Plastic treaty: negotiation failure, France “disappointed” and “angry”

It is a failure. The 185 countries gathered in Geneva failed to agree on the night of Thursday to Friday on a binding text to combat plastic pollution that is worseing on the planet.

“We will not have a plastic pollution treaty here in Geneva,” said the representative of Norway during a plenary session at daybreak on Friday. A little earlier, India and Uruguay underlined the incapacity of the negotiators “to find a consensus”.

The French Minister of Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, said he was in the wake “disappointed” and “angry” on her account X. “I am disappointed because a handful of countries, guided by short-term financial interests and not by the health of their populations and the sustainability of their economy, blocked the adoption of an ambitious treaty,” she writes.

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.

What is the negotiations following?

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. Deep divisions remain between the two camps that clashed on the subject.

Blocking of petroleum countries

The “ambitious”, including the EU, Canada, Australia, many countries in Latin America, Africa and islands, want to clean the plastic planet that begins to gangrener and affects human health, and above all reduce global plastic production.

Opposite, essentially oil countries which refuse any constraint on the production of hydrocarbons at the base of the plastic industry and any ban on dangerous molecules or additives.