PIC and choose - a toxic-imports accord.

Last week, representatives of 62 nations signed onto a United Nations protocol to control the proliferating export of toxic chemicals to countries that have decided they cannot ensure safe use. Once ratified by 50 countries, this new convention--adopted in the Dutch city of Rotterdam--will become a binding treaty and make it illegal to export a listed chemical without an importing country's prior consent.

The accord requires that whenever a participating country bans or "seriously restricts" the use of a chemical, it must alert the convention's secretariat--its administrative body--and pass along data documenting the compound's toxicity. Once two such designations arrive for any chemical, the secretariat must add the agent to the list of compounds regulated by the convention.

Each country will receive details of a newly listed compound's toxicity and then have 9 months to decide whether to accept imports of the chemical. The secretariat will compile and publish a list of all unwilling recipient countries. This procedure is the heart of the new treaty, known as the Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC).

The secretariat has run a voluntary PIC program since 1989, in which 154 nations have participated. Their efforts led a PIC list of 27 chemicals, including chlordane, DDT, lindane, crocidolite asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls.

However, compliance has sometimes been a bit sketchy, notes Jim Willis, who works for the secretariat at the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) in Geneva. For instance, he notes, "not everyone provided the notifications that they were banning or restricting a chemical" or offered timely decisions on their willingness to accept certain imports.

Tougher, though still voluntary, procedures agreed to last week will remain in effect until the treaty becomes law. "We actually have time frames for all of these responses and actions, so that things become much more predictable--and almost mandatory," Willis says.

The low cost of many older toxic compounds, such as DDT, encourages their continuing use in developing countries long after many industrialized countries have limited or eliminated them (SN: 3/16/96, p. 174). Further jeopardizing the safe use of these chemicals in many developing countries, United Nations studies show, are the poor labeling typical of many toxic imports and the inadequate instruction of workers on their safe use.

The United States, a major manufacturer of such compounds, exported pesticides at an average rate of 936 tons per day in 1996, the most recent year for which data are available, according to an analysis of customs records published this spring by the Los Angeles-based Foundation for Advancements in Science and Education. Notes Carl Smith, who directed the analysis, a large share of these exports went to developing countries.

To date, Smith observes, PIC's process has largely ignored products whose use requires extreme safety precautions. They "wouldn't necessarily be banned but still are extremely hazardous."

He points to the pesticide aldicarb as one example; it is so potentially lethal that applicators "basically have to put on a moon suit to use it." Few developing countries would be able to provide such gear. Nonetheless, in 1996 the United States exported 2.58 million pounds of aldicarb, Smith notes, "mostly to developing countries."

Under the new accord, Willis says, countries will be able to nominate for PIC controls such "severely hazardous," but not banned, pesticides. More than 200 chemicals are now "waiting in the queue" for PIC consideration, he told Science News, and some fall into that category.