GUBAREVICHI:
On the edge of Belarus’ Chernobyl
exclusion zone, down the road from the signs warning “Stop! Radiation,” a dairy
farmer offers his visitors a glass of freshly drawn milk.
Associated
Press reporters politely decline the drink but pass on a bottled sample to a
laboratory, which confirms it contains levels of a radioactive isotope at
levels 10 times higher than the nation’s food safety limits.
That
finding on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear
accident indicates how fallout from the April 26, 1986, explosion at the plant
in neighboring Ukraine continues to taint life in Belarus.
The
authoritarian government of this agriculture-dependent nation appears
determined to restore long-idle land to farm use — and in a country where
dissent is quashed, any objection to the policy is thin.
The
farmer, Nikolai Chubenok, proudly says his herd of 50 dairy cows produces up to
two tons of milk a day for the local factory of Milkavita, whose brand of
Parmesan cheese is sold chiefly in Russia.
Milkavita
officials called the AP-commissioned lab finding “impossible,” insisting their
own tests show their milk supply contains traces of radioactive isotopes well
below safety limits. Yet a tour along the edge of the Polesie Radioecological
Reserve, a 2,200-square-kilometer (850-square-mile) ghost landscape of 470
evacuated villages and towns, reveals a nation showing little regard for the
potentially cancer-causing isotopes still to be found in the soil.
Farmers
suggest the lack of mutations and other glaring health problems mean
Chernobyl’s troubles can be consigned to history. “There is no danger. How can
you be afraid of radiation?” said Chubenok, who since 2014 has produced milk
from his farm just 45 kilometers (28 miles) north of the shuttered Chernobyl
site, and two kilometers (a mile) from the boundary of a zone that remains
officially off-limits to full-time human habitation.
Chubenok
says he hopes to double his herd size and start producing farmhouse cheese on
site. His milk is part of the Milkavita supply chain for making Polesskiye
brand cheese, about 90 percent of which is sold in Russia, the rest
domestically. The World Bank identifies Russia as the major market for
Belarusian food exports, which represent 15 percent of the country’s export
economy.
Since
rising to power in 1994, President Alexander Lukashenko — the former director
of a state-owned farm — has stopped resettlement programs for people living
near the mandatory exclusion zone and developed a long-term plan to raze empty
villages and reclaim the land for crops and livestock.
The
Chernobyl explosion meant 138,000 Belarusians closest to the plant had to be
resettled, while 200,000 others living nearby left voluntarily. One of the most
prominent medical critics of the government’s approach to safeguarding the
public from Chernobyl fallout,
Dr. Yuri
Bandazhevsky, was removed as director of a Belarusian research institute and
imprisoned in 2001 on corruption charges that international rights groups
branded politically motivated. Since his 2005 parole he has resumed his
research into Chernobyl-related cancers with European Union sponsorship.
Bandazhevsky,
now based in Ukraine, says he has no doubt that Belarus is failing to protect
citizens from carcinogens in the food supply.
“We have
a disaster,” he told the AP in the Ukraine capital, Kiev. “In Belarus, there is
no protection of the population from radiation exposure. On the contrary, the
government is trying to persuade people not to pay attention to radiation, and
food is grown in contaminated areas and sent to all points in the country.”
The milk
sample subjected to an AP-commissioned analysis backs this picture.
The
state-run Minsk Center of Hygiene and Epidemiology said it found strontium-90,
a radioactive isotope linked to cancers and cardiovascular disease, in
quantities 10 times higher than Belarusian food safety regulations allow.
The test,
like others in resource-strapped Belarus, was insufficiently sophisticated to
test for heavier radioactive isotopes associated with nuclear fallout,
including americium and variants of plutonium.
The
Belarusian Agriculture Ministry says levels of strontium-90 should not exceed
3.7 becquerels per kilogram in food and drink. Becquerels are a globally
recognized unit of measurement for radioactivity.
The Minsk
lab informed the AP that the milk sample contained 37.5 becquerels. That
radioactive isotope is, along with cesium-137, commonly produced during nuclear
fission and generates most of the heat and penetrating radiation from nuclear
waste. When consumed, scientists say strontium-90 mimics the behavior of
calcium in the human body, settling in bones.
Milkavita
chief engineer Maia Fedonchuk rejected the findings. “It’s impossible. We do
our own testing.
There
must have been a mix-up,” she said, adding they test samples from every batch
of milk they receive from Chubenok and do an “in-depth” analysis every six
months. She said the plant’s own lab analysis indicates its overall milk supply
contains an average of 2.85 becquerels per kilogram.
Health
officials say the danger level posed by low levels of radioactive isotopes
depends greatly on length of exposure and individual physiology. Notably, the
regional free-trade bloc that includes Belarus and Russia permits higher levels
of strontium-90 in goods of up to 25 becquerels per kilogram, still lower than
that detected in the AP-commissioned test.
The
question is whether anyone in authority is positioned to identify the true
level of risks in produce from farms on the frontier of Belarus’ prohibited
zone.
The
deputy director of Belarus’ Institute of Radiobiology, Natalya Timokhina, said
Belarus permits food producers to conduct their own food safety monitoring and
lacks the lab equipment necessary to identify the presence of americium, which
is estimated to be present in about 2 percent of Belarus’ top soil and is
expected to remain a health risk for another 270 years.
“One-time
ingestion of contaminated food is not very dangerous,” Timokhina said. “What’s
dangerous is the accumulation of radionuclides in the body.”
Ausrele
Kesminiene, a doctor in the cancer research unit of the World Health
Organization, said the consumption of radioactive food is linked chiefly to the
development of cancer in the thyroid, a gland in the neck that produces
body-regulating hormones.
Thyroid
cancer is typically not fatal if diagnosed early. WHO officials say they are
dependent on reports from sister agencies in Belarus to alert them to cancer
clusters or other signs of unresolved Chernobyl-related dangers.
Gregory
Hartl, a WHO spokesman in Geneva, said the agency had no authority to regulate
or oversee food safety — even products exported to other countries — because that
is a domestic responsibility.
“Radiation
effects and the development of cancers and the effects on the region are
something which go on over a long, long period. So we haven’t seen the end of
it,” Hartl said.
“Undoubtedly
there is going to be some increase in cancers.” Hartl said WHO officials have
not received “any red flags” from Belarus.
Environmentalists
critical of Belarus’ Chernobyl cleanup record says that’s hardly surprising,
since the government has funded no machinery to scrutinize corrupt practices in
the food industry.
As a
result, they say, no Belarusian food maker has ever been prosecuted for using
ingredients or producing goods containing excessive levels of radioactive
materials. Irina Sukhiy, founder of the Belarus ecological group Green Network,
said workers in food-industry factories have confidentially told her that
ingredients and products are blended to dilute the impact of potentially
radioactive ingredients from Belarusian suppliers bordering Ukraine.
Such
alleged mixing, she said, reduces the level of potentially carcinogenic
isotopes in dairy products and processed meat below “the allowable dose, but it
is still hazardous to health.” The division of the Belarusian Emergencies
Ministry responsible for cleaning up the consequences of Chernobyl says that
the rate of thyroid cancer in children runs 33 times higher than before the
nuclear blast.
It says
thyroid cancer rates run several times higher in adults. Farmers working both
on the edge of, and inside, the prohibited zone say they see no obvious signs
of nuclear dangers, have been given no guidelines on reducing the risk of
permitting radioactive isotopes into the food chain, and aren’t worried about
this.
Chubenok,
the dairy farmer, said he had never heard of the sorbent substance Ferocin,
known as Prussian Blue, which farmers in Ukraine feed their cattle to
accelerate the removal of the cesium-137 isotope from their digestive tracts.
A tractor
driver on one of his neighboring farms, where an abandoned village has been
demolished to make way for fields of grain, says he’s never seen an official
testing for radiation levels in the soil.
But
Leonid Kravchenko said there was no reason for alarm. “Nobody’s in danger,” he
said. Driving toward Chernobyl and into the nearby Radioecological Reserve
required AP journalists to negotiate painstaking government permission.
Inside
the zone, Belarus has authorized an experimental farm to operate for the past
decade. Today it contains 265 horses, 56 cows and apiaries buzzing with honey
bees.
The farm
director, Mikhail Kirpichenko, said he’s permitted to pursue commercial
ventures, including the sale last year of 100 horses to a Belarusian
manufacturer of kumys, a popular beverage in swathes of Eastern Europe and
Central Asia.
Kumys is
produced from fermented mares’ milk. “We’re not afraid of radiation. We’ve
already gotten used to it,” said Kirpichenko, who suggested that his horses had
to pass a basic eyesight test to confirm their good health. “Horses aren’t
being born with two heads or without legs. There are no such mutations,” he
said. “This Chernobyl syndrome passed long ago.”
AP
