The top Environmental Protection Agency official in Puerto Rico said Friday that Bioculture Puerto Rico Inc. has met the federal requirements to build its monkey breeding facility in Guayama.
However, the Israeli company had to yet to inform federal officials whether it intends to build a treatment plant to process the monkey waste generated at the facility under construction in the Pozo Hondo area of Guayama, said Carl Axel Soderberg, EPA director for Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.
“Federal regulations require any construction to have an erosion and sedimentation control permit during the building process. We investigated and they comply with EPA requirements,” Soderberg said.
The EPA official said Bioculture Puerto Rico Inc. may still need to seek a federal discharge permit depending on how they plan to handle monkey waste.
Soderberg said if the company aims to use a treatment plant it would need to seek a permit through the EPA’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) or Prevention of Serious Deterioration (PSD) programs.
If Bioculture opts to use septic tanks, it would be up the commonwealth Environmental Quality Board to grant a permit allowing that process.
Some residents of Guayama are vowing to fight the planned monkey-breeding facility for fear that the primates will escape and overrun their community.
The facility, which will supply monkeys to pharmaceutical companies for research, was cleared for construction this summer.
Locals in Guayama said they don’t want their southern coastal town to become another Lajas — a town in southeast Puerto Rico that today is plagued by monkeys that escaped decades ago from research facilities.
But Mauritius-based company Bioculture’s local development and community coordinator, Jacinto Rivera Solivan said the “probability of a monkey escaping is zero.”
Hundreds of people are signing an online petition asking Gov. Luis Fortuño and Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi to halt the project, community leader Roberto Brito said.
Construction of the 13,000-square-foot facility was temporarily suspended because Bioculture did not have the appropriate environmental permits, said Francisco González Suárez, Guayama city planner.
They were awarded the permits last month, he said, but residents question why public hearings were not held.
The facility will hold at least 3,000 macaque monkeys that will be sold for up to $3,000 each, González said.
Bioculture had considered building the facility in south Florida, but opted for Puerto Rico because the island’s pharmaceutical companies could test the animals without having to transport them elsewhere, Rivera said. The monkeys will be used to test a range of medications for humans, possibly even swine flu vaccines.
The facility will have two emergency rooms for injured or sick monkeys. It also will feature cages with a triple-lock system, meaning that workers will have to access two doors before reaching the monkeys, he said.
Animal activists have called the project cruel and warn it will damage Puerto Rico’s image.
Hundreds of monkeys from the new breeding facility will be killed when they are no longer needed for research, said Hope Ferdowsian, research policy director of the Washington D.C.-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
Authorities in Puerto Rico have resorted to shooting monkeys they catch that belong to an estimated population of 1,000 running around the Lajas Valley in the island’s southwest region.
The monkeys arrived in the 1960s and ‘70s after escaping labs on nearby islands. They are blamed for causing nearly $300,000 in damage each year as they plunder crops such as pineapples and melons.
Puerto Rico is so anxious to get rid of those runaway primates that officials sent a group of them to a zoo in Iraq earlier this year.
Meanwhile, almost 1,000 monkeys run wild on Cayo Santiago, an uninhabited, 37-acre islet off Puerto Rico’s coast that supplies primates for behavioral research at the site as well as AIDS experiments at the University of Puerto Rico and top U. S. laboratories.
They are provided with food and water, and are tattooed for identification, but otherwise live freely, as they would in the wild. Rhesus macaques are the main species used to test AIDS vaccines, but they’re in short supply.
By CB Online Staff
http://www.caribbeanbusinesspr.com/news03.php?nt_id=32906&ct_id=1
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