'Dead zone' strategy rattles farm interests

The fight over the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" - a problem scientists say can be traced in large part to Iowa and its sister farming states - has ramped up as the Obama administration considers a regulatory attack on the problem.

Suzanne Schwartz, who directs a division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working on the dead-zone issue, said the federal government and Louisiana researchers are checking to see whether the pollution violates water quality standards.
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If it does, "Louisiana could set standards for what comes in," using the legal authority of the Clean Water Act, Schwartz said at a news conference this week. "That is not a short-term, immediate action but something we are looking at."

Said Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: "This is an issue we take seriously."

The possibility drew immediate fire from Iowa agricultural interests, which pointed out that this year's dead zone is far smaller than predicted and among the smallest in recent history.

The dead zone is an area left largely lifeless in summer as algae fed by a mixture of Midwestern fertilizers, sewage and dead plants from the Mississippi River watershed die off, consuming oxygen. Biologists call this hypoxia. There are at least 200 such zones worldwide.

The U.S. Geological Survey has said that nine states - Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi - are responsible for 70 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus running into the Gulf of Mexico. At issue is not only water quality in those states but disruption of Louisiana's lucrative shrimping industry.

New attention on the issue will include a meeting of the federal Gulf Hypoxia Task Force in Des Moines Sept. 23-24. Details are pending.

The Clean Water Act machinery often leads to new pressures on polluters to limit contamination, though farming has largely escaped that kind of regulation in the past.

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