Phosphate and pollution

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32902, 28 April 1972, Page 10

Phosphate and pollution

New Zealand’s application of phosphates to the land was typical of severe pollution being produced by activities that were apparently essential to man’s existence, Mr R. G. Norman, the Assistant Commissioner of Works for the Ministry of Works said in Christchurch last evening.

Speaking to the Christchurch branch of the United Nations Association on his recent trip to the Paris conference on “Man and the Biosphere,” Mr Norman said there was a steady and irreversible depletion of the world’s phosphate resources. “It has been estimated that at the present rate of depletion of the world’s phosphate resources, the entire supply will be used up in 60 years,” he said.

He said that without phosphates, agricultural technology could produce food for two thousand million; the world already had the thousand million people and in 60 years will have about eight thousand million.

However, once applied to the land, only a small proportion was used to sustain animal —and thus human—life. Some was fixed in the soil, but a very large proportion was washed into rivers to find its way to the bottom of the sea. High use Mr Norman said New Zealanders were using phosphate at a greater rate per capita than any other country. “Do we have a right to do this? What serious attempts are we making at recycling?” Mr Norman asked. It might be argued that New Zealand was a long way from any other country, and that what we tipped around our own ocean was our own business. “But what is our own ocean? And in the present environmental crisis, what right do we have to lay claim to anything?”

Another kind of pollution was that which had been produced from the beginning of man—people. “It is a product produced by unskilled operatives who enjoy their work and have a minimum of union trouble,” Mr Norman said. Somewhere in the 1950 s

the stork had passed the plough; the developments in science and technology had lagged then behind the population increase, and the world’s average standard of living had begun to fall. It was now falling at a rate which should give great concern.

Mr Norman said that one of the resolutions expected from the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment which he would be attending in Stockholm in June, would be that member governments be encouraged to develop demographic and population policies—where it was in the interests of the governments concerned.

But he said the survival of man might demand more than encouragement—it might need firm, deliberative action.