Regulation wrangles

Europe's chemical manufacturers must not abandon their drive for competitiveness, according to the new president of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), BASF board member Eggert Voscherau.

Speaking at CEFIC's recent general assembly in Versailles, Voscherau urged his fellow executives to maintain their focus on innovation - and to keep up the pressure on the EC to amend the upcoming White Paper on chemicals policy to reduce the regulatory burden on the industry.

The industry's performance in recent years has been impressive, Voscherau said. It manufactures almost a third of the world's chemical output, ahead of the US (albeit only by 1 per cent) and Japan. Its E463billion sales in 2001 make it the third largest manufacturing sector in Europe, and its trade surplus of E53billion places it among the top exporting industries. 'But despite its size and strength,' Voscherau said, 'the fact is that the European chemical industry in recent years has not been able to take full advantage of the many opportunities presented by globalisation.'

The industry, along with the EU, has addressed the problem of competitiveness in the past, notably in 1993 with the establishment of the Single Market within the Union. Back then, Voscherau said, the EU set itself the target of becoming 'the most competitive and most dynamic knowledge-based economic area in the world'. 'We have to admit that we don't have much to show for this ambitious statement. There's still a wide gap between what is aimed for and what has been achieved.'

Voscherau laid the blame for this at the door of the regulators. Extensive testing requirements mean that it costs ten times as much to bring a new substance to market in Europe than in the US, and takes three times as long, he claimed. 'Despite this,' he said, 'nobody can seriously maintain that the US has a worse safety record or pays less attention to protecting humans and the environment.' The effects have been far reaching. In some product areas, Voscherau claimed, European companies have simply stopped developing new substances because of the costs of bringing them to market.

'We're also concerned that the public at large is increasingly sceptical about the benefits of technical progress,' Voscherau said. This has made the European Union more cautious, focusing more on the risks of new products and technologies than their benefits.

Environmental protection is a particular bugbear for the industry, with the White Paper supposedly aimed at reducing the risks posed by chemicals to health and the environment. But the industry could hardly be said to ignore these issues, Voscherau said. 'This year we have met our commitment to report at European level on all the 15 performance indicators that we defined back in 1998. Among other things, we've seen a 21 per cent reduction in lost-time injury frequency rates and a halving of releases of heavy metals to water and sulphur dioxide to air.'

Everyone should - and does - take questions of environmental and consumer protection extremely seriously, but these factors should not be considered in isolation, Voscherau said. 'We therefore call upon the European institutions to pay proper attention to industrial interests. All the important proposals for keeping Europe attractive and competitive as a place for doing business have been formulated. They just need to be put into action.'