A lot of people are spouting a load of nonsense about Bhopal, presumably in order to celebrate the anniversary of the tragedy there. "Hooray, it’s the anniverary of a tragedy, we can go bash a multinational! That’ll be worthy and tasteful."
The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal made pesticides to be used on Indian crops. Government tariffs made it economically unviable to import pesticides from abroad. Union Carbide set up a plant in India not to dodgily outsource production to somewhere cheap, but because it was the only way to do business in India. Famine was eradicated in India after the introduction of synthetic pesticides.
The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal met all Indian safety standards. It was designed and built by local engineers, again largely due to the protectionist regulations that banned foreigners from doing much of anything in India.
Following the tragedy, Union Carbide USA sold its Indian subsidiary and used all the money plus additional cash from its US operations to pay half a billion dollars to the victims. According to Union Carbide’s estimate of 3000 fatalities and 3000 non-fatal but disabled casualties, then this works out as $83,000 per head. According to pressure groups’ estimates of 15,000 fatalities and 45,000 disabilities, this still works out as $8000 per head.
The first figure is 80 years’ income. The second figure is 8 years’ income. While it may seem like a pittance in the west, it really isn’t – and if the plant had belonged to an Indian company, then the victims would have got nothing.
The Indian government enormously ballsed-up allocating the money, to the extent that many survivors died before they received a penny. This is not Union Carbide (or its new parent company Dow Chemical)’s fault. If you’re scandalised by Bhopal, go and protest against the Indian government’s incompetence – this is, after all, the thing that has kept India poor for the last 50 years.
Protesting against Dow for daring to buy a company that dared to do business helping people (yes, and obviously making money) in the developing world is somewhat pathetic.
NB it’s not only acceptable, but morally correct, to apply less stringent safety standards in India than in the US. In India, poverty is the biggest cause of premature death. In the US, it is not. Building a dangerous factory in India that makes its workers rich enough to afford food and medicine is better than not doing so (this is also why developing-world sweatshops are *good* – the people who work there are less abysmally badly-off than if they didn’t work in developing-world sweatshops).