ENVIRONMENT: Land-based toxic chemicals killing ocean life

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Nov 4 1995 (IPS) - The monk seals of the Black Sea in Turkey, the Beluga whales of the Arctic, the coral reefs off Phuket island in Thailand and the coastal mangroves of Ecuador are dying slowly because of a common threat: human activities on land.

These range from industrial waste discharges into the Danube River, which flows into the Black Sea, and pesticides which make their way via ocean and wind currents to the Arctic Sea, to garbage generated by tourists in Thailand and the destruction of mangroves by shrimp farmers in Ecuador.

The United Nations has brought environment ministers here from around the world to do something about such threats, which experts say are responsible for almost 80 percent of all marine pollution.

Friday, representatives of more than 100 countries are expected to sign a “global plan of action” to tackle “persistent organic pollutants” (called POPs for short).

POPs will be the major focus of the work here, but other land- based activities, including the impact of tourism and water and sanitations systems, are also being discussed this week. Delegates have agreed that the latter issues should, in the first instance, be addressed at the local or regional level.

The document’s signing will be the final outcome of the Intergovernmental Conference on Protection of Marine Environment from Land-Based Activities — one of the many programmes launched at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil.

The global plan will complement the U.N. Law of the Sea which governs marine activities. Unlike the Law of the Sea, however, the plan is not legally binding. Instead, it lays the groundwork for a convention to eliminate the worst of these chemicals and create a mechanism to identify other toxics.

At the top of the list of POPs to be addressed are the so- called “dirty dozen” — aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, dioxins, endrin, furans, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, PCBs and toxaphene.

These chemicals are highly toxic and persistent — which means that they do not break down for decades. They also “bio- accumulate” — when consumed, they are not excreted but accumulate in fatty tissue instead. Thus, animals high up in the food chain, which eat large quantities of other animals, retain higher doses of the chemicals.