Delegates from 122 countries reached agreement in Johannesburg Sunday on a convention to ban or severely restrict 12 of the world's most toxic chemicals.
The "dirty dozen" persistent organic pollutants (POPs) range from industrial chemicals to insecticides.
They are linked to birth defects, cancer, and developmental problems in children, and spread throughout the world, entering the food chain.
"This new treaty will protect present and future generations from the cancers, birth defects and other tragedies caused by POPs," said conference chairman John Buccini of Canada in a statement announcing the agreement.
Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), commented: "This is a sound and effective treaty that can be updated and expanded over the coming decades to maintain the best possible protection against POPs."
The environmental organization Greenpeace welcomed the agreement, commenting in a statement: "This agreement sends a clear message to industries that they must reform and stop using our Earth as a testing ground for their dangerous pollutants."
The agreement by the close to 600 delegates came around 7:30 a.m. (0530 GMT) after they had met through the night.
It marked the end of five rounds of negotiations over two-and-a-half years.
The convention will be signed in Stockholm on May 22-23 and become a legally binding treaty once it has been ratified by 50 countries, a process that Buccini said would take four or five years.
The convention makes provision for adding chemicals to the POPs list in future.
It makes an exemption for DDT in the meantime to allow its use in controlling malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people a year.
It also provides exemptions -- with deadlines -- for specific countries to phase out various POPs.
Governments may maintain until 2025, in a way which prevents leaks, existing electrical transformers and other equipment in which polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are used. They are no longer produced, but hundreds of thousands of tonnes of PCBs are still in use in such equipment.
Control mechanisms in the convention cover the production, import, export, disposal and use of POPs.
"Governments are to promote the best available technologies and practices for replacing existing POPs while preventing the development of new POPs," UNEP said.
"They will draw up national legislation and develop action plans for carrying out their commitments."
Funding to allow developing countries to give up their reliance on POPs will come from a new "mechanism" -- a victory for the Third World, which had argued against the use of the existing Global Environmental Facility because it has failed to disburse all the money allocated.
"New and additional funding and technical assistance will be provided," UNEP said.
The "precautionary principle" which urges countries to err on the side of caution when regulating potentially damaging environmental practices was inserted in the case of chemicals which may in future display the characteristics of POPs.
The text calls for regulation of such chemicals with the aim of preventing their production or use.
The United States and a number of other industrialized countries had argued for the precautionary principle to be restricted to the introductory preamble, where it would have had less force.
The 12 POPs comprise eight pesticides (aldrin, chlordane, DDT, dieldrin, endrin, heptachlor, mirex and toxaphene), two industrial chemicals (PCBs and hexachlorobenzene, which is also a pesticide) and two unwanted by-products of combustion and industrial processes (dioxins and furans) -- JOHANNESBURG (AFP)
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