It has nearly been ten winters since Ulaanbaatar (Red Hero) turned into Utaanbaatar (Smog Hero). Statistics keep showing that more and more people, especially young children and the elderly, are dying because of the toxic smog. Those who have the means are migrating like birds to spend the winter in a warmer country, the rest are counting days to greet the spring and stop coughing up the toxic air they breathe in.
The governments and mayors we have had spent years talking about the problem, implementing dozens of programs, and expending hundreds of billions of tugrugs. However, the smog this winter has been particulary thick and black, leaving our city sinking in toxic air and making it difficult to even see who is walking beside you.
The majority of people whose health has been damaged by the smog are kids. Sadly, they are unable to find a hospital bed regardless of whether they are going to a public hospital or a private one. Our children are spending days and nights sleeping in a hospital corridor. At the same time, our government is strangled by debt, and our private sector has been weakened because of increases in taxes. People who are unemployed are now escaping to other countries, hoping that they will find a job.
Tales of fighting the smog
The tale of fuel-efficient stoves: Seventy per cent of Ulaanbaatar’s smog comes from stoves in the ger district. A World Bank report shows that the low-income families who reside in ger districts spend 40 per cent of their income on coal and fuel in order to overcome the winter that gets as cold as -30 degrees. Under Former President Ts.Elbegdorj’s sponsorship, the government distributed more than 100,000 stoves to ger district households in 2011 working with the Millenium Challenge Corporation from the United States, and another 40,000 stoves in 2013 in cooperation with the World Bank. These were good quality, fuel-efficient stoves brought from Turkey, and they were sold at 25,400 MNT each (a heavily subsidized price of 93 per cent). In the beginning, this really helped air pollution levels to come down. However, it did not take long for the capital city to sell the stoves for a much more expensive price to rural areas. The political group that embezzled this money saw a happy ending for themselves after only one or two people were sentenced for misusing the funds of the Clean Air project.
The tale of replanning: The Democratic Party won the capital city for the first time in 2012. They started a programme to do replanning in the ger district, promising that every family who lived in a ger would get an apartment and that the Ulaanbaatar administration would move to Bayankhoshuu, which was the area with the most pollution then. Only a few companies, among which was a company owned by the son of the mayor, attempted to build apartment blocks in ger districts and swap people’s land for apartment units. People were not gullible enough to give up their most valuable asset – their land. So, a very small number of households obtained an apartment unit while hundreds of others were left with neither their land nor an apartment. This has spelt the end of the tale of replanning. Mongolians are building apartments only for the rich, but not for low-income families. The key characters of this tale have also seen a nice ending for themselves after sacrificing one or two of their circle.
The tale of free electricity: In 2016, J.Erdenebat’s government commenced a project to remove nighttime electricity fees from ger districts and provide heat from electrical sources to 180,000 households. Despite the lighting problems that existed, let alone electrical heating, ger district households stopped burning coal after 9pm. But what happened was that the emission of most toxic pollutants started occuring by 6am when families restarted burning coal when electrical tolls came back online. This started emitting more toxicity than would have been the case if coal was burnt all night. As a result, the toxic smog was too great to disperse during the day, and the black cloud above the city thickened. On top of that, if every family used electricity as the program intended, the two power stations would not have met their operational requirements. Needless to say, no one was held responsible for this poorly planned programme that started off based on miscalculations and delivered no results.
The new tale of declaring an emergency: This is a brand new tale that is only about to start. Racing with the New Year, our new President announced that an emergency will be declared because of air pollution, and the parliament should disband if things do not get better by the Lunar New Year. He wants to solve a problem that could not be resolved in ten years within ten days. We have now found ourselves as spectators to a political tragedy that would disband the parliament, if not the smog.
Fighting the cause, not symptoms
It would be smart to not fight the smog, which is merely a symptom, but instead to look at the cause of the problem. Altough Ulaanbaatar’s toxic smog is coming from stoves, the reason why we have stoves in the first place is poverty. If we dig deeper, it is the poverty in our countryside. If our policy on rural development had encouraged people to work in cooperatives and acquire ownership of their pasture and winter shelters rather than livestock, the countryside would not have been empty and people would not have flocked to the city.
Furthermore, if Ulaanbaatar’s administrations over the years had not turned land into tools to get wealthy and had planned zone by zone and built infrastructure in a smart way, everything including the traffic, the rhythm of our life, and the appearance of our city, would have been completely different.
We would not have found ourselves in this situation today even had our enemies devised the policy on rural development and urban planning. Our true enemy that is causing the most damage is the corruption in the government and every one of us who are sitting idle and watching our livelihood and well-being deteriorate instead of fighting and eradicating the corruption.
No one from those people who have caused this damage has been held accountable, and they are now trying to guide how we live our lives. This is the real problem. The tales of fighting smog will never end unless the people learn the real truth and assume complete oversight on what the government is doing. How many more lives are we meant to lose because of the toxic smog as the problem gets forgotten over summer and sees empty words during the winter?
2018.01.10
Trans. by B.Amar