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A toothless PIC? - Convention negotiations move slowly

Prior Informed Consent (PIC) opens the way for developing countries to control the import of banned or severely restricted pesticides. While based on information exchange, an efficient PIC system could reduce trade in the most hazardous chemicals. Barbara Dinham reports.

PIC was agreed as a voluntary system in 1989, and since then has been run by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) for pesticides, and UNEP Chemicals for other chemicals. An international PIC Convention is now being negotiated. In October, governments met in Rome for the fourth attempt to agree a text. The hope is that the next session, planned for January, will bring agreement and the Convention would be ready for signing by March 1998. Governments had agreed just three sessions to finalise the legally binding instrument, but agreement on the contents are proving more intractable than envisaged. In the style of international negotiations, there remain many 'square brackets', or text still to be agreed. 

Export notifications  
One breakthrough in Rome was agreement that exporting countries which have banned or severely restricted a chemical will provide annual export notifications to importing countries, rather than the present arrangement of notification on first export only.  However, once chemicals are included in PIC there is no obligation to notify. While governments could require notification as a condition of allowing import, if this is not recognised in the Convention it is not clear whether importing parties would make the request, or exporting parties would observe it. 

Trade matters-never mind health or the environment  
There is no willingness among governments to help document the scale of trade in banned chemicals, or to require identification of production sites of banned chemicals and chemicals in PIC. Failure to address these issues indicate that governments have no stomach to get tough on trade in hazardous chemicals.
    Some governments have adopted an aggressive position that trade rules agreed in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) should override PIC. The US wants a 'savings clause', which would in effect nullify the legal force of the PIC Convention in any dispute between Parties to it who are both also Members of the WTO. Not only does this limit the value of PIC, it also sets a dangerous precedent for other Multilateral Environmental Agreements, by attempting to make them all subject to WTO law. If the clause goes through, it would defeat the objectives of PIC, and give trade rules precedence over health and environmental concerns. These articles were hardly discussed in Rome, and it remains to be seen whether the fifth session will see intransigent positions shift.

Getting on the PIC list  
Key unresolved issues remain relating to identification of hazardous chemicals for inclusion in the Convention. Under the voluntary scheme good progress has been made, with the first pesticides recently included not because of a ban, but because they cause health problems in developing countries. Would these chemicals make it into a Convention?
    Contentious too is the number of bans and severe restrictions required to trigger PIC. The voluntary PIC requires only one ban or severe restriction for health or environmental reasons made after January 1992.  Some governments are calling for five bans or severe restrictions in three FAO regions. A note from the secretariat indicated that only 30-40 chemicals would qualify on this basis. There are already 23 pesticides and five industrial chemicals in the voluntary procedure. What is the value of a Convention on information exchange which drastically limits the chemicals covered? The Secretariat records show that if one control action in one region triggered PIC, about 220 chemicals have been verified as meeting this criteria. If the negotiations compromise on two bans or severe restrictions in one region this would still only cover 116 verified control actions.
    Another area yet to be agreed is whether PIC should cover 'acutely' hazardous formulations of pesticides, or simply hazardous formulations. Insistence on 'acutely' toxic formulations ignores real problems in developing countries, where high exposure over a planting season can result in health problems which are not immediately observable-for example the ability of organophosphate (OP) pesticides to inhibit production of cholinesterase and the growing concern about neuro-behavioural impacts of OPs.
    Still in brackets, too, is whether pesticides which cause environmental, as well as health, concerns in developing countries should qualify for PIC.

Other gaps  
So far no discussion has taken place on enforcement and action required to punish exporters who contravene an importing country's PIC decision.
    If decisions on inclusion in PIC can only be made at the Conference of the Parties (COP), it is essential that this meets at least annually (not yet agreed). A matter of concern to NGOs is that the objection of one-third of governments could exclude them as observers at the COP. Although extensive tasks have been relegated to a subsidiary body, its terms have not yet been specified and it is thus unclear what observer rights NGOs will have.

Conclusion  
The discussions in Rome moved slowly and did not augur well for a fast finale in Brussels. Industrialised countries are cautious about the extent to which they are prepared to change national laws in implementing PIC. While supporting its role in information exchange, they do not want it to expand their funding obligations to achieve full enforcement. Our concern is that PIC should be an effective mechanism, and in particular that it must cover pesticides which are causing health or environmental problems.  The criteria agreed must focus on ways of including these problem pesticides, rather than try to limit PIC to covering only a handful of out-dated chemicals.

Would they qualify?  
New pesticides in the voluntary PIC  
To include an [acutely] hazardous pesticide formulation in PIC, in the first place documentation must be submitted from a government which identifies:  

  • the pesticide formulation;  

  • common and recognised patterns of use of the pesticide formula tion in the country;  

  • a clear description of each incident related to the problem;  

  • measures taken by the government in response to the incident. 

The first five pesticides identified for causing health problems in developing countries have been included in the voluntary PIC:  monocrotophos, methamidophos, phosphamidon, parathion and methyl parathion. These were not identified by governments submitting data on incidents; but by documentation submitted by Pesticide Action Network (PAN) groups, later confirmed by a questionnaire to governments, and extensive checking by the Secretariat.   
    Conditions in developing countries mean documentation on specific incidents is rare. In Africa, for example, very few countries have the means to collect data. This year Ethiopia banned the herbicide paraquat when the regulators heard reports of problems in the coffee growing areas of the country where it was used. Would the PIC Convention recognise this as a valid action? Collecting 'a clear description of each incident' would require significant use of very scarce resources.

References  
UNEP/FAO, Report of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for an international legally binding instrument for the application of the PIC procedure for certain hazardous chemicals and pesticides in international trade on the work of its fourth session, UNEP/FAO/PIC/INC.4/2, 4 November 1997.  
Information on the PIC Convention negotiations: http://faowfs0a.fao.org/picd/pic.htm

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 38, December 1997, page 15]
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