With seven chemicals on its unusually heavy agenda, the seventeenth meeting of the Chemical Review Committee (CRC-17) to the Rotterdam Convention convened virtually to review notifications of final regulatory action on these substances. If warranted, the Committee was to prepare recommendations for listing them in Annex III of the Rotterdam Convention. The Committee considered notifications related to carbaryl, iprodione, terbufos, chlorfenvinphos, thiodicarb, methidathion, and methyl parathion. The Committee also received notifications of final regulatory action on amitrole, carbon tetrachloride, methyl bromide, mirex and paraquat. However, because CRC-17 is meeting online due to the global pandemic, consideration of this latter set of substances was deferred to a future meeting.  

When a party to the Rotterdam Convention takes final regulatory action to ban or severely restrict a chemical for environmental or health reasons, it notifies the Convention Secretariat. When the Secretariat receives notifications from two parties in different regions regarding a specific chemical, it forwards the notifications to the Chemical Review Committee. The Committee, which is made up of 31 government-designated experts from around the world, reviews the notifications and decides whether to recommend the Conference of the Parties to the convention consider listing the relevant substance in Annex III of the Convention, and thereby subjecting it to the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) procedure.

The PIC procedure enables importing parties to formally declare whether they wish to receive future shipments of chemicals listed in Annex III of the convention. It is also a mechanism for ensuring exporting parties comply with these decisions. Annex III currently lists 52 chemicals, including 35 pesticides, 16 industrial chemicals, and 1 chemical that is listed as both a pesticide and industrial chemical.