UN urges quick end to "dirty dozen" chemicals
Date: 22-May-01
Country: SWEDEN
Author: Alister Doyle
Representatives of more than 120 nations were gathering in Stockholm to adopt a treaty on Tuesday banning or minimising use of the "dirty dozen" chemicals. Greenpeace said it was staging protests in four countries against lingering industrial uses.
"We can prove in this convention that international environmental cooperation is still possible," UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer told Reuters on the eve of the meeting.
He urged rapid ratification of the deal to outlaw chemicals including the pesticide DDT and dioxins, blamed for causing deadly illnesses, cancers and birth defects and for weakening the immune systems of people and animals around the world.
"The convention is extremely important with the continuing discussions on climate change and Kyoto," Toepfer added. The 12 so-called persistent organic pollutants (POPs) have even been found in the breat milk of Inuit women in the Arctic.
President George W. Bush in March pulled out of the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which tried to limit emissions of gases blamed for pushing up world temperatures. The decision triggered a storm of protests, even from many U.S. allies.
"We want to see ratification as soon as possible," Toepfer added. "On the optimistic side I think that could be between two and three years."
About 50 environment ministers and senior officials from more than 70 other nations will attend the Stockholm POPs talks. The treaty comes into force once 50 nations have ratified it.
CHEAPER THAN KYOTO
"It's more than helpful that it will be signed by countries critical of Kyoto," he said. For the United a States, the cost of implementing the convention will be tiny compared with the Kyoto protocol as many POPs are already outlawed in the U.S.
Greenpeace said activists in Turkey and Lebanon blocked clinical and hazardous waste incinerators releasing dioxins and other POPs yesterday.
In Thailand, about 100 people protested outside the Japan Bank for International Cooperation to demand a halt to funding and exports of incinerators to south-east Asia. Some waste incinerators release POPs.
In Sweden, activists blocked transport of waste to an incinerator at a cement kiln at Gotland, in the Baltic Sea.
"We welcome this treaty as a major turning point towards a toxic-free future," Kevin Stairs of Greenpeace International told a news conference. "But so far it's only words on paper."
Greenpeace reckons that 30,000 people are killed by use and abuse of pesticides every year. Thousands more suffer from other ills triggered by POPs.
Environmnentalists echoed the UNEP call for quick ratification.
Ministers will adopt the treaty on Tuesday and sign it on Wednesday. But ratification has to be done by parliaments, a process Greenpeace said was likely to take three to five years.
"Governments should waste no time in ratifying the treaty so implementation can proceed as soon as possible," said Clifton Curtis, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature's Global Toxic Chemicals Initiative.
