Seychelles on Wednesday October 8,  took the first step towards the creation of a national strategy to govern the use of a group of dangerous chemicals, classed as Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPS).

A day long workshop, drawing together relevant stakeholders, such as staff of the ministries of Environment, Agriculture and Health, as well as members of the Coastguard, took place at the International Conference Centre, to start work on a National Implementation Plan for the management of POPS.

The workshop comes about following the May 2002 signing, in Stockholm, Sweden, of the POPS Convention, under which Seychelles is obliged to conduct a two-year project with the objective of developing a POPS plan.

The POPS Convention seeks to stop the production, limit the use and eventually eliminate the 12 most hazardous POPS compounds, which are seen as being responsible for a number of lethal illness, most notably a variety of cancers.

Opening the workshop the Minister for Environment, Mr Ronny Jumeau, said that the use of chemicals over the last half century had brought about tremendous benefits for humanity and cited the use of pesticides to increase crop yields as one such example.

However, the minister stressed that the same chemicals had been poisoning all living creatures that come into contact with them from the moment they entered the food chain.

The minister also highlighted the fact that once released into the environment these highly volatile chemicals were easily transported across national boundaries by animals, the wind and the oceans.

The minister called on the delegates attending the workshop to give careful consideration to both the costs and benefits of the use of POPS, which he said had already been used to the benefit of industrialised nations and were now being increasingly relied upon by developing countries.

To facilitate the drawing up of the National Implementation Plan assistance has been sought from the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), which provided the expertise of Professor Chidi Ibe, the UNIDO POPS and International Waters Programmes Advisor for Africa.

Prof. Ibe said that UNIDO would work alongside the Ministry of Environment in order to "create a platform for ecologically sound industrial development."

He said that during the two-year project, UNIDO would work with the Ministry in building up a team which can ensure rational chemical management and strengthening all institutions associated with environmental protection and natural resource management.

Acting Environment Principal Secretary and Director General of the Environment Assessment and Pollution Control Division, Mr Jude Florentine, chaired the meeting and said that the two-year project would seek to attain five main goals.

These are the establishment of a sustainable POPS inventory system, an assessment of  current POPS monitoring competence, an assessment of the socio-economic implications of POPS use and reduction, identification of priority action needed to be taken and the preparation and endorsement of a plan of action.

Mr Florentine also confirmed that of the 12 chemicals listed under the Stockholm Convention, eight of them, the pesticides, are already banned in Seychelles. Of the remaining four, two were described by Mr Florentine as the by-products of incomplete combustion and therefore difficult to regulate, with the control of the other two, Polychlorinated Biphenyl and Hexachlorobenzene, likely to be the main focus of the plan.

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