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P A N U P S
Pesticide Action Network Updates Service
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Action Alert: POPs Negotiation Update
March 17, 2000
Nations Gather in Bonn to Negotiate Pops Treaty
NGOs Call For Stronger U.S. Government Position
Governments from around the world meet in Bonn, Germany next week to
continue negotiation of a global treaty to eliminate persistent organic
pollutants (POPs), including many pesticides. The Bonn meeting is the fourth
of five negotiating sessions. At the third meeting in September 1999,
negotiators from 115 countries met in Geneva and reached preliminary
agreement to eliminate production and use of the POPs pesticides aldrin,
endrin and toxaphene without exemptions. They also agreed to phase out
chlordane, dieldrin, heptachlor, mirex and hexachlorobenzene with
country-specific exemptions (see PANUPS, 10/12/99). The remaining chemicals
on the list remain controversial: PCBs, dioxins and furans, and DDT.
Other issues under consideration at the fourth POPs treaty negotiating
session include providing technical and financial assistance to allow
developing countries to implement a POPs treaty, criteria for adding
additional POPs to the treaty, use of trade mechanisms to implement the
treaty, and ensuring adequate research and information exchange. The fifth
and final negotiating session will be held this fall in South Africa.
NGOs, including PAN groups worldwide, have followed the POPs treaty
negotiations closely. An International POPs Elimination Network (IPEN) was
established in 1998 to coordinate NGO activities related to POPS issues. The
IPEN platform statement emphasizes elimination rather than management of
POPs chemicals, and urges application of the Precautionary Principle
throughout the treaty and in its implementation.
POPs are a group of synthetic carbon-based chemical compounds that pose
particular hazards to human health and the environment due to their
chemistry. They are toxic, and break down verly slowly in living beings and
the environment. They also accumulate in body fat, and can evaporate and
travel great distances. POPs pose a hazard even at low levels, because they
build up over time in the body fat of organisms and concentrate as they move
through the food web. Because they are persistent, mobile and accumulate in
body fat, POPs contamination is now pervasive and global.
A U.S. State Department memo to European government officials was recently
leaked to Greenpeace. The U.S. memo urged European negotiators to back down
on several positions that are stronger than those of the U.S. government.
In an effort to counter these U.S. government efforts to undermine the POP
negotiations, dozens of NGOs worldwide, including PANNA, have signed on in
support of print and television advertisements calling on the U.S.
government to strengthen its position in the POPs negotiations. The first
print ad runs in the New York Times on Saturday, March 18, and again next
week run in the newspaper USA Today's European edition. The television ad
will air next week on the television network CNN in Washington, D.C. and
Europe.
What You Can Do
Go to http://www.stoppops.org ON OR AFTER SATURDAY, MARCH 18 (when the New
York Times advertisement appears) to view the ad and send a message to U.S.
President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore urging them to resist
pressure from the chemical industry and to push for global elimination of
POPS and a strong POPs treaty.
For additional information on how to help stop POPs, visit PANNA's website
http://www.panna.org.
Contact/Source: PANNA
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Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA)
49 Powell St., Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94102 USA
Phone: (415) 981-1771
Fax: (415) 981-1991
Email: panna@panna.org
Web: http://www.panna.org
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