A Magnificent Success: POPs Treaty Turns Off the Tap

But the next Monday morning, a different message flashed up: "YES! WE HAVE A POPs TREATY!" Further breath-taking news revealed that, after an all night last ditch negotiating session, the nations of the world had agreed on a text, and environmental activists reported that the Treaty was good. The veteran warriors of Greenpeace indulged in rare optimism. "This Treaty turns off the tap on POPs for future generations," one rejoiced.

"Persistent organic pollutants threaten the health and well-being of humans and wildlife in every region of the world," said John Buccini, the Canadian government official who chaired the talks. "This new treaty will protect present and future generations from the cancers, birth defects, and other tragedies caused by POPs."

Executive Director Klaus Toepfer of the United Nations Environment Programme, which organized the negotiations, applauded the strong international regime that has been established for promoting global action on POPs. "This is a sound and effective treaty that can be updated and expanded over the coming decades to maintain the best possible protection against POPs," he said.

In a joint statement, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) and the Chlorine Chemistry Council (CCC) endorsed the Treaty for its "realism" and "pragmatism," especially the weight-of-science approach to adding new chemicals to the international ban.

Close to forty years after the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first sounded the alarm about persistent man made chemicals and their wide-ranging harm, specifically DDT, the nations of the world had concluded negotiations under the United Nations for a global treaty on POPs — Persistent Organic Pollutants. [See Looking into Pandora's Box of POPs: Towards Global Action on Persistent Toxics, Watershed Sentinel, August/September 1995. Not available on this website.] In contrast to the fiasco at the Kyoto Climate Change negotiations, not only was agreement reached, but environmentalists and health activists are still agreeably surprised at how close the final text came to our "wish list."

Brooks Yeager, head of the US delegation, also expressed surprise at the outcome: "We got a good result. It's almost surprising, but I think everyone is happy. Environmentalists are happy with it, and industry can work with it." He told the Chemical Market Reporter that the final precautionary language has a "scientific flavor," making it acceptable.

Thanks largely to the efforts of the European Union and Developing countries, elimination of the world's worst actors in the man-made chemical family is the stated goal of the Treaty, rather than the slow-release control measures favoured by the companies, the United States, Japan, Australia and Canada.

Stephane Gingras of Great Lakes United, attended the negotiations in South Africa as a member of the Canadian delegation. He says Canada "played a great role for a change" by not blocking progressive proposals such as the European one on the inclusion of the precautionary principle in the requirements of the convention. Canada promoted compromise on this issue so that both strong science and the Precautionary Principle were included in the text.

Gingras said three 'drivers' explained "why we got such a good Treaty." First, the abject failure of traditional risk assessment in the spread of mad cow disease led the Europeans to want the precautionary principle made effective in the text. Second, many countries were determined to succeed after the breakdown of the Kyoto Climate change negotiations. And, thirdly, says Gingras, "We are very efficient and our native friends are even more efficient than we are …"

The concentration of POPs from all over the world in the Arctic food chain had made them a priority for Environment Canada and northern aboriginal peoples. Native organizations had devoted special attention to cultivating Ottawa's understanding of this problem, which is of more than academic interest to people who live in the North and eat their traditional "country food."

The POPs talks were also the subject of a special organizing effort by an international network of toxics activists who painstakingly developed a platform acceptable to both "North" and "South," environmental, indigenous and health activists from developed and developing countries. This solidarity was to stand in good stead over the two years of negotiations, as IPEN (International POPs Elimination Network) members sponsored teach-ins and government briefings across the world. Physicians for Social Responsibility held the secretarial and organizing functions, while Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund both made the POPs Treaty organizational priorities, along with hundreds of regional and grassroots citizens' organizations.

In Canada, the members of the Canadian Environmental Network Toxics Caucus, still aching from the industrial gutting of the 1999 Canadian Environmental Protection Act, prepared briefings and sent representatives to meeting after meeting with the Canadian government. Environmentalists, northern aboriginals, and industry were each granted one representative on the Canadian negotiating delegation.

Over and over, until it seemed like futile rhetoric, the Toxics Caucus consensus position was in complete agreement with IPEN — to be effective, the Treaty needed several major features. Most importantly, the resolution of the Treaty with regard to the first 12 POPs was no more important than ensuring that the Treaty would provide stepping stones into a clean future using pollution prevention, materials substitution and alternative technology.

• The Toxics Caucus supports a global POPs treaty that promotes the use of clean safe technology to prevent the use, production, release and disposal of any POPs.
• Even for PCBs, DDT and unintentionally produced by-products like dioxins and furans, the goal must be elimination, "even if it is a long-term goal." It was recognized that temporary exemptions to phase out would be required for some chemicals, such as DDT, while suitable alternative products were developed.
• Incorporation of the precautionary principle was the key to future effectiveness of the global treaty in dealing with subsequent addition of other chemicals.
• The destruction and disposal of POPs stockpiles and waste needed to be based on non-incineration technologies.
• The Treaty should not be subject to World Trade Organization strictures, and
• Financial aid was critical to help developing countries phase out the POPs they were currently using. Without that aid, developing countries would not agree to eliminate the cheap but persistent chemicals which are migrating to northern regions from around the world.

To a substantial extent, the Treaty includes all of the elements we had identified as crucial; even the wording that WTO articles would take precedence got moved out of the body of the Treaty and into the preamble, where it has less force.

The treaty sets out control measures covering the production, import, export, disposal, and use of POPs. Governments are to promote the best available technologies and practices for replacing existing POPs while preventing the development of new POPs. A POPs Review Committee will consider additional candidates for the POPs list on a regular basis. Most of the 12 chemicals are subject to an immediate ban. However, a health-related exemption has been granted for DDT, needed in many countries to control malarial mosquitoes. Similarly, governments may maintain existing electrical equipment in a way that prevents PCB leaks until 2025 to give them time to arrange for PCB-free replacements. Although PCBs are no longer produced, hundreds of thousands of tons are still in use in such equipment. In addition, a number of country-specific and time-limited exemptions have been agreed for other chemicals. The treaty calls on governments to reduce releases of furans and dioxins, "with the goal of their continuing minimization and, where feasible, ultimate elimination."

Toxics activists around the world surely enjoyed a Happy New Year, knowing we were leaving future generations the best kind of gift — one they will never know so many people had to work so hard, so long, to achieve. In the new year, the work begins to get fifty nations to ratify the Treaty, so that it can take effect. The signing ceremony is scheduled for Stockholm in May 2001.

Let the future begin!

* Sources: UNEP, GreenPeace, Pesticide Action Network, IPEN Press Releases, Chemical Market Reporter, Great Lakes United Toxics Watch, December 2000 with Special Thanks to Stephane Gingras.

* Delores Broten was selected by the CEN Toxics Caucus to participate as a member of the Canadian government delegation in two of the five negotiating sessions for the POPs Treaty. She is Senior Policy Advisor for Reach for Unbleached! and editor of the Watershed Sentinel.

Effects of POPs on Children

• Families of fishermen from the east coast of Sweden known to have consumed PCB and dioxin polluted fish from the Baltic sea gave birth to children with lower birth weights than their counterparts from the west coast of Finland whose diet was less contaminated.
• A lower birth weight has also been determined among children from parents that had a relatively high consumption of fish from Lake Michigan in the USA.
• In Japan children had lower weight at birth after a rice poisoning incident. Rice was contaminated with PCBs and dioxins.
• Otherwise healthy Dutch babies whose mothers had slightly elevated levels of PCBs and dioxins in their body showed retarded post-natal growth and development of the immune and nervous systems.
• Babies of Inuit mothers with slightly elevated levels of PCBs in their breast milk have problems with their immune system and their post-natal growth is retarded.

* http://www.greenpeace.org

[From WS February/March 2001]