SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
In the course of producing food and fibre, agriculture causes adverse effects on water quality in New Zealand as in other countries. These effects include sedimentation caused by erosion, nutrient loading of waterbodies, faecal contamination from animal sheds and pasture runoff, and destruction of streamside vegetation by livestock or by
Although the extent of these problems is unknown, regional council officials from around the country rank agriculture as the biggest source of adverse effects on water quality.
These effects impose a range of costs on people and the environment, including destruction of habitat for plants and animals, reduced recreational, cultural, and aesthetic values of water and more frequent flooding of rivers. The agricultural sector itself relies on high water quality for livestock and for intakes to meatworks and dairy processing factories.
Farmers can help to minimise adverse effects on water quality by maintaining more vegetation along streams to filter out sediment and other contaminants, by better management of effluent ponds, more careful application of fertiliser, and by reducing grazing pressure on slopes that are erosion-prone.
The Resource Management Act offers New Zealand an opportunity to address these issues, potentially gaining an advantage in overseas markets where consumers are increasingly interested in the environmental impacts of production processes. Under the Resource Management Act, communities must decide, through their regional councils, the acceptable levels of these impacts and how to balance competing interests. Permission from regional councils will be required for many activities, and in some cases producers may have to adjust their practices.
As the Act is still relatively new, there is considerable uncertainty about how it will be implemented, how strict water quality standards will be, and whether activities such as fertiliser application will require resource consents. These points should become more clear as regional councils develop their regional policy statements and regional plans, which are meant to be the expression of the community's values and objectives.
Every land and water user, and everyone with an interest in water quality, should actively participate in the development of these policies and plans, as they will set the general rules against which applications for resource consents will be considered and performance will be judged.
Regional councils have the difficult task of interpreting and giving practical effect to the Resource Management Act's provisions regarding water quality. They are assisted in this regard by the Ministry for the Environment, which is developing guidelines for water quality standards. Nonetheless, it will be left for councils to decide, based on community input and subject to rulings by the Planning Tribunal, how to implement the Act and balance costs and benefits in order to achieve the best result for the regional community.
Achieving sustainable management of water resources will require more information than is available at present. More research is needed on the extent and severity of water quality problems, how other users of water are affected by varying degrees of contamination, and on new practices which can avoid, remedy, or mitigate adverse effects on water quality. In addition, information on new practices will have to be disseminated to producers in a form they can apply to their own situations.
This information, and its communication to users, has a substantial public good element, since most of the benefits of improving water quality accrue to the public. Funding could be provided by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology, and in some instances already is. The 'polluter pays' principle should be applied where possible, but relying on 'polluter pays' is no likely to generate the information that is needed, because of the large number of small producer and the difficulty of identifying the source of many impacts. MAF may be able to assist by endorsing research applications to the Foundation which address these problems. MAF may also be able to support a limited amount of research if it is directly related to policy development.
In the final analysis, achieving sustainable management of New Zealand's water resources will require the recognition of these issues by agricultural producers and others who use water, am it will require that feasible solutions be available. Regional councils have a key role, and MAF can encourage change, but in the end acceptable solutions must be defined locally by all those with an interest in water quality.
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