Olympia, Wash.-Agriculture interests, joined by a broad coalition, succeeded in preventing passage in the Washington State Legislature of a tax on hazardous chemicals to fund stormwater clean-up efforts that would have hit fertilizer twice. But environmentalists bent on protecting Puget Sound and other waterways from pollution are expected to make another try next session. “We kept it from passing this time,” Scott Dahlman, a public policy analyst for the Washington State Farm Bureau, told Green Markets. “That was because of a broad coalition that formed as the session wore down there with agriculture, business associations including the state chamber of commerce, petroleum companies and local gas stations.” Dahlman said fertilizer would have been taxed at the manufacturing level because it’s a petroleum derivative, as well as at the wholesale level. “It would have increased costs because of the increase in petroleum taxes,” he explained. In a letter to lawmakers opposing the tax, the Washington Farm Bureau cited the situation that would have confronted potato farmers with their crop value of potatoes already being hammered by retaliatory tariffs from Mexico. If the hazardous chemicals tax went from 0.7 percent to 2 percent as proposed, the Farm Bureau said the result would have been profits plunging for potato farmers another 20 percent. “Of course, the proposed tax increase would also spread its damage through the rest of the state’s agriculture industry, which generates $38 billion for Washington’s economy along with 160,000 jobs,” one blog declared on the Internet. Still, according to Dahlman, the stormwater tax remains a big priority for environmental groups in this area. They claim that petroleum products represent nearly 60 percent of the pollution that flows from streets and storm drains into Puget Sound waters.
Transparency Across the Fertilizer Value-Chain