Green Party co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons has hit out at the dairy industry saying it did not pay for its impact on the environment.
Yesterday she said the industry was being effectively subsidised by being able to use water for free and not paying for its degradation.
Dairy farmerswere not charged for losses of biodiversity, landscape and shelter nor for creating methane and nitrous oxide.
Last week, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Jan Wright, said dairy farmers were not paying enough for the pollution they caused and a price needed to be put on water.
Water allocations had increased 50 per cent since 1999 when plans for creating Fonterra triggered a huge growth in dairying.
It was untrue to claim the industry did not benefit from subsidies once environmental issues were considered, Ms Fitzsimons said.
"Roughly half our climate change emissions come from methane and nitrous oxide from farming.
"Dairying is the largest part of that and by far the fastest growing."
The Green Party believes greenhouse gas emitters should pay for the Kyoto bill.
After the Wright report, Federated Farmers dairy section chairman Frank Brenmuhl, who lives in Canterbury, the main region using irrigation water, said farmers had to pay the costs of pumping, storage and piping and faced significant bills in obtaining resource consents to put down bores and take water.
"Water is definitely not free."
Green MP Nandor Tanczos said the argument was flawed.
"The claim by Federated Farmers that farmers shouldn't have to pay a resource rental for using water because they already pay for their irrigation equipment and infrastructure is like saying that motorists shouldn't pay for petrol because they already have to pay for their cars and for roads," he said.
