Can’t see the fishing nets that killed the dugongs, for the naturally occurring dioxins that made media headlines, is what I might have said on radio back more than two decades.   At the time, it caused me much grief because the Executive Director of Canegrowers Ltd didn’t want his Environment Manager maligning the fishing industry who it seemed were happy for the sugarcane farmers to take the rap for the dead dugongs.

It is the case that I was Environment Manager for Queensland Canegrowers Ltd from 1998 through until 2003 – and that I did nothing about all the agricultural pesticides.   That has been a recent accusation across at my official Facebook page.

I was employed to implement the findings of a three-volume audit of the sugar industry and its environmental impacts.  I got off to a good start, but in 2001, with the launch of the WWF Save the Reef campaign everything was blown off course.   I’ve written about that before, including how it begun here:https://jennifermarohasy.com/2018/11/theprinceandhisdumptrucks/

I first became aware of the specific issue of pesticide in dugongs in August 1998, long before the launch of that campaign.

A senior officer with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) phoned me with the news that a soon-to-be-published research study had found that elevated levels of pesticide residue, most likely from cane farming, were accumulating in the fat tissue of dugongs. Media headlines followed, including ‘Pesticide in reef creatures and cane burning link with dioxin in dugong’.

I obtained a copy of the study and found it was primarily an analysis of the type and quantity of dioxins found in the fat tissue of dugong carcasses that had been killed in fishing nets. Dioxins are a group of organochlorine compounds commonly associated with industrial waste incineration. The research paper made reference to a different study that had analyzed the dioxins found in soils under sugarcane cultivation and commented that the cane-land soils and dugong fat samples both had elevated levels of the same type of dioxins.

Concerned by this news, I contacted a dioxin expert at the University of Queensland. Dr Brian Stanmore informed me that the type of dioxin considered by the GBRMPA to be elevated in the dugongs was common and the least toxic of all dioxins. Furthermore, Dr Stanmore indicated that the level of dioxins found in the dugongs was less than the national average in people in the United States. He commented that ‘it looks like the dugong is better off than we are’.

The GBRMPA study clearly stated, ‘All (dugong) carcasses were in good condition at the time of sampling. All animal deaths were confirmed or suspected (fishing) net drowning.’

However, instead of focusing on net fishing practices, the GBRMPA subsequently provided funding for a full investigation by the National Research Centre for Environmental Toxicology (NRCET) into the likely origin of the dioxin considered to be at elevated levels in the dugong carcasses, including possible links with sugarcane production.

Two years later, the NRCET investigation concluded that the dioxin of concern to the GBRMPA was common in soils along the entire Queensland coastline, including in regions beyond sugarcane cultivation.  Analyses of dated marine sediment cores indicated that the chemical was present prior to European settlement in Queensland. In other words, the dioxin is a naturally occurring organochlorine and not a pesticide residue. There are, apparently, many naturally occurring non-toxic dioxins.

That has never made media headlines.

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You can read more of this story in the piece I wrote for the IPA Review back when they regularly published me, the article is called ‘Deceit in the Name of Conservation’.