SUNS  4362 Thursday 28 January 1999

Environment: Talks for banning most dangerous chemicals



Nairobi, Jan 26 (IPS/Judith Achieng') -- More than 400 delegates from at least 100 countries are meeting in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi to debate a ban on the world's most dangerous chemicals to reduce environmental contamination.

The five-day conference which began Monday at the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi marks the second round of talks on a group of chemicals known as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), most of which were developed early in the century to control diseases, increase food production and improve the standard of living but which were over time, found to be a threat to biodiversity and human health.

"They harm the ecological support system of which life depends. They accumulate, they move from food chain to food chain, concentrating even in the largest animal species like polar bear and whales," said UNEP deputy director Shafqat Kakakhel.

Addressing the conference on Monday, Kakakhel called for a global ban on POPs and said no country or individual is safe from POPs contamination.

The Nairobi meeting, which followed a series of talks, which began in the Canadian city of Montreal mid last year, is expected to end in a legally binding blueprint by 2000.

"At this point, work on this treaty is on target and on time, a treaty by the year 2000 is challenging, but reachable as long as there are resources to get the job done," said Kakakhel.

Scientists say POPs, which affect human beings through contamination of water and food supply and to a lesser extent through inhalation and contact with skin, are major causes of cancers an disfunctional endocrine systems, interfering with the body's hormones.

The chemicals which are not soluble in water, are readily absorbed in the body fat tissue, where they remain accumulated unbroken, explains Peter Oris, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Illinois, School of Public Health in the United States.

"The concentrations are bound to be hundreds of thousands of times higher in the human body than they are anywhere in the environment," he told journalists in the Kenyan capital on Monday. In women, Oris said, the contamination accumulates in the breast cells and uterus then passed on to infants leading to abnormal births.

Groups negotiating the agreement target 12 chemicals for urgent total banning, although they urge restrictions on a number of organic chemicals, according to Romeo Quijano of the International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN), which groups some 130 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) around the world.

The 12 chemicals, on the banning list, include eight pesticides, two industrial chemicals and two families of unintended by-products of manufacture and use of chlorine and chlorine containing materials such as dioxins and furans. Most of these chemicals are restricted in most countries but their use are still widespread, according to a delegate at the talks.

On top of the list of 12 targetted chemicals is DDT -- a colourless toxic insecticide -- banned in many countries but whose use is still widespread.

Quijano said the abandoned and obsolete stockpiles continue to pose hazards to the environment and human health.

Environmental groups, like the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and Greenpeace, say they are concerned about a mix of pesticides buried in the mid 1980s on a Yemen state farm project, financed jointly by the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) and the World
Bank.

The dump, which contains an estimated 33 tonnes of unwanted pesticides, is dispersing through the ground and irrigation water spreading contamination and posing threat to local water supplies, according to WWF.

An estimated 110,000 tonnes of obsolete or unwanted pesticides are believed to remain in stockpiles in developing countries and enormous stockpiles in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, in the form of highly toxic POPs such as DDT, chloride and dieldrin, most of it
escaping to the environment.

WWF says the stockpile problem will worsen until the stocks, stores and environmental hot spots are identified and destroyed in a manner "that does not create new POPs pollution or other environmental hazards".

The proposed agreement, which is being pushed mainly by environmental groups like Greenpeace and WWF, draws strength from at least five previous agreements which add onto the pressure for a worldwide ban on persistent organic pollutants.

The most recent of the agreements is the 1998 legally binding Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, which provides importing countries with a more informed basis for deciding which chemicals to accept or reject. It makes trade in chemicals subject to labelling requirements and information on potential health and environmental hazards.

Other significant agreements include the UN Economic Commission for Europe's Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP) also ratified in 1998, the 1993 Global London Convention on ocean dumping and the Basel Convention on the control of transboundary movements of hazardous wastes later amended to include the banning of exporting such wastes.

Indigenous groups from Europe and Americas are also pushing for more say in the proposed agreement against POPs which they say have affected their populations over time.

Tom Goldtooth of the Dine Indian ethnic group in northern America, who works for the US-based Indigenous Environmental Network, told IPS on Monday that although there are only about 2.5 million people left of the 400 indigenous tribes in northern America, the populations continue to bear the consequences of contamination of POPs as a result of industrial activities, compounded by unfair environmental laws.
"There are serious environmental injustices meted out on indigenous people of America. Although there are federal laws to protect the general population against environmental hazards, the laws are
discriminating against coloured people whose communities are usually dumped with toxic wastes," he claimed.

He cited a recent study on indigenous tribes around the Great Lakes region between the United States and Canada which found between 6,000 and 7,000 parts per million levels of contamination of POPs in the breast milk of women as opposed to 50 parts per million minimum acceptable standard of contamination. The study also found high concentrations of DDT in blood samples.

Greenpeace's Jackie Warledo, who belongs to the remnants of the Seminole, a small Indian tribe in northern America, said indigenous people are also at higher risk of contamination because of the direct link of their cultures and religion to their environment. "We indigenous people are disproportionately burdened with POPs contamination because of our relationship with our land," she said.

Some delegates have, however, opposed the elimination of DDT, which is still in use in more than 20 countries, because of its major role in combating malaria and other insect-borne diseases.

Malaria poses threat to some 2.5 billion people in more than 90 countries and contributes to at least three million deaths every year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).