Water-Food Nexus // How to Stimulate the Water and Agriculture Nexus?
By Rob van der Veeren, Diederik van der Molen and Siep Groen. This paper highlights steps needed to improve cooperation between these two policy domains and discusses first steps already taken at the European level. In addition, some examples of Dutch National Initiatives resulting from a dialogue between farmers and water managers with the aim of combining the objectives of water and agricultural policies and interests are presented.
Water and agriculture are interlinked: water is indispensable for agricultural production and agricultural production results in emissions of nutrients and other substances to surfacewater and groundwater. However, not only in physical terms are water and agriculture interlinked, there are also strong links between water and agricultural policies.
This paper focuses on European National Policies on water and agriculture. Agricultural practices are primarily regulated by European Agricultural Policies, such as the Nitrate Directive, Directive 2009/128/EC on sustainable use of pesticides and the Common Agricultural Policies.
The achievement of the objectives for nutrients and pesticides of European water related policies, such as the Drinking Water Directive and the Water Framework Directive, depends on agricultural practices. Therefore, for an effective and efficient implementation of sustainable policies on both agriculture and water, it is necessary to make sure that the targets and instruments of the two policy areas are properly aligned.
Current practices show that this is not yet the case; so, there is room for improvement.
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David Publishing website (open access)
Published
2017
In
Journal of Environmental Science and Engineering B 6 (2017), 362-369
doi: 10.17265/2162-5263/2017.07.003