The 185 countries gathered in Geneva failed to agree on the night of Thursday to Friday on a binding text to fight against plastic pollution that will stimulate. “We will not have a plastic pollution treaty here in Geneva,” summed up the representative of Norway during a plenary session at daybreak on Friday.
A little earlier, India and Uruguay underlined the incapacity of negotiators “to find a consensus”. Presented in the middle of the night from Thursday to Friday a new compromise text included even more than a hundred points to be clarified, after 10 days of intense negotiations but the chiefs of delegation gathered in informal session did not manage to agree.
The future of negotiations was not clear immediately. Uganda has requested a new negotiation session on a later date and the European environment commissioner, Jessika Roswall considered that Geneva had made it possible to establish “a good base” for a takeover of the negotiations.
The Ecuadorian diplomat Luis Vayas Valdivieso, who already presided over negotiations during the failure of the previous diplomatic sequence in South Korea in Busan at the end of 2024, should give a brief press conference, according to UN services. His method and the negotiation process were severely criticized throughout the Diplomatic Sequence in Geneva but often anonymously.
Theoretically, the CNI5-2 negotiation sequence, which started in Geneva on August 5, was to stop at midnight local on August 14.
>> Listen to Marie-France Dignac’s interview in the morning:
Switzerland “disappointed”
Switzerland will therefore not have its Geneva agreement against plastic pollution. Friday morning in front of the other states, its chief negotiator Felix Wertli relayed the “disappointment” of his delegation. And he asked for a “break” to think about the continuation of the negotiations.
“It’s a difficult time,” admitted the chief of international affairs of the Federal Environment Office (OFEF). “It was not due to a lack of commitment,” he added. “We have obtained advances,” added the Swiss ambassador. “But the significant stages which were required” for a treaty that could work against plastic pollution were missing, according to him.
Despite the failure, “our efforts cannot stop either,” insisted Felix Wertli. But after three years of negotiations during various meetings, it is now necessary to “break” to decide the future approach, he warns.
The French Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, also expressed her disappointment, saying herself “angry”. “A handful of countries, guided by short-term financial interests and not by the health of their populations and the sustainability of their economy, have blocked the adoption of an ambitious treaty,” she said.
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“Give priority to health”
In a message on network X, French President Emmanuel Macron thundered Thursday afternoon to encourage delegates to find common ground: “What do we expect to act?” And asked to “adopt a text that meets the environmental and health emergency. For our health. For our environment. For our children”.
“It has been two and a half years that we negotiate and the last hours that remain crucial” to “find an agreement that solves the problem and gives priority to the health of the general public”, had abounded Graham Forbes, the head of the delegation of the Greenpeace environment defense NGO.
Blocking of petroleum countries
The chances of finding an agreement after three years of negotiations, however, seemed to be very thin, given the deep divisions that remain between the two camps which clashed on the subject.
>> Reread: Negotiations in Geneva for a plastic treaty always in the deadlock
The “ambitious”, including the European Union, Canada, Australia, many countries in Latin America, Africa and islands, want to clean the plastic planet that begins to gangrener and affects human health.
Opposite, mainly oil countries refuse any constraint on plastic production and any ban on dangerous molecules or additives.
AFP/Asch