Black market CFCs move South. (Environmental Intelligence).

The world's black markets in ozone-depleting CFCs have migrated from industrial to developing countries, according to a new report by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (ETA). The illegal trade in CFCs has been estimated to be 20,000 tons per year, or about 20 percent of global production.

The CFC black market in South Asia and other developing countries has steadily grown since 1999, when the Montreal Protocol first required developing countries to follow North America, Europe, and Japan by beginning to phase out the chemicals. (Production and imports of CFCs were banned in industrial nations in 1996.) In the late 1990s, a crackdown on the illegal trade in Europe and the United States also pushed smugglers to target the "safer" havens of developing countries, where enforcement is often less rigorous.

Many developing countries are still heavily dependent on CFCs for basic domestic needs, and have until 2010 to adopt a complete phase out. (The ban is to be implemented in three stages: a 1999 freeze in production levels, followed by a 50 percent reduction in 2005, and an 85 percent cut by 2007.)

Though the extent of the black market shift to developing countries is not clear at this point, the EIA is beginning to uncover sophisticated smuggling networks in places like India, where an estimated 880 tons of ozone depleting chemicals (12 percent of national consumption) were smuggled from Nepal between early 1999 and March 2000. Nepal charges only a 5 percent import tax on CFCs, while India charges 54 percent, allowing Nepalese smugglers to net a significant profit. "Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg," says EIA Senior Investigator Julian Newman, who has found similar cases in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. China continues to be a main source for illegal supplies, which are channeled through Singapore and Dubai to destinations in many developing countries.