Rich-Poor Breach Slows Ozone Accord : Environment: The price of substitute chemicals is a sticking point. But London conferees expect an accord by the weekend.

Amid growing concern over a breach between rich and poor nations, environmental ministers from 88 countries began final negotiations Wednesday on a treaty to protect the Earth’s eroding ozone layer from destruction by man-made chemicals.

While most delegates expect agreement on strengthening a major pact on ozone protection by the weekend, top-ranking officials arriving here Wednesday were confronted with lingering disputes that have dogged lower-level negotiators for the last week and slowed progress toward a major revision of the Montreal Protocol, the accord on ozone signed in 1987.

On Wednesday, those disputes broke into the open when Malaysia accused the United States of “environmental colonialism” and India served notice that it will not sign the treaty unless certain conditions opposed by major industrialized countries are accepted.

The United States continued to insist on having a permanent seat on a proposed 15-member panel that will dispense $240 million in aid to Third World nations.

The position, reaffirmed Wednesday by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chief William K. Reilly on grounds that the United States will be contributing 25% of the fund, drew a sharp rebuke from Stephen Yong of Malaysia.

“We must ask the U.S.A. to treat the rest of us here like equal partners if we are expected to play our role effectively in our joint efforts to save this only planet of ours. We, the developing nations, are certainly not prepared to accept environmental colonialism in whatever form it may appear,” Yong declared.

Many see Third World cooperation as crucial to the long-term success of efforts to protect the ozone layer. For example, neither India nor China, which together account for 20% of the world’s population and an enormous potential for producing and using ozone-destroying chemicals, have signed the protocol.

The conference comes at a time of overwhelming scientific evidence that man-made chemicals--used chiefly as refrigerants, fire suppressants and in foam manufacturing--are gnawing an ever widening hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic and thinning it over much of the world, including North America and Europe.

Diplomats and others said here that the gas layer’s rapid deterioration demands that scientific facts be matched by political action.

“The time of high-sounding declarations which promise everything and achieve next to nothing is over,” Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, told the conference.

In welcoming remarks, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said that even if all damaging chemicals were banned immediately, a step far more ambitious than proposed, ozone depletion would continue to get worse for more than a decade.

“It would still take our planet well beyond the lifetime of all of us here to replenish the ozone already lost,” Thatcher said.

At stake are amendments to strengthen the Montreal Protocol by speeding up the phase-out of most of the ozone-destroying substances by the year 2000. Currently the protocol calls for a 50% reduction by that time in industrialized nations.

Another amendment would establish the first international fund devoted exclusively to addressing a global environmental threat.

Developing countries also want the West to transfer the new technologies to them at low cost. But major chemical companies, backed by Western governments, are hesitant to make their technology available because they say they would be put at a competitive disadvantage. Third World countries, which have not invested millions in research and development, could simply manufacture the chemical substitutes and undercut the major companies on the world market, they argue.

Third World nations say that they cannot always afford to buy products from the West, that their needs for widespread refrigeration are great, and that they already are burdened by staggering debt.

Developing countries estimate that it will cost them $2 billion to $7 billion to convert to chemical substitutes.

Thatcher announced that Britain will contribute up to $15 million to the fund, 6.25% of the total.

Both the United States and the European Community are calling for a ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons by the year 2000. But the community is pushing for larger initial cuts--50% by 1991-92, compared to a 20% cut urged by the United States.

The differences are important. For every year the harmful substances are pumped into the atmosphere, there is a five- to 10-year delay in repairing the damage they do to the ozone layer.

BACKGROUND

The layer of ozone gas protects humans and plant and animal life from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation, which can cause skin cancer and cataracts, lower crop yields and kill fish larvae and plankton, which form the base of the marine food chain.