An international commission assessing the water quality of the Great Lakes has pointed an accusing finger at intensive agriculture as a key source of disease-carrying waste that pollutes water and threatens public health.
“Current approaches dealing with large volumes of animal wastes may not be sufficient because numerous reports have linked discharges and contaminated runoff from large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations to impairments in the United States water bodies and in Canada, to emerging diseases,” the International Joint Commission said in a report published Sept. 13.
The commissioners also warned about the emergence of new pathogens in animal waste because of farmers’ “largely unregulated” use of antibiotics.
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The report noted that even though Ontario is implementing new nutrient management regulations, they do not become effective for large livestock farms until next year and “do not include controls on microbial contamination from animal wastes.”
It said this could be the greatest looming public health threat.
“Some experts believe that the massive and largely unregulated use of antibiotics in agriculture and aquaculture, coupled with the increasing number of antibiotic-resistant pathogens found in nature, may present the greatest risk to the aquatic environment and public health,” the report said.
“Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been spread in the environment through the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in human and animal health.”
Agriculture officials quickly conceded there is a problem, but insisted Canadian governments and farmers are taking steps to reduce the risk.
“The industry recognizes it as a problem and is putting mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening,” said Ottawa farmer Gerry Kamenz, who is also chair of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture’s environment committee.
“Are we as far along as we should be? Probably not, but progress is being made.”
He suggested the IJC focused on the issue this year partly because American environmental lobbyists have campaigned on it, accusing intensive livestock operations of being a looming environmental disaster.
“I think the IJC report is taking us down paths more rapidly than we want to go and I think that is in part because of the influence of the environmental activists.”
At Agriculture Canada, senior environmental policy analyst Patricia Story pointed to the $265 million, five-year government commitment to the environmental farm plan program, which will have manure and run-off control as part of its mandate.
“The biggest environmental program coming out of the department right now is farm environmental planning and this certainly is one of the issues being addressed,” she said.
The IJC, co-chaired by former deputy prime minister Herb Gray, issues a report every two years assessing progress in cleaning up the lakes through the 1972 Great Lakes water quality agreement signed by the two countries.
Tens of millions of people live in communities around the lakes on both sides of the border. They also are surrounded by thousands of farms.
This year, the IJC concluded that while progress has been made during the past three decades in reducing pollution and its sources, water quality is increasingly threatened by growing urban sprawl and intensive agriculture in the basin that includes Ontario and seven states from Minnesota in the west to New York in the east.
