A Chemical Kyoto

Environmentalists, joined by a growing body of regulators and the global insect pest community, are raising the alarm that a long list of chemicals are criminals on the loose, moving unnoticed from country to country, able to harm millions and kill thousands. In their minds, there's no better way to nab the suspect than with more environmental regulations.

Enter the Rotterdam Convention, a U.N. treaty whose parties are this week toasting its successful entry into force earlier this year. Reading like an environmentalist's Christmas wish-list, it has been justified to the world with the claim that "Pesticides and industrial chemicals have poisoned millions of people in recent decades and killed tens of thousands as a result of accidents." Klaus Toepfer, head of the U.N.Environment Program, this week went so far as to suggest that the treaty would benefit "subsistence farmers, nursing mothers, wildlife,...sustainable development and poverty alleviation."

So how does Rotterdam hope to achieve all these lofty goals? It's a global system of registration and trade restrictions for chemicals. Under its "prior informed consent" requirements, exporters of listed substances are obliged to inform authorities in the country of import as to the product's nature, legal and illegal uses, safety provisions, health effects, and even alternatives.

Armed with this information, the importer may then decide whether to allow imports, or not, and under what conditions. Once the importer has responded, the country of export is obliged to regulate exports according to the wishes of the importer. As such, Rotterdam reverses the normal procedures for regulating imports.

The treaty also enacts a procedure for adding new chemicals to the list of substances subject to prior informed consent, and a system of regulatory information sharing. If a country or region, such as the EU, enacts a new regulation like REACH (its ambitious plan to regulate 30,000 chemicals), regulators in other countries will be encouraged to enact similar "precautionary" legislation.

Rotterdam was agreed following an intensive campaign by environmental groups to push the idea that a massive, unregulated and illegal trade in chemicals existed. They claim that evil industrialists profit by duping poor countries into accepting chemicals that were long ago rejected in wealthy countries. The underlying implication is that poor countries shouldn't be responsible for their own chemicals regulation. This in turn rests on the twin assumptions that rich countries have got it right in respect of chemicals regulation and that by imposing duties on exporters, problems relating to mismanagement of chemicals will magically disappear.

One of the treaty's many problems is its failure to enable countries to accurately assess the tradeoffs that sometimes must be made with chemicals. DDT, a chemical listed in the treaty and maligned by environmentalists in the past four decades, helped wipe out malaria in many countries, rich and poor, during the 20th century. Reduced DDT use in the past 20 years has been associated with a significant resurgence in the poorest parts of the world.

When DDT is used indoors, and is not disseminated into the environment, it is highly effective in protecting against the nocturnal malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito. It is often used by cash-strapped public health programs in poor countries, many of whom signed up to the treaty. A plausible scenario is that the treaty will hinder rather than promote public health in these countries. For example, it may offer another vehicle for underpaid customs officials to enhance their salaries through bribes -- raising the cost of important chemicals.

Since the publication of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the 1962 bestseller which launched the modern environmental movement, the idea that "all chemicals are harmful" has plagued the Western world. Rotterdam, other treaties such as the POPs convention (which prohibits trade, with minor exceptions, of 12 chemicals), and legislation such as REACH, are symptoms of the chemophobia that has overtaken society at large. Modern detection technologies help to perpetuate the idea stated this week by the Rotterdam secretariat that "every human being on Earth carries in his or her body traces of various hazardous chemicals, many of which have been linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems."

Treaties such as Rotterdam offer the Western world -- which seems to be striving for a world free of synthetic toxins -- a false sense of security against perceived chemical risks. The treaty cannot, and does not, deal with the fact that all chemicals, whether natural or synthetic, could pose public and environmental health threats at certain concentration levels.

Exposure to toxins is a fact of life and most toxins are natural. Among the most dangerous thing we do as humans is breathe: exposure to oxygen leads to various ageing processes, which eventually kill us. But without oxygen, we would die. How do we explain this apparent paradox?

Paracelsus observed that the dose makes the poison. Many chemicals that are known to be toxic in high doses are benign or even beneficial in small doses. Vitamin A is a good example that most people are probably familiar with. In small doses it's essential to good health; in high, it damages the liver. Likewise, many so-called pollutants are harmless at low doses. A theory called hormesis even has it that some of these chemicals, by stimulating the body's defenses, may be beneficial.

Yet modern environmental and public health legislation is built on the false premise that any chemical that is toxic in high doses must also be toxic in low doses. In reality their objection is not to toxic substances at all but to substances produced by man.

Rotterdam applies this ideology, in the hopes that it will take us further towards the fantasy world envisioned by environmentalists, in which man-made chemicals are eliminated. Such a world would, of course, be far more dangerous than the present one.

The treaty joins a growing body of national legislation and regulations, and global environmental treaties like the Biosafety Protocol, which are ambiguously justified on the basis of the "precautionary principle". Environmentalists allege that a huge number of substances, products, and production methods cause environmental harm.

The treaties intentionally conflict with the global trading framework of the World Trade Organisation, which doesn't generally permit trade restrictions based on precaution. Of course, both environmentalists and protectionists would cheer if U.N. treaties take precedence over the WTO. It is no coincidence that the EU, on behalf of its 25 member states, has eagerly ratified Rotterdam and other treaties, no doubt seeing it as the perfect opportunity to justify more environmental regulations and extend them to the world. Other big industrial countries -- Russia, China, India and the U.S. -- haven't ratified this treaty.

Economic and technological development -- and environmental protection -- go hand in hand. But by restricting trade, Rotterdam and other global regulations threaten to slow both processes, limiting access to new, cleaner and safer technologies. Let's hope these thoughts temper the celebrations in Geneva this week.

Ms. Okonski, co-editor of "Environment and Health: Myths and Realities" (IPN, 2004), is director of the sustainable development project at the International Policy Network in London.