The World Health Organization (WHO) last week issued a tabulation of pollution in 1,082 cities around the world showing that Ahvaz was the most polluted and Sanandaj the third worst; all 18 Iranian cities tabulated were in the dirtiest 11 percent.
The WHO used as its measure the volume of particulate matter, which is largely sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide from auto exhausts and industry.
Bahram Sanai, the chief of Iran’s Meteorological Organization, told the Fars news agency it was all the fault of the Americans.
“One of the reasons for the increasing amount of dust in Iran is the presence of occupying forces in Iraq, which has destroyed the agriculture and dried the tidal flats,” he said Saturday.
He said the bombardment of Iraq by US warplanes flattened the country and loaded the atmosphere with dust.
But the Americans have not dropped any significant number of bombs on Iraq for years. Furthermore, the drying out of Iraq’s famed marshes was done under Saddam Hussein, who wanted to stop opponents from taking refuge there. After the Americans took over in 2003, water flow was returned to the marshes.
There is a major problem with dust storms blowing into Iran from the Iraqi desert. But that isn’t what WHO was reporting about. It was talking about pollutants, not mere dust.
Curiously, Iran’s Environmental Protection Organization (EPO), which is the agency that is supposed to be concerned about air pollution, has remained silent in the week since the WHO report was released. None of the media in Iran has made a major issue of the WHO report and it appears it will simply be ignored.
Mohammad-Javad Mohammadizadeh, national director of the EPO, announced Monday that Iran and Iraq had signed an agreement to spend $1.2 billion to suppress the dust storms over the next five years.
He said nothing about the dust problem being linked to the Americans.
He said instead that the two sides will first try to find a “biological solution” to the problem, presumably meaning there will be a search for flora that could be sown in the desert to fix the sand in place. If that does not work, he said, “oil mulch” will be poured over the sand to keep it from taking flight in windstorms.
Neither proposal is new. Neither has worked very well in previous applications around the world.
