Who’ll Stop The Rain?
June 21, 1999
Richard A. Halpern
Early next year, the President must submit to Congress a plan to mitigate environmental damages in the Gulf of Mexico that no one can find, and to restore economic losses to Gulf fisheries that no one has suffered. The president’s charge, under the 1998 Coast Guard Authorization Act, is to clean up the “Dead Zone,” a transient area of low oxygen, or hypoxia, off the Louisiana coast, which the Sierra Club claims is “an enormous threat to the biological integrity and productivity of the Gulf of Mexico.”
In very dry years, the zone virtually disappears, but after the Great Flood of 1993 it expanded to an historic high of seven thousand square miles, and the Sierra Club demanded “immediate and concerted action.” This alarm brought forth a joint task force to confront the crisis, combining the efforts of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Justice, and Interior and even the Food and Drug Administration. They all agreed beforehand that hypoxia was a major environmental and economic threat, and got ready to blame it on fertilizer from Midwest farms washing down the Mississippi River into the Gulf. Congress, acting on inaccurate findings by the Senate Commerce Committee, mandated that a plan be developed for “controlling” hypoxia. But after four years of “immediate and concerted action,” the case against hypoxia has dissipated like hot air, leaving the president obligated to commit an environmental injustice of monumental proportions. A White House task force called the Hypoxia Work Group revealed this spring that it can find no “detrimental ecological and economic impacts” at all to the Gulf of Mexico-no environmental damage of any kind, and no economic damage-not one single dollar.
This massive research effort involved a host of federal, state, and university researchers and substantial funds from the public treasury, and found nothing. Yet the administration is still determined to impose severe restraints on Mississippi Valley agriculture to reduce the “excess nutrients” that are supposedly guilty of the environmental and economic harms it could not find.
The truth is, hypoxia poses no threat at all, nor is it anything new. Dr. Nancy Rabalais, a researcher with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is credited with “discovering” hypoxia in the Gulf in the 1980s, but the phenomenon has been documented there since the 1930s and Mobile Bay since the 1850s-where “fisheries landings,” according to Alabama authorities, “remain high” despite frequent hypoxic events. Hypoxia occurs during the natural cycle that continually renews coastal waters. Nutrients flow from land to sea, producing blooms of algae that support the species on which the fisheries depend. Because the algae blooms deplete oxygen at the sea bottom, marine life migrates to the rich feeding areas at the edge of the hypoxic zone, creating the abundance that has led Gulf fisherman to refer to the area as the Fertile Crescent. In fact, at its seven-thousand-square-mile maximum, when it should have been most devastating, the hypoxic zone actually provided net benefits to the fisheries. In 1994, Louisiana fisheries enjoyed the largest, highest dollar-value harvest in nearly a decade.
The size of the hypoxic area does not depend, as the Work Group assumes, on the rate of fertilizer application in the Midwest. Fertilizer use in the Mississippi River valley has remained essentially flat since the early 1980s, and nitrogen concentrations in the Mississippi are about what they were in 1979. Yet the hypoxic zone varies almost annually, following changes in rainfall in the Mississippi River valley, not even remotely in proportion to Midwest fertilizer use. The sudden expansion to 7,000 square miles resulted from the Great Flood of 1993-a once-every-five-hundred-years event-and the zone receded to 4,800 square miles in 1998. We have seen the worst, and it was good for the fisheries and did the environment no harm.
It certainly makes sense to monitor the situation, but to reduce production permanently on the world’s greatest farmland will cause more fragile land in the rest of the world to be plowed under. And it won’t benefit the Gulf fisheries, either. Bureaucrats can shut down farms, but they can’t stop the rain.
(The Richard A. Halpern is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues.)
Posted in Commentary |