Human Wrongs Watch
Tackling agricultural water pollution across highly industrialised countries costs taxpayers billions of dollars annually. In addition to the expense of removing pollutants from drinking water and of paying farmers, for example, to help them store manure safely or create contamination buffers, there are wider costs to society and to the environment of contaminating rivers, lakes and coastal waters.
This is what the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says in a report, adding that OECD governments “have made little overall progress in reducing water contamination from farming over the past decade… Not only are pollutant levels high in many areas but sources of contamination are often spread widely across the landscape, making measurement and control difficult.”
OECD groups 34 countries spanning the globe, from North and South America to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.