Few Australians heard about the March meeting in Bonn, Germany, at which a handful of delegates, led by those from the United States and Australia, brought negotiation of an international treaty to eliminate persistent organic pollutants (POPs) to a near standstill.
POPs are a group of chemicals that are toxic, persist in the environment, accumulate in animal tissue, particularly body fat, and can travel great distances. The initial 12 POPs addressed in the treaty are aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, toxaphene, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxin and furans.
The meeting was the fourth of five sessions to draft a treaty targeting POPs, involving 121 countries, but at the session's end the draft was riddled with "bracketed" (contested) language reflecting key unresolved issues.
The three main areas of contention are: whether the treaty's ultimate goal will be elimination, rather than management of POPs; whether the precautionary principle will be integrated into the treaty in a meaningful way; and whether industrialised countries will agree to a binding financial commitment to support underdeveloped countries to implement the treaty.
The financial commitment issue was the most contentious. At one point in the discussions, a US delegate offered a cynic's version of the golden rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"): "He who has the gold, rules".
Many underdeveloped country delegates have repeatedly stated that without a strong financial commitment there can be no treaty. The ultimate success of the negotiations depends in large part on resolving this issue.
In terms of the type of financial mechanism needed, most underdeveloped countries support the establishment of an independent, multilateral fund, while many industrialised countries support the use of existing mechanisms, such as the Global Environment Fund.
Also unresolved are the disagreements about the criteria by which additional POPs chemicals would be identified for global elimination.
At the third negotiating session in September 1999, preliminary agreement was reached to eliminate production and use of aldrin, endrin and toxaphene, without exemptions. It was also agreed to phase out chlordane, dieldrin, heptachlor, mirex and hexachlorobenzene, with country-specific exemptions.
The exact nature of the exemptions, however, has not yet been defined and was not addressed at the Bonn meeting. The US has proposed a number of controversial open-ended "general" exemptions as well.
Agreement has not been reached on the approach for the remaining chemicals on the initial list (DDT, PCBs, dioxins and furans).
More than 80 non-government organisations from around the world participated in both the official session and a pre-meeting weekend workshop organised by the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN). During negotiations, NGOs distributed a regularly updated scorecard reporting delegate positions on elimination and precaution.
In the final scorecard, only a dozen of the 121 participating countries had very weak or negative positions on elimination and precaution. Key among these were Australia, the US, New Zealand and Russia.
The treaty is supposed to be finalised at a December meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. The final IPEN scorecard is available at <http://www.ipen.org>.
[Abridged from Pesticide Action Network North America, 49 Powell St, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA. Email <panna@panna.org> or visit <http://www.panna.org>.]