Organized Crime Trashing Naples

"Naples may be the worst-governed city in Europe's worst-governed country. Overflowing garbage has been a problem for almost two decades. Local cancer rates are well above the national average, probably because leaky dumps brimming with illegal toxic waste - courtesy of the Mob - are contaminating the ground water.

Naples, along with the rest of Campania, neighbouring Calabria and Sicily - huge swaths of southern Italy - are more or less ungovernable, so politicians end up wondering: Why bother trying to fix it? Until Italian unification in the 1860s, it was essentially a feudal state. The Neapolitans learned to resent authority. It was this suspicion of central authority that probably made life easier for organized crime [the Camorra], the oldest and most inventive of Italy's main regional Mafia powerhouses.

[The garbage crisis] began in earnest in the 1990s, when the Camorra cleverly solved northern Italy's shortage of dumps and incinerator capacity by trucking the waste south and stuffing it into already-packed landfills and unlicensed sites ranging from farms to caves. (One cavern has been found brimming with the equivalent of 28,000 truckloads of trash.)

The authorities finally caught on in 2002, when the first of the "eco-Mafia" trials began. But the problem persists and people of Campania are suffering. In a 2006 study of 196 municipalities in the region, the World Health Organization found "significant excesses" - up to 12 per cent higher than the national average - for stomach, liver, kidney, lung and pancreatic cancer.

In the town of Acerra, about 20 kilometres northeast of Naples, sheep are dying because of high levels of toxicity found in the land. Sales of the famed mozzarella di bufala, a soft white cheese made from milk from water buffalo, have plummeted because of the outbreak of brucellosis among the animals. The bacterial disease may not be connected to the contaminated land, but consumers are not taking any risks and as many as 60,000 buffalo are being slaughtered.

The fear of poisonous pollution is so high that residents of Pianura, in the hills above Naples, have barricaded the streets and clashed with police to prevent the authorities from reopening an old dump nearby."