Plastic pollution treaty will be finalized, says negotiating committee chairman

Isabel Saco

Geneva, Sep 4 (EFE) - The global crisis caused by plastic pollution is the most neglected because there are no international standards to stop it. This will change when a global treaty is approved, which has been very difficult to achieve but will undoubtedly see the light of day, the president of the negotiating committee, Ecuadorian ambassador Luis Vayas Valdivieso, assured EFE.

"It's possible to reach (an agreement), and we will get there. I'm completely optimistic," said the diplomat, who has been leading the negotiation process for nearly two years and who last month failed to lead the 183 countries involved to the adoption of a treaty after ten days of difficult negotiations in which blocs of countries with widely divergent interests and positions were formed.

That was supposed to be the final round, so the fear of ultimate failure hung over the negotiations.

The most pressing issues were reducing the production and phasing out single-use plastics, banning chemical additives that are hazardous to health and the environment, and creating a funding mechanism for the most vulnerable countries to "repair" the damage already caused by plastic not only to nature but also to the livelihoods of entire communities.

To avoid throwing away more than three years of work, and when it was already impossible to prolong the negotiations in Geneva any further, Ambassador Vayas opted for a diplomatic maneuver that consisted of "suspending" the negotiations rather than terminating them.

"I suspended the negotiations, so they are open, and as president (of the negotiating committee), it's my responsibility to keep them on track and with the clear goal of reaching an agreement," he said in a videoconference interview with EFE from London, where he is Ecuador's ambassador to the United Kingdom.

Vayas says he still has no date or location for the next negotiating conference, although he has already begun consultations with various states on the matter "because we need donors, we need a budget" to convene a new round.

Despite the failure to meet the deadline for negotiations that the states themselves had set, Ambassador Vayas denies that this was a failure of multilateralism and maintains that the reason for this outcome was that the positions of certain groups of countries on key issues were "very far apart," an obstacle he attempted to overcome by presenting a text proposal that was roundly rejected by the countries and for which he was widely criticized.

The Ecuadorian diplomat asserts that, from his perspective, the text was never intended to be "a future treaty," but rather to reflect "the common denominators" on which everyone agreed, which is why he later presented a second, modified text "that reflected a balance between the countries' positions."

"Obviously there was still a lot of work to be done, but there wasn't enough time to digest the document. Now I've heard from some countries that it's a good document that serves as a basis for negotiation," he comments.

However, the urgency of plastic pollution on land and in the sea, and its impact on human health, makes it urgent to resume negotiations.

Plastic pollution is the most serious environmental crisis for which there is no binding international treaty, as there is with the Paris Agreement on climate change or the UN Convention on Biological Diversity for the conservation of species.

"In just 70 years, we've done enormous damage to the very place where life originated, in the oceans that emerged 4 billion years ago. There's scientific evidence that we're altering DNA—our own and that of future generations—so we need to clean up this damage, and this agreement is a key instrument to stop and eliminate this pollution," Vayas said.