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The United States have put up a coalition of nations including Japan, India and 10 others to denounce the likely trade disrupting effects of REACH which they argue risk hitting developing countries and small businesses.
EU legislators completed their first reading on REACH last year when the Council of Ministers voted on the text in December (EurActiv 13 Dec. 2005). The draft has now returned to the EU Parliament for a second reading due to take place in October this year.
REACH was tabled in 2003 to perform health and environmental safety checks on some 30,000 chemical substances out of the 100,000 or so which are currently used in daily household and industrial products. According to the European Commission, safety information is "sketchy" for around 99% of those substances. This is because they escaped full safety assessment as they were introduced before 1981 when a more rigorous evaluation became compulsory.
LinksDossier: Chemicals Policy review (REACH)
Representatives of 13 nations including some of the EU's largest trading partners issued a joint statement
on 8 June asking the EU to revisit a draft EU law on chemicals known as REACH (Registration, Evaluation and Authorisation of CHemicals).
The joint statement, which was publicised at the initiative of the American Chamber of Commerce to the EU (AmCham EU), focuses on what those nations consider as potential trade disrupting effects of REACH. The signatories include Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand and the United States.
It follows an earlier statement by AmCham EU in April which claimed that some aspects of REACH could be regarded as constituting an unnecessary obstacle to trade, opening the prospect of a WTO dispute in accordance with article 2.2 on technical barriers to trade (TBT).
The countries call on EU lawmakers to "review the legislation" and to consider "revisiting the scope" of the draft law, in particular when it comes to authorising and registering chemical products with the future European chemical agency in Helsinki.
They denounce "the opacity of the regulatory process" and highlight concerns regarding the high cost burden that REACH will inflict on SMEs, particularly in developing countries.
These arguments are brushed aside by environmental NGO WWF. "The statement […] is out of date and fails to take account of the changes made to REACH by the Council and Parliament at first reading," the WWF said in a counter statement
.
Justin Wilkes, a chemical safety campaigner at the WWF, says the statement is only "part of a continuing US effort to weaken REACH to the benefit of its chemicals industry". "There is nothing new in this document", he said.
On the SME concerns, the WWF says they are unfounded too. It points to a report drawn up by the European Parliament's Development Committee which showed that the costs of REACH will predominantly be borne by the large multi-national chemical companies exporting a few bulk chemicals, not developing countries themselves or local SMEs.
"The analysis estimated the costs to the chemical companies operating in developing (ACP) countries to be just €50 million over 11 years," WWF said.
Asked by EurActiv, the European Commission said it consulted with the WTO and its own legal service about compliance with article 2.2 on technical barriers to trade. "We do not see how [REACH] could contravene the WTO rule", said environment spokesperson Barbara Helfferich.
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