Water pollution: a new plan without ambition to fight nitrates

Non-binding, the seventh plan to combat nitrates of agricultural origin, presented Friday to the members of the National Water Council, could also be ineffective as the six precedents.

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Bad for human health, in particular that of infants, harmful for water bodies where it generates cyanobacteria and for coastal waters where it is proliferating green algae tides, excess nitrates makes the object of a struggle continued for decades. Or at least gives a succession of plans for reducing water pollution by this oxidized form of nitrogen.

France is at its seventh plane of the genre from the European Nitrates Directive of 1991. Las, without great result.

Friday, December 3, the services of the Ministry of the Ecological Transition and those of agriculture presented to members of the National Water Committee, a consultative body, their next national equity program on nitrates of origin Agricultural (or PAN), whose rules must come into effect in the summer of 2022. “The feeling that this plan is clearly lacking from ambition dominated the Assembly which still adopted a favorable opinion with many reservations in the form of “Recommendations”, “says Antoine Gatet, Vice-President of France Nature Environnement, who has abstained.

Because this new plan that comes in the form of a technical file is limited to revisions at the margin of the previous one. That’s what is reproached for him: why not change a program that does not work? The environmental authority, an independent body under the Ministry of the Ecological Transition, advance a beginning of the response in the severe opinion that it rendered on 19 November:

“The planned PAN adaptations are aimed less about increasing its effectiveness on the reduction of nitrate pollution than to limit the constraints for farmers on the grounds of promoting appropriation.”

In other words, no question of crumpling a sector at the origin of the bulk of the problem, since 88% of the nitrates are due to excess nitrogen spread in the fields.

twenty- Five years of state commitments

After having already been consulted in 2011 and 2016, the experts point to their annoyance about the quadrennial exercise 2022-2026: “The evaluation of the previous Pan did not show their effectiveness. [it] Do not demonstrate how the new measures will improve the situation, or even what they will not degrade it. “

The environmental authority concludes by asking to inform the public “on the environmental, social and economic cost of nitrate pollution and eutrophication [the lack of oxygen]” water.

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/Media reports.