Conversations about forging a milestone treaty to combat the plague of plastic pollution, stumbled on Saturday, with progress slowly and land wild at odds on how far the proposed agreement should go.
The negotiations, which were opened on Tuesday, still have four working days to make a legally binding instrument that would tackle the growing problem that stifles the environment.
During a blunt mid-way assessment, lecture chairman Luis Vayas Valdivieso warned the 184 countries that negotiated at the United Nations that they had to shift to get a deal.
“The progress has not been sufficient,” Vayas said delegates.
“There is a real push to achieve our common goal,” said the Ecuadoran diplomat, adding that Thursday was not just a deadline, but “a date with which we have to deliver.
“Some articles still have unsolved problems and show little progress to achieve a common understanding,” Vayas complained.
The most important break is between countries that want to concentrate on waste management and others who want an more ambitious treaty to also lower production and eliminates the use of the most toxic chemicals.
And with the conversations that depend on finding consensus, it has become a game of Brinkmanship.
A diplomatic source told reporters that many informal meetings were merged for the day free on Sunday to try to break the impasse.
“If nothing changes, we won't get there,” the source added.
– Battle of the Beugels –
Countries came again in Geneva after the failure of the so -called fifth and final negotiation round in Busan, South Korea in 2024.
After four days of conversations, the design text is from 22 to 35 pages with the number of brackets in the text that goes up almost five times to almost 1500 while countries insert a snowstorm of conflicting wishes and ideas.
The conversations are required to look at the entire life cycle of plastic, from production to pollution, but some countries are unhappy with such a wide scope.
Kuwait spoke for the so-called like-minded group-one vague cluster of mainly oil-producing countries that reject the production limits and want to concentrate on the treatment of waste.
“Let's agree on what we can agree. Consensus must be the basis of all our decisions,” Kuwait was full.
Saudi Aarabia, who bumped in the same direction, said that he spoke for the Arabic group, that the responsible way was ahead to start with the consideration of which pieces of the text “perhaps not reach the final outcome because of irreconcilable divergence”.
But given how little has really been agreed, Uruguay warned that consensus “cannot be used as a justification not to achieve our objectives”.
Eirik Lindebjerg, global plastic advisor for the World Wide Fund for Nature, AFP said that the proposal of the like-minded group “was a different attempt to make it a waste management agreement”, and to suppress conversations about reducing the amount of plastic in circulation.
– Path through the fog –
The UN environment program organizes the conversations and is quickly called a press conference after the stock-take session.
UNEP -executing director Inger Andersen said that a deal was “really inside our grip, although it might not be that” today.
“Despite the fog of negotiations, I am really encouraged,” she told reporters, insistently: “There is a way to success.”
Vayas added: “We have to accelerate. We need a better rhythm in this and we also have to work in such a way that it will be clear that we will deliver at the end.”
Afterwards, Bjorn Beeler, executive director of Ipen, told a worldwide network aimed at limiting toxic chemicals, to AFP: “This whole process has not been able to make decisions and still collects ideas. We are sleeping to a cliff and if we don't wake up, we fall off.”
– 'Poisoning profits' –
Plastic pollution is so ubiquitous that microplastics were found on the highest mountain tops, in the deepest ocean channel and spread over almost every part of the human body.
Every year more than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced worldwide, half of which are for one -time use items.
The plastic production is set to Triple by 2060.
Panama's negotiator Juan Monterrey Gomez took the floor to hit those countries that wanted to stop the treaty to include the entire life cycle of plastic.
He said that microplastics are “in our blood, in our lungs and in the first cry of a newborn child. Our body is a living proof of a system that benefits from poisoning us”.
“We can't recycle our way from this crisis.”
RJM/IM/GV
