Nairobi, Kenya — The stage is set for final agreement on a legally binding global treaty to reduce and, or,eliminate the already identified 12 priority Persistent Organic Pollutants or POPs and to establish criteria and a procedure for identifying others as candidates for international action.

The UN Environmental Programme executive director, Klaus Toepfer, said in Nairobi Thursday that toxic and very long- lasting, persistent organic pollutants posed a serious endanger to the well-being of our planet and all living beings.

Speaking ahead of an anticipated global treaty to protect health and environment from persistent organic pollutants - due for completion December, he said that a global defence against such poisons was necessary.

"Only decades ago most of the 12 persistent organic pollutants targeted for action under the treaty being negotiated did not exist, and now they are in the air, water, soil around the planet, and in us all, and they last for generations," he told journalists.

He added that countries will be going to the negotiating table in Johannesburg, South Africa, in December to reach an agreement for the sake of people living today and generations to come.

The 4-9 December meeting is expected to attract delegates from more than 120 countries. It will be the last of the five scheduled negotiating sessions, which began in Montreal, Canada, and were continued in Nairobi, Geneva, and Bonn.

The session will focus on limitations on manufacture and use, national action plans, funding, technical assistance, exemptions for DDT for combating diseases like malaria, and stockpiles of obsolete or unwanted pesticides, among others.

Their deliberations are expected to respond to the mandate for a POPs treaty issued by the UNEP Governing Council in 1997, whose deadline is December.

The 12 POPs listed in the mandate consist of the pesticides - aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex, and toxaphene; the industrial chemicals - PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, which is also a pesticide; and the unwanted by-products of combustion and industrial processes, which include dioxins and furans.

The 12 POPs pose a risk to human health and the environment, especially for children. A combination of pesticides, industrial chemicals, and unwanted by-products, are toxic, last for long, and travel long distances to remote areas far from the source of release.

They accumulate in fatty tissue, becoming more concentrated higher in the food chain. They also present a special risk to children because they are conveyed through the placenta and in breast milk, and can have a critical effect on the foetus and infant whose systems are at key stages of development.

In the Artic, Toepfer said, the indigenous diet of the Inuit people relies on such fatty foods as whale, seal, and char, which are high in POPs like dioxin-like compounds and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.

Inuit mothers typically have high levels in breast milk, five times the levels in mothers in industrialised countries.

According to preliminary UNEP estimates, of the tens of thousands of obsolete pesticide stocks stored in Africa and throughout the developing word - often in inadequate or even dangerous conditions - approximately 30 percent are POPs.

An estimated 1.5 million tons of PCBs were produced commercially, and were used in electrical equipment, as coolants in transformers and dielectrics in capacitors, as well as in other items all over the globe.

Although PCBs are no longer produced, an estimated 100,000 tonnes are in stocks awaiting final disposal, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes more are still in use and may need to be identified and disposed of.

Ageing electrical equipment that contain PCBs and has not been maintained is in danger of leaking.

It is envisaged that with the agreement in December, the Diplomatic Conference to sign the treaty will take place in Stockholm in May 2001, followed by ratification and entry into force.