made extensive modifications in the design of the project, which will take 10 years to become fully operational. While ESSA's current salt works, which are 45 years old and located 87 miles away in a different lagoon, use diesel pumps to draw water from the sea and giant trucks to harvest and transport the salt, the new project will utilize quieter electric pumps, smaller trucks and a conveyer belt to move the salt. Double dikes will be built to lessen the possibility that concentrated salt water will seep into the lagoon.

Gray whales have taken to the Web.

The highest concentrate solution, which is known as brine and can kill sea life if not immediately diluted, will be leached into deep water at the end of the pier. Environmentalists say that brine dumping at the current salt works has killed fish and sea turtles, but ESSA denies that.

Juan Bremmer, ESSA's director general, points out that ESSA's evaporation ponds contain algae that throw off as much oxygen as a 50,000-acre forest, that thousands of birds come to winter here every year because there is so much to eat and that no whale has ever been harmed by his company.

Still, ESSA has a mixed environmental record. A Semarnap audit of the company last year found 290 separate violations, including the dumping of batteries in the lagoon. (ESSA says that the batteries were used to weigh down channel markers and that it has stopped the practice.)

The company's first environmental-impact study for the Laguna San Ignacio project was rejected by Semarnap in 1995 on the ground that it didn't offer sufficient environmental guarantees. But Aaron Esliman, deputy director of the Vizcaina World Heritage Biosphere, the U.N.-protected reserve within whose "buffer zone" both the current and planned salt works are located, says he believes ESSA has since "learned how expensive it is not to do things right."

'More Secure'

Between the use of better technology and intense public scrutiny "the San Ignacio plant will be more secure and efficient than the existing salt works," he says.

Last year, ESSA generated profit of $10.5 million on $80 million in sales. With the inauguration of the new salt works, Essa would vault ahead of Cargill Co. of the U.S., Akzo Nobel NV of the Netherlands and RTZ Ltd. of Australia to be the world's biggest salt producer.

That ESSA has modified the project after public consultations sways neither the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., nor the International Fund for Animal Welfare in Yarmouth Port, Mass., the two organizations spearheading the environmental campaign.

Using the Internet, direct mail, a newspaper appeal signed by Nobel laureates, and highly publicized visits by actors like Pierce Brosnan and Glenn Close, the groups have generated over 700,000 letters of opposition to the ESSA project.

NRDC director Jacob Scherr says he believes the project is dangerous because it will set a global precedent on locating industrial projects in protected areas. "If you can build a salt mine at Laguna San Ignacio," he says, "you can do almost anything anywhere. The importance of this case goes well beyond the whale habitat."

'Industrial Wasteland'

Yet it is the whales that the environmentalists focus on. A recent NRDC mailing signed by senior staff attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the Laguna San Ignacio project "might have been conceived by a science-fiction catastrophist." If "Mitsubishi has its way," he writes, "the whales may soon return to their last unspoiled breeding grounds only to find an industrial wasteland."

The fact that scientists working on the project believe it is sound doesn't carry much weight with NRDC and IFAW. Mark Spalding, an IFAW consultant and professor of international environmental policy and law at the University of California, San Diego, accuses them of being little more than mercenaries. "The study is a bought- and-paid-for scientific point of view," he says.

That allegation infuriates Paul Dayton, a professor of marine ecology at Scripps and a participant in the $2 million study funded by ESSA. "Science is based on observable, repeatable truth. It is one thing to be critical of interpretations and of overextended data, but this is an outright intent to deceive the public on their part," says Mr. Dayton, who adds "what the NRDC and IFAW are doing is dishonest."

One of the ironies of the whole debate is that far fewer whales go to mate in Laguna San Ignacio than to the Ojo de Liebre lagoon, where the current salt works are located. Burney Le Boeuf, a University of California, Santa Cruz, biologist who has done ESSA-funded whale surveys in both areas, says that since the mid-1950s, the whale population at Ojo de Liebre has actually increased by about 11% annually while it has decreased slightly at Laguna San Ignacio.

Mr. Le Boeuf says he believes the whales prefer Ojo de Liebre, the salt works notwithstanding, because its entrance is wider and deeper than that at Laguna San Ignacio.

One thing is clear, though: The residents of Guerrero Negro, a gritty town of 13,000 where ESSA is by far the biggest employer, don't like being characterized as despoilers of the environment. They are also irritated the NRDC and IFAW have targeted ESSA without offering realistic development alternatives in an area where overfishing has already reduced economic opportunity.

"We are all for taking care of the whales, but we have to feed our kids, too," says Jose Guadalupe MacLesh, who owns a private security business here.

Leonel Cota Montano, the governor of Baja California Sur and a member of a center-left political party that it is normally a staunch backer of ecological causes, takes a similar stance.

"We want the environmentalists here as witnesses, to make sure the project is as sound as possible," he says. "But the area has only one hope for development, and that is salt."