Source: Greenpeace
Greenpeace says Environment Canterbury (ECan) has thrown rural households ‘under the tractor’, after the regional council voted to ‘resolve’ the nitrate emergency it declared just one year ago.
Greenpeace Programme Director Niamh O’Flynn says, “Resolving the emergency makes it sound like it’s sorted, but a few discussions from the council has not magically cleaned up the nitrate pollution that is wrecking our rivers and poisoning the water in people’s kitchen taps.”
“Tens of thousands more cows have been consented for Canterbury, which is only going to exacerbate the existing crisis. ECan has essentially written off the problem, let polluters go for gold, and left households to stump up the costs associated with trying to access safe drinking water for their families.”
“In ten years time, when rural people in Canterbury are looking for who was responsible for allowing the dairy industry to poison their water, they should look at the records of this council meeting, and the politicians who have aided and abetted the dairy industry in its pollution.”
Greenpeace says this move to minimise the nitrate emergency, at the behest of industry lobby groups like Federated Farmers and Dairy NZ, is spineless.
O’Flynn says, “ECan has a bare minimum responsibility to keep telling the truth about the situation in Canterbury. There is a nitrate emergency. It hasn’t gone away – if anything, it’s gotten worse. And the only thing that the regional council has put in place to deal with this is a Drinking Water Action Plan which does not address the source of the pollution, and puts the onus back on households.”
ECan’s Drinking Water Action Plan prioritises education and evidence gathering, but does not provide solutions to stopping pollution from getting into groundwater in the first place.
“The evidence of the problem is clear,” says O’Flynn. “Prioritising ‘evidence gathering’ instead of calling time on the issue and addressing the source of the problem, is not only kicking the can down the road, but condemning more Cantabrians to increased risk of bowel cancer, pre-term birth, and the anxiety about their drinking water for years to come.”
“ECan has a responsibility to protect source water and stop it from getting polluted in the first place. But if its not willing to maintain its declaration of a nitrate emergency, then it is safe to assume they will not be taking action to make sure it doesn’t get worse.”
Greenpeace says that while ECan has a responsibility to protect drinking water at the source and advocate for its constituents, central Government is ultimately responsible for the failure to protect rural people’s health.
“The source of the nitrate emergency is the intensive dairy industry – an industry that successive Governments have let off the hook for decades. Fonterra and the other dairy corporations are poisoning rural drinking water and they’ve managed to avoid any kind of accountability for it.”
“Ultimately, the solution is clear. We need fewer cows, a ban on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use, and a transition away from intensive dairying, towards ecological practices that don’t poison our drinking water and pollute our lakes and rivers.”