Industrialized countries have undertaken scientific, legal and administrative measures to control pollution and other side effects from the steadily increasing production and use of chemicals.
Comparable controlling measures are widely lacking or not implemented in developing countries, due to a lack of expertise, proper equipment and administrative infrastructure. Chemical hazards are therefore often a more serious problem in developing countries. It appears as a moral duty of industrialized countries, that have provided most of the chemicals and chemical products used in developing countries, to support the efforts of these countries to solve their chemical pollution problems.
Against this background the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and with support of the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundation, considered it timely and appropriate to organize a Working Group on “Chemical Hazards in Developing Countries”. The meeting is scheduled to take place in the Vatican City (21-23 October 1993).
The aim of the meeting is to obtain an overview of the situation concerning chemical pollution and concomitant health hazards in developing countries in different parts of the world and to discuss possible measures to protect in an adequate way the environment, food chain and human health and welfare. Other important aspects in that context are the tran sfer of hazardous industrial plants and technologies as well as chemical waste to developing countries. The meeting should also aim at proposing tentative guide-lines and recommendations.
Nicola Cabibbo
President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences