The United Nations has warned that the trade in secondhand vehicles, which are popularly referred to as Tokunbo in Nigeria, is a largely unregulated one--posing serious health and environmental hazards to the developing world. 

A report in the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) details the global trade in secondhand cars, which has historically attracted little scrutiny. 

According to the New York Times which cites the UNEP report, between 2015 and 2018, the United States, the European Union and Japan exported 14 million used passenger cars abroad, with 70 percent ending up in low-income countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

In countries like Kenya and Nigeria, more than 90 percent of cars bought today are secondhand imports.

The report also found that many of the cars exported to low-income countries don’t meet basic minimum standards for air pollution and are often unsafe to drive.

Worse, there are few rules in place to govern the quality of the vehicles exported to Africa. 

In the Netherlands for instance, investigators found that some cars have had their pollution controls removed and harvested for the valuable metals they contain, before they are shipped abroad.

“What we found is not a pretty sight,” said Rob De Jong, who is one of the authors of the report.

Jong who is also head of UNEP’s Sustainable Mobility Unit said; “Most of these vehicles are very old, very dirty, very inefficient and unsafe.”

Regulators in the Netherlands released the results of an investigation which showed that most of the secondhand cars the country exported to Africa in 2018 lacked valid certificates of roadworthiness. Other cars had their catalytic converters, which filters out air pollutants, stripped of valuable metals like platinum.

It was also found that the spike in road accidents in low-income countries like Nigeria has everything to do with the poor quality of secondhand cars imported from richer countries.

If left unsupervised, the global trade in used vehicles could have stark consequences for both climate change and public health in the decades ahead, the report’s authors added.

The report looked at 146 countries that import used cars and concluded that 86 of them had “weak” or “very weak” laws around the age or environmental performance of used vehicles entering their markets. 

The report’s authors didn’t call for a ban on the trade of used cars, which they consider beneficial to poorer countries, given the disparity in purchasing power across the Atlantic.

However, they recommend that richer countries do more to coordinate on minimum standards.

In the European Union for instance, cars built after 2005 have to comply with Euro 4 standards, which aims to slash the most harmful pollutants in car exhaust by more than 70 percent when juxtaposed with older models. 

These pollutants, such as fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, have been linked to increased risk of heart attacks, lung cancer and asthma. 

Europe has further tightened its pollution rules for new cars in 2009 and 2014.

Most used cars shipped to Africa still don’t meet these standards, although 15 West African nations, including Nigeria and Ghana, recently agreed to adopt the equivalent of Euro 4 rules for all imported cars starting in 2021, New York Times reports. 

Spokespersons of the Ministry of Transportation and Vehicle Inspection Office (VIO) in Nigeria did not immediately respond to requests for comments for this story.