The Politics of Fresh Water: Access, Conflict and Identity by Catherine M Ashcraft & Tamar Mayer

Author:Catherine M Ashcraft & Tamar Mayer [Ashcraft, Catherine M & Mayer, Tamar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Real Estate, General, Nature, Ecology, Political Science, Public Policy, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9781138859227
Google: xiBurgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 26536598
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-14T00:00:00+00:00

The rise of dairy production

Despite the intentions behind the RMA, major changes have occurred when it comes to sustaining the ecological integrity of New Zealand’s watersheds. The current cow population has reached almost four million (DairyNZ, 2014). In 2007, 21 percent of dairies used rotaries, with two people milking up to 800 cows in two hours. New Zealand’s dairy cow population is increasing faster than the resident human population. The shift to large-scale dairy production has also led to an overall increase in the density of cows, that is, the number of dairy cows per hectare, as well as in the amount of land owned and operated per farmer.

Dairy production not only raises concerns about water quality and the loss of aquatic habitat and associated native species diversity, it also raises concerns about water scarcity. Local water scarcity problems are manifesting across New Zealand due to of the overdrawing of rivers and creeks. Research on “virtual water” relationships between consumption, trade, and water resource use shows that freshwater resources should not merely be considered as an issue for individual countries or river basins. Exporting dairy and other animal products requires a significant amount of water, and the average water footprint per for one liter of milk is 1020 kg of water (Hoekstra, 2012). Overall, the total international virtual water flows related to the global trade of dairy and other animal products amount to 272 billion cubic meters per year—the equivalent of about half the Mississippi River’s annual runoff in the United States (Mekonnen & Hoekstra, 2011).

Climate change is influencing the rainfall in New Zealand. As NBC News reported in 2013 (Newland, 2013), the country was facing its worst drought in thirty years. Parts of New Zealand’s north island, where most dairy production takes place, were drier in 2013 than they had been in seventy years. Clearly, water scarcity is an economic reality in New Zealand, and the high amounts of water required to feed grass and dairy cattle exacerbates the challenge of adapting to climate disturbance and the likelihood of major droughts in the future. In 2013, the drought caused NZ$820 million in lost export earnings connected with dairy production. The drought also required ranchers to reduce the size of their dairy herds.

New Zealand is failing to live up to its brand of a clean, green country (Anderson, 2012). Many of the nation’s watersheds have been converted to wastesheds: systems of shedding waste and other industry by-products (McGinnis, 2016). Scientists have documented the ecological impacts of the country’s wastesheds, which are the subject of a heated political debate over the country’s brand and future (Harding, 2007). As Mike Joy (2011), one of the country’s outspoken freshwater scientists, observes:

We have gone too far. Surely it is time to admit, even if just to ourselves, that far from being 100% pure, natural, clean, or even green, the real truth is we are an environmental/biodiversity catastrophe … In five decades, New Zealand has gone from a world-famous clean, green paradise to an ecologically compromised island nation near the bottom of the heap of so-called developed countries.

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