Negotiations in Geneva for an international agreement against plastic pollution ended on an absence of consensus on the proposed texts. The president of the Luis Vayas Valdivieso talks and several delegations relayed the situation on Friday.
The differences on reducing plastic production and controlling problematic products between ambitious states, including Switzerland, and oil countries were too large. Shortly before 2 hours, after ten days of discussions, Luis Vayas Valdivieso had unveiled a new text of text.
“It was my best attempt to seize the members’ views in a balanced way,” he said during the closing plenary at daybreak on Friday. Several countries have deplored that no consensus could be found. “We will not have a plastic pollution treaty here in Geneva,” said the representative of Norway during the session.
What future for negotiations?
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.
Profound divisions
Theoretically, the sequence of CNI5-2 negotiations, which started in Geneva on August 5, was to stop at midnight this August 15.
Deep divisions remain between the two camps that clashed on the subject. 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.
The text still did not provide for a long -term production of production, apart from only national efforts in a non -binding manner. NGOs had rejected this draft text. They spoke of a “bad treaty” or a simple “waste management treaty”.