Investors Fault Dow Chemical for 'Hiroshima of Chemical Industry'
Investors Fault Dow Chemical for 'Hiroshima of Chemical Industry'
Jeffrey Allen, Oneworld.net, November 26, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Nearly 20 years after what is considered by many to have been the worst industrial disaster in history, investors are calling on the U.S. corporation they hold responsible to do more to address the considerable remaining environmental, social, and health concerns of survivors.

A shareholder resolution was filed Tuesday with the Dow Chemical Company on behalf of the Brethren Benefit Trust (the financial arm of the Church of the Brethren), which owns $330,000 worth of stock in the company, asking Dow to describe what it has done to address the lingering concerns of the estimated 120,000 to 150,000 people left chronically ill by a gas leak at the Union Carbide pesticide factory in India in 1984.

Dow, which now owns Union Carbide, has been admonished by activists for doing little to clean up the contaminated site, failing to release information about the gas that doctors need to better treat patients, and inadequately compensating survivors and their families.

"When Dow Chemical bought Union Carbide two years ago, it inherited not only its assets but the liability and karma attached to Carbide's lack of accountability for the Bhopal chemical disaster," said Gary Cohen of the Environmental Health Fund, in a statement about the shareholder resolution released by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal.
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