Plan St-Laurent - Pour un développement durable

• The St. Lawrence
  River in good hands
  • Governmental
    actions
  • St. Lawrence Plan
  • Phase IV 2005-2010
  • Coordination Committees
    • Agriculture
    • Access to Riverbanks
    • Community Involvement and Awareness
    • Ecological Integrity
    • Navigation
    • Monitoring the State of the St. Lawrence River

Agriculture Coordination Committee

Background

Phase I of the St. Lawrence Action Plan (1988-1993) attacked the problem of industrial pollution. Subsequently, the St Lawrence Plan adopted a less narrowly focused, more ecosystem-oriented approach, in which the work was to be done on the scale of the watersheds of the rivers that empty into the St. Lawrence. The impact of these tributaries on the quality of the water in the St. Lawrence was thus recognized. Of necessity, agriculture was involved. Hence, for Phase II of the St. Lawrence Plan (1993-1998), it became logical to establish a Coordination Committee whose priority area would be the uses of the St. Lawrence that were affected by agricultural activities.

The activities carried out under the Agriculture component of Phase II of the Plan were designed chiefly to fight non-point source pollution from heavily farmed watersheds that were degrading the quality of the St. Lawrence ecosystem. The studies conducted during this period revealed the presence of agricultural pesticides and, especially, herbicides used on field crops (corn, soybeans, and cereals) in several tributaries of the St. Lawrence River and in the St. Lawrence itself as far as Quebec City.
In Phase III (1998-2003), the primary objective for the Agriculture component was to reduce the use of pesticides and the risks associated with the use of pesticides for targeted crops (cereals, corn, soybeans, apples, and potatoes). The preferred mode of action was the adoption of agri-environmental management practices for the targeted crops, which together accounted for 70% of all agricultural pesticides used, of which a large share were herbicides.

Mandate

The mandate of the Agriculture Coordination Committee is to maintain a balance between the development of an economically viable, socially acceptable agriculture sector and a high-quality environment for generations to come.
 
In Phase IV, the activities being carried out under the Plan’s Agriculture component are designed to continue the work begun in earlier phases. The basic objective of these activities is to conserve resources and reduce non-point-source pollution in agricultural areas. To achieve this objective, the partners involved in agriculture are relying on a more integrated form of management based on a better understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between agricultural pressures on the environment and the St. Lawrence ecosystem.

Setting a new objective necessarily implies targeting new results as well. At present, the main challenges for the Plan’s Agriculture component are to establish a Coordination Committee that includes all of the partners who are essential to the achievement of these results and to encourage discussion, coordination, and development of partnerships among all the actors involved in the complex dynamics of the agriculture sector. The critical goal is to promote a strategy that will enable the majority of agricultural businesses to make a faster transition from current agricultural practices to beneficial management practices. The means of achieving this goal are diverse. They include creating an information-exchange network, interlinking different projects, increasing the visibility of achievements in the field, and so on.

Composition

The federal departments and provincial ministries involved in the Agriculture component of the St. Lawrence Plan are as follows:

Canada	Quebec
Environment Canada Agriculture and Agri-food Canada	Ministère du Développement durable, de l’Environnement et des Parcs Ministère des Ressources naturelles et de la Faune

Targeted Results

In Phase IV, the Agriculture Coordination Committee has targeted the following results:

1. reduce the impact of agricultural activities on sections of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries; and
2. improve knowledge so as to develop new agricultural management practices and to more effectively monitor the state of sections of the St. Lawrence and its tributaries.

Overview of Work

• Beneficial farming practices – From Bras d'Henri to the St. Lawrence

Publications from Preceding Phases of the Plan

Phase III (1998-2003)

• The last five years in agriculture
• St. Lawrence Vision 2000 Five-Year Report 1998-2003
• St. Lawrence Vision 2000 Annual Report 2000-2001, p. 13
• St. Lawrence Vision 2000 Biennial Report 1998-2000, p. 13
• The use of agro-meteorology as a agro-environmental management tool for farmers  - Specialized Weather Forecasts for the Agricultural Sector (Meteorology serving the needs of agriculture)

Phase II (1993-1998)

• More Sustainable Agriculture: An Experiment
• Bassin versant de la rivière Boyer (1998) (French only)
• Bassin versant de la rivière Chaudière (1997) (French only)
• Bassin versant de la rivière L'Assomption (1997) (French only)
• Bassin versant de la rivière Yamaska (1997) (French only)
• Contamination de l'eau par les pesticides dans les régions de culture de maïs et de soya au Québec - Résultats des campagnes d'échantillonnage 1999, 2000 et 2001, et évolution temporelle de 1992 à 2001. (French only)

To display a list of all the documents that have been published by the Agriculture component since Phase II of the St Lawrence Plan, follow this link to the Library page of the St. Lawrence Plan web site, then click the Components list box, choose Agriculture, and click the Search button.