Chemical treaty to extend scope
September 20, 2004
A week-long international conference on regulating hazardous chemicals gets under way in Geneva on Monday.
Delegates from more than 100 countries will meet to discuss extensions to the Rotterdam Convention, which came into force earlier this year.
The convention aims to make sure that countries importing, manufacturing or using dangerous chemicals are fully aware of the risks of handling them.
It currently covers 22 pesticides and five industrial substances.
The Rotterdam treaty grew out of discussions that began in the 1980s.
There was concern that some importing countries, many of them developing nations, did not have the expertise to handle many of the most dangerous synthetic compounds.
Some pesticides that have been banned or whose use has been severely restricted in industrialised countries are still marketed and used in developing countries.
In a number of cases, stockpiles have been amassed which have been leaching into the environment.
These include persistent organic pollutants (POPs), highly toxic compounds that remain in the environment for long periods of time, travelling thousands of km from their point of release and building up in the tissues of animals and people.
Governments first established the prior informed consent procedure (Pic) which required the exporters of a list of hazardous substances to obtain the prior informed consent of the importer before proceeding with trade.
The Rotterdam Convention has built on this work and the Swiss meeting marks the first gathering of the signatories since the treaty came into force in February.
The "conference of the parties" will focus on which additional substances should be covered; there is a list of 15 up for discussion, including several forms of asbestos, petrol additives containing lead, and more pesticides.
The convention is administered by two United Nations agencies: the Environment Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The FAO says that as the current locust swarms in north Africa demonstrate, pesticides are still needed in agriculture.
What treaties like this can do, it says, is make sure that people using them know the hazards and are able to protect themselves.
This article was first published on the BBC News site.
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