ILO, OECD and UNEP/FAO Chemical Safety Activities: A Comparative AnalysisChapter IIntroduction |
This analysis was commissioned by the International Labour Office (ILO) in order to facilitate coordination and cooperation among certain intergovernmental organizations involved in activities related to chemical safety, specifically the ILO, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Furthermore, this analysis can also be used to help improve understanding by member States of select intergovernmental activities related to chemicals testing, assessment and management, as well as prevention of, preparedness for and response to major industrial accidents.
In addition, the information contained in this analysis and related efforts at coordination among the international organisations, should help enhance inter-ministerial cooperation at the national level. In this regard, most countries have numerous ministries and agencies concerned with issues addressed in this analysis namely the ministries for labour, environment, health, agriculture, industry and local authorities including civil defence, fire and the police.
This analysis is limited in scope, in that it focuses on certain legal instruments concerning chemical safety adopted by ILO, the OECD, UNEP and FAO. For the purpose of this text, "chemical safety" is used as an umbrella term to encompass issues related to testing, assessment and the sound management of chemicals, including their safe use, both in terms of overall policy and with respect to individual chemicals, as well as to include issues related to chemical accident prevention, preparedness and response.
The analysis will focus on the following instruments:
In addition to providing an overview of these instruments, this paper will briefly describe each of the four organizations. It will also include a comparative analysis in Section IV to point out where areas of interest overlap, where work of different organizations is mutually supportive and, in the rare cases, where there are inconsistencies or potentials for inconsistencies in approach. It will also point out where further cooperation/coordination would be warranted.
This analysis does not address other documents or outputs of the ILO, OECD, UNEP and FAO, such as guidance materials, policy documents, databases or workshop reports issued by these organizations. Nor does it consider the ongoing activities of the target organizations (e.g. the work of OECD and ILO related to the classification and labelling of chemicals) except to the extent that they are reflected in the above-mentioned legal instruments.
This analysis also does not address other legal instruments adopted by the target organizations which address similar subjects (such as the ILO Convention on Occupational Safety and Health (No. 155), 1981 or the Basle Convention), nor does it address conventions issued by other organizations which are directly related to chemical safety (such as the UN/ECE Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents).
In this regard, it should be kept in mind that there are quite a number of other international organizations specifically tasked with carrying-out intergovernmental activities related to chemical safety which are not considered in this analysis. These include, for example, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), as well as the International Programme for Chemical Safety (IPCS) which is a joint programme of ILO, UNEP and WHO.
| [ Table of contents ] | [ List of papers ] |