Export of bottled New Zealand water

OPINION: It is one of the ironies of life that, at a time when Auckland and Coromandel are suffering from a surfeit of water – the flooding that is occurring is almost unprecedented – many New Zealanders are becoming exercised about the export of bottled water, particularly by internationally-owned companies.  Looking at water flows as a whole I suspect that bottled water is a drop in the ocean.

In principle, I don’t object at all to export initiatives of that type, nor do I care whether they are locally or overseas owned.  What I care about is that they are paying us something for the value of the resource they are using – not sure whether they are, but if so it is likely to be a small part of the total cost of the operation.  It needs to be remembered too that new businesses of all types, whether selling bottled water or anything, bring benefits in the form of local employment and expenditure.  As to how much bottling companies should be paying, I am happy to leave that to the relevant authorities as I don’t have the information to comment.

I think the key problem is that water resource policy has been in shambles for years and had defied efforts to work out a good overall solution.  There are particular solutions in some parts of the country and for some uses e.g. irrigation, but not overall.  The lack of a comprehensive policy means that particular issues run the risk of being blown out of proportion because they are seen in isolation.

There are several important aspects to this:

• Water is a renewable, flowing resources – whatever we do it keeps raining, the water runs down the rivers, flows out to sea, evaporates into clouds and so on. If we extract some of the water and sell it then hypothetically it will come back to us eventually – driven by the water cycle
• New Zealand actually has plenty of the stuff – if you hadn’t noticed New Zealand is a wet country, particularly in the winter. The problem is that the water is not necessarily in the right place at the right time, and to fix that problem you need resources, i.e. money.  And that is where the problems really start.
• And finally, the natural environment needs a certain amount of clean water in its rivers and streams to function effectively, and there are several risks associated with this.

My principal issue with the bottled water debate is that it is distracting from a more important problem which is the impact of dairying on the quality of our water resources.  The problem is well recognised and better efforts are being made to minimise runoff and so on, but the sense is that we are really fiddling with the problem.  From a water resource point of view, dairying is a potential monster – but it is also a major driver of the economy.  We would ideally like the best of both worlds –  minimal impact on rivers etc. and high and growing dairying export receipts. The extent to which we can do that is I think inherently limited.

I think the ultimate solution is to recognise that even with the application of the best technology there is only so much dairying we can support and that will, in the end, be driven by environmental standards and constraints.  We badly need consensus on the latter and action to then make the standards a reality.  Efforts are being made in that direction but they seem to keep falling at the final hurdle.    Trouble is that if we keep falling we will wake up one morning and find that the monster has taken over and we are in a world of trouble from which it will be very difficult to extricate ourselves.

Written by Bas

This is another of Bas Walker’s posts on GrownUps.  Please look out for his articles, containing his Beachside Ponderings.