SUVA, Fiji, Mar 11 1994 (IPS) - South Pacific nations have taken the first steps towards adopting a regional convention banning toxic waste imports and the transboundary movement of hazardous trash.

Representatives of South Pacific Forum (SPF) member countries will gather in Suva in June to further discuss details of a proposal first presented by Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1992 and taken up at an SPF meeting here this week.

South Pacific leaders have expressed concern at the health and environmental impact of toxic waste imports and uncontrolled movement of harmful wastes within the region.

This week's meeting, attended by representatives from 10 SPF member countries, discussed in detail a formal draft treaty prepared by PNG.

SPF spokesman Alfred Sasako says the draft treaty is a comprehensive document covering a wide range of concerns such as who will pay for damages in case of an accident and how to ensure observance of internationally recognised safety standards.

''We believe the countries that generate waste must be responsible for disposing of it in their own countries,'' says Sasako.

The environmental group Greenpeace, one of two non- governmental organisations (NGOs) that attended the meeting as observers, says the North has been sidestepping the 1989 Basel Convention which bans toxic waste dumping by exporting trash to the South under the guise of recycling.

In 1988, a U.S. company offered to build a 38-million-dollar incinerator in northern PNG. It said it would ship 600,000 tonnes of toxic waste a year for incineration and pay the provincial government 60 dollars per tonne. Despite the big sum, PNG authorities rejected the offer.

Four years later, another U.S. firm shipped 8,000 tonnes of contaminated soil from California to be used as landfill for a causeway project in the Marshall Islands.

But local protests led by Greenpeace and other green groups prompted U.S. environmental protection authorities to impound the ship in Guam and later send it back to the United States.

Early last year, South Pacific island nations were outraged when a Japanese ship carrying a controversial consignment of plutonium from France passed through the region without informing regional governments of its deadly cargo.

David Rapaport, a Greenpeace pollution prevention expert who attended the Suva meeting, said a number of industrialised countries have offered to ship hazardous waste to the region over the last six years purportedly for recycling, for fertiliser use or as humanitarian aid.

''These include everything from garbage from the United States to waste tyres, used batteries and hazardous industrial waste,'' he told IPS. ''These proposals have been scattered all over and so far there's been no known case of such dumping.''

Rapaport says industrialised countries have been trying to persuade the region to ban only waste dumping and not the import of reusable waste.

''Such talk of hazardous waste recycling is an absurd proposition,'' says Rapaport. ''Even if you extract anything recyclable out of it, there's that hazardous portion to get rid of which normally gets released into the atmosphere.''

He says this week's meeting also discussed banning the transport of toxic waste within the region, which especially applies to Australia and New Zealand -- both SPF member nations.

Local media reports before the meeting said Australia had been trying to water down the proposed treaty. A July 1993 official document said Australia would have difficulty being party to a treaty imposing a total ban on waste shipments in the region.

But PNG and other Pacific island countries believe the Basel Convention does not go far enough and has too many loopholes to effectively end toxic waste imports.

Interestingly, the South Pacific meeting started on the same day the Philippine government impounded two 40-foot containers of hazardous computer waste from Australia shipped to Manila on board a Russian ship.

One meeting participant said Australia and New Zealand showed overt support for the draft treaty during the meeting but raised a number of technical points which led to the bracketing of some clauses.

He believes both countries will go along with the majority support for the PNG proposal for the moment, but will try to water down some of the clauses at the final drafting sessions.

Meeting chairman Resio Moses of Micronesia said despite some snags on technical points of the draft treaty, South Pacific countries have ''made progress in many difficult areas and... the groundwork for a regional convention is now in place''.

The treaty is expected to be finalised for signing at the 1995 SPF summit to be hosted by Papua New Guinea. (END/IPS/KS/LNH/94)

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