ENVIRONMENT-U.N.: U.N. Debate on Oceans Disappoints Some Ecologists

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 1996 (IPS) - The conclusion this week of a U.N. debate on the world’s oceans was even more disappointing than usual, contends the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), an international environmental group.

“The resolutions that have been adopted are some of the worst examples I’ve seen of decision-making by the lowest common denominator,” argued Joy Hyvarinen, WWF’s coordinator for international treaties.

The 185-nation U.N. General Assembly failed to take countries to task for not signing an agreement to regulate world fish stocks or for not ratifying the Convention on the Law of the Sea, she said.

Nearly half of the 20 countries that take 80 percent of world marine catches have failed so far to sign the U.N. Fish Stocks Agreement, which was adopted by the United Nations last year. Among the nations yet to sign are some of the largest fishing countries, including Chile, Peru, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam, Hyvarinen noted.

Moreover, she argued, the Assembly has not put sufficient pressure on nations like Britain and the United States to ratify the Law of the Sea Convention, which remains a hard sell for ratification by the British Parliament and U.S. Senate.

Yet this year’s debate only included a mild call Monday for states which had not already joined the convention to do so. It also included an appeal for countries to cease any over-fishing and to use the newly created International Seabed Authority to settle fishing disputes.

“The debate was even more discouraging than before,” Hyvarinen said. “It was basically speechmaking.”

But some countries — most notably the United States — have moved toward accepting U.N. regulation of the seas. During the 1980s, the United States refused to accept the Law of the Seas Convention, which the conservative Ronald Reagan administration labelled “socialistic”.

On Monday, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island said that the U.S. government was working to ratify the convention, modified in 1994 to address U.S. concerns. Pell also endorsed a Global Programme of Action, adopted this year by a U.N.-sponsored governmental conference. The plan is intended to protect the marine and coastal environment.

The programme “calls for the development of a global, legally binding instrument to phase out and eliminate persistent organic pollutants (POPs).”

Pell noted that it would also create a clearing-house on environmental data to allow countries to share information on pollution by sewage, wastewater, heavy metals, nutrients and sediments.

Even the progress on dealing with organic pollutants, however, may not affect what WWF contends will become one of the biggest environmental hazards: the potential threat to marine life from chemicals, called ‘endocrine disruptors’, which affect the hormone systems of various types of wildlife.

“Endocrine disruptors are synthetic chemicals which mimic hormones found in both humans and wildlife, with effects such as reduced fertility,” noted Barbara Rutherford, WWF coordinator on water pollution. “They have emerged as a serious threat to endangered marine life, and we need urgent action.”

WWF has in particular drawn attention to the contamination of beluga whales in Canda’s St. Lawrence River. The environmental group labels the whales, the source of beluga caviar, as “among the most contaminated animals on earth”.

The organisation also links endocrine disruptors to the mass deaths of thousands of marine mammals, including the deaths of 10,000 seals by a virus in Asia’s Lake Baikal in 1987, and the deaths of 700 bottlenose dolphins along the U.S. Atlantic coast in 1988.

But the U.N. debate did not touch the endocrine disruptor issue, Hyvarinen said, with nations unwilling to take on any new concerns about environmental damage. Since not all the chemical compounds that function as endocrine disruptors would qualify as POPs, she said, regulating organic pollutants may not address the issue.

Several nations, including many small island states, are urging the General Assembly to broaden its debate on the world’s oceans in the future to take up new environmental threats.

Ambassador Laurence Edwards of the Marshall Islands said that it was essential for the debate to be broadened by next year, since his Pacific nation was facing problems over contamination resulting from nuclear test explosions.

So far, however, General Assembly commitments that the oceans and sea bed are the common heritage of all humanity operate more like “a last will and testament”, added Ambassador H.L. de Silva of Sri Lanka. The benefits, he noted, have yet to be distributed to the benificiaries.