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NVZ’s
Christopher Booker's Notebook
Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 22/09/2002)
Pointless prohibition - NVZ’s
For an example of the malevolence with which our
Brussels/Whitehall system of government treats Britain's countryside,
you could not do better than the bizarre story of the EU's nitrates
directive.
Thousands of already beleaguered livestock farmers
will shortly be forced by Defra to pay out £50 million a year
to comply with this 11-year-old directive, based on bogus science,
to which our government was initially opposed and which is so absurd
that the European Commission has threatened 13 governments with
legal proceedings for failing to obey it.
What makes this even odder, as has been pointed
out to Defra by Alan Monckton, a Staffordshire dairy farmer who
is a technical expert on the directive, is that, under a new Brussels
directive, the UK Government has the right to refuse to enforce
this nonsensical law because it will damage both public health and
the environment.
The story of directive 91/676 goes back more than
20 years. A small number of scientists had claimed that nitrates
of the kind produced by nitrogen-fixing crops or by putting animal
manure on fields were harmful on two grounds.
First, if leached into drinking water, they caused
a very rare condition known as "blue baby syndrome".
Second, they caused algal blooms in estuaries,
or eutrophication. Brussels therefore issued a law prohibiting farmers
in "nitrate vulnerable zones" (NVZs) from growing certain
crops or spreading muck on their fields for several months a year.
Providing storage for the forbidden muck could cost a large pig
or dairy farm as much £100,000.
Even before the directive came into force, new
research from Sweden, Britain, France and Ireland showed how the
scientists had got it totally wrong.
Not only were nitrates not the cause of blue baby
syndrome, they were actually good for human health - nitrate deficiency
can promote conditions such as diabetes and asthma. Furthermore,
it is not nitrates that cause eutrophication in rivers but phosphates.
The directive seemed ridiculous and was widely
ignored. Brussels, however, can never admit that it is wrong. Once
a directive is issued, it is virtually impossible to repeal. Thirteen
of the EU's 15 member states were threatened with legal proceedings.
The European Court of Justice, hearing the case
against the UK for failing to designate enough NVZs, said it would
impose a fine of £50 million if the directive was not fully
enforced.
Still odder, however, was the fact that the British
government did not even contest the commission's case.
The reason was that in 1991, when the nitrates
scare was at its height, the government forced our 29 new private
water companies to instal denitrification plants, which to date
have cost shareholders£3 billion. If the Government now admits
that nitrates are not harmful after all, this might lay it open
to a massive compensation claim.
Faced with this embarrassment, Defra has resorted
to concealing the likely cost of the directive to farmers with figures
which the National Farmers Union has shown, through a detailed survey,
to be wild underestimates.
Defra claims that the total cost will be £21
million a year, including £12 million for paperwork. As the
NFU shows, the true figure will be well over twice that. Yet, as
Mr Monckton has explained to Defra, it has been presented with a
perfect get-out by the EU's 2000 water directive.
This would permit Britain to cancel NVZs on health
grounds, thus averting a fine from the ECJ and saving farmers £50
million a year. But Margaret Beckett and her fellow farm ministers
are now dead-set on enforcing a directive which their own officials
opposed as unnecessary and misconceived.
Christopher Booker
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