ABSTRACT
The 1998 Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, which came into force in 2004, commits exporters of chemicals banned in their own countries because of their human or environmental toxicity to notify importers of this through a prior informed consent procedure (PIC). Under PIC exporters are obliged to provide Decision Guidance Documents detailing the pollution and health grounds for the domestic restriction of chemicals such as dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane and parathion. The Convention was meant to give a legally binding character to Article 9 of the voluntary Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) 1986 International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides, inspired by the tragedy of the 1984 Bhopal chemical plant disaster in India. Thousands of people have died as a consequence of the disaster, resulting from the leak of the chemical methyl-isocyanate, a substance completely unknown to the Indian government hosting the plant owned by the US multinational corporation Union Carbide. The establishment of PIC as a binding international rule was sealed by eventually gaining the support of the chemical industry in the early 1990s, after they had opposed its inclusion even in the voluntary code, after a civil society campaign led by the Pesticides Action Network, an alliance of non-governmental organizations set up in 1982 through concern at the polluting effects of increased pesticide use in the Global South. The reason for this “U-turn” by the industry was a fear of the alternatives, such as an outright prohibition of the export of certain pesticides, a bill of which was debated in the United States during 1991-1992 (Hough 1998).
