NADALEEN SINGH

Prof Ju­lian Ken­ny has said that re­vis­ing the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Act 2000 will in­ter­fere with the pow­ers of the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Au­thor­i­ty (EMA). Ken­ny was re­spond­ing yes­ter­day to a state­ment Prime Min­is­ter Patrick Man­ning made on Sun­day dur­ing a tele­vised pro­gramme with jour­nal­ists, An­tho­ny Wil­son, act­ing ed­i­tor-in-chief of the Guardian, Juhel Browne of State-owned CN­MG and Hans Hanoomans­ingh of Her­itage Ra­dio, that the rul­ing Peo­ple's Na­tion­al Move­ment will re­vise the En­vi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment Act if it wins the gen­er­al elec­tion.

The hour-long pro­gramme, or­gan­ised by Gov­ern­ment In­for­ma­tion Ser­vices Ltd and ti­tled, Prime Min­is­ter, Un­plugged. "It is bad and back­ward (to re­vise the Act). When some­one ap­plies for a cer­tifi­cate of en­vi­ron­men­tal clear­ance (CEC), the pub­lic has a right to be con­sult­ed on two lev­els: one, in the terms of ref­er­ence and, sec­ond, to ex­am­ine the re­sults of that as­sess­ment," Ken­ny said. "He (Man­ning) wants to make the EMA a 'rub­ber stamp' for the Gov­ern­ment to do what­ev­er they want, like Ude­cott (Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion of T&T) or any of the State's spe­cial pur­pose en­ter­prise. Ac­tivist Wayne Kublals­ingh said re­form­ing the Act should not be a po­lit­i­cal act.

"The re­form of the Act has to be that the Prime Min­is­ter and the line min­is­ter must get out of the busi­ness of the EMA and let the EMA run its busi­ness, ac­cord­ing to sci­ence and law, and not po­lit­i­cal in­ter­fer­ence. "The prob­lem is not with EMA; it is with Man­ning's ap­proach to in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion. He has stran­gled his own ba­by, and now he is blam­ing oth­ers for the death of that ba­by." Kublals­ingh said the Act needs to be re­formed, but it must be done in the right way.

He said the EMA has al­ways ap­proved CEC for projects, such as four in­dus­tri­al es­tates and the steel mill in Clax­ton Bay. "The EMA didn't refuse a CEC and they did not de­ny the cer­tifi­cate. They sim­ply said re­lo­cate the smelter. "The facts show that the EMA has been work­ing hand-in-hand for the Gov­ern­ment's heavy gas-based in­dus­tri­al mas­ter plan. That plan has col­lapsed not be­cause of the EMA. Out of all, the smelter is be­fore the court. That is not be­cause of the EMA, but be­cause of Man­ning," Kublals­ingh said.