The sector's efforts are necessary to improve water quality. That is what outgoing State Secretary Martijn van Dam wrote in a letter to the House of Representatives on Tuesday (9 May). In doing so, he is responding to the PBL's 2016 synthesis report Evaluation of the Fertilizers Act, which denounces large-scale manure fraud.
According to the ministry, manure fraud takes place in all links of the manure chain and throughout the country. 'The exact extent of the manure fraud is unknown', writes Van Dam† Despite all the measures to combat manure fraud and the tightening of application standards, the water quality in the southern livestock areas is not improving.
Sector itself has a role
The State Secretary therefore emphasizes that the sector itself also has a role and that compliance with the rules itself will have to improve. Particularly in regions where the risk of increased leaching of nitrate into the groundwater is greatest, efforts by the sector are necessary to improve water quality.
Van Dam wants to flesh out the sixth Nitrates Directive Action Programme to improve the enforcement of the existing rules in consultation with the parties concerned.
Overutilization of phosphate and nitrogen
Calculations by the PBL and Wageningen UR show that there is an overuse of nitrogen between 104 and 128 percent in the southern livestock area. For phosphate this is 108 to 129 percent. According to the authors of the report, this bandwidth can be regarded as preventing manure fraud.
The State Secretary concluded that in only part and in certain areas over-fertilization could be the reason that the water quality has not improved and in some cases has even deteriorated. The PBL calculated that the aforementioned exceedance resulted in 5 to 30 milligrams per liter of extra nitrate in the upper groundwater. According to Van Dam, this information indicates that the exceeding of the application standard, as a result of manure fraud, is the reason that the water quality has improved to a limited extent and has deteriorated further in some areas.
Measures against manure fraud
Van Dam lists the measures that have been taken since 2014 to combat manure fraud:
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