Ecological Disaster

Towns on the Baltic Sea are normally idyllic places of retreat, but the waters lapping toward them have become more than a little mucky.

The World Wildlife Fund in the Baltic seaport of Stralsund said this week that low oxygen levels have rendered around 70,000 square meters of the sea uninhabitable.

The main culprit polluting and strangling the waters is fertilizer, said Jochen Lamp, head of WWF in Stralsund. He said fertilizer nitrates are leaking into the Baltic Sea from farms and estuaries.

In addition, across one sixth of the Baltic, algae flowers now bloom where plants and animals once lived -- with serious consequences for the ecosystem.

"On the top of the water it looks like a normal sea, but on the bottom, there is very little which still lives," he said.

Waste being dumped into Baltic Sea

However, Dietrich Schulz of the German Federal Environment agency said that fertilization runoff from crops is not the biggest issue.

Schulz, who is part of a group working on ways to lessen the impact of animal by-products on the Baltic, said that the water near the new EU states in Eastern Europe, and in Belarus and Russia, suffers from another problem.

"The bigger problem is that the animal farms in the area have no place to discard their waste, so the farmers tend to just discharge it into the water," he said.

In November, experts will present the Baltic Action Plan to the Helsinki Commission, a collaboration of all the countries that surround the Baltic, in November.

Calls for sustainable practices

Good agricultural practices could be binding for EU members, but we also have Russia and Belarus as members of the Helsinki Commission and they are not within the EU schemes, Schulz said. "So we have to define other standards and respect the Russian and Belrussian positions," he added.

The EU cross-compliance controls -- the trade-off of agricultural subsidies for environmentally friendly practices -- will cut funding for animal farms with antiquated waste management systems in old EU states starting in October.

But, this will not go into effect for the new EU member states until 2013.

Experts say the real problem is increasing and uncontrolled agricultural production in the new EU states.

They are calling for a binding and sustainable agricultural policy for the entire Baltic Sea region.