The pastoral sector is collaborating to quantify the scale and impact of livestock being displaced by new forest plantings to offset greenhouse gas emissions, Meat Industry Association chief executive Tim Ritchie says.
Rural community leaders estimate more than 30,000ha of farmland, mostly on the North Island’s East Coast, has converted from pasture to exotic forest in the last year, encouraged by investors farming for carbon credits and Government planting subsidies.
The group is also making submissions to the Government on what its members view as an inequitable policy favouring fossil fuel emitters over livestock farmers, which could harm the meat sector and its 25,000 employees.
“Big farmers cannot offset their emissions by planting gullies but big carbon dioxide emitters like Air New Zealand can come in and purchase farms to plant in trees.”
It is a short-term solution, he warns.
“It is only a temporary solution, which might make NZ feel good but if we are still emitting carbon dioxide then we will have to continue planting forestry and we may run out of land.”
The association is not opposed to forestry but the blunt way it is being implemented creates unintended consequences for rural communities.
“It will have a real impact in the so-called wellbeing of regional NZ.”
Beef + Lamb is also part of that group and its chief insight officer Jeremy Baker says it is highlighting pine plantations being used by fossil fuel emitters to park their pollution on productive land.
Pine plantations sequester carbon for only 30 years.
“We find it perverse that the Zero Carbon Bill enables fossil fuel emitters to continue to emit and plant their long-term emissions on productive land while not recognising native forests on sheep and beef land as an offset for short-term biological emissions.”
Baker says B+LNZ, MIA and Federated Farmers are doing economic analysis and modelling of the economic impact of different mixes of livestock and forestry and their effect on the viability of rural communities.
Hawke’s Bay meat company owner Craig Hickson of Progressive Meats says land use change is a continuum but Government subsidies skew investment behaviour in favour of forestry over livestock.
“For the pastoral sector it’s not a fair playing field determining land use.”
Hickson says carbon farming trees, where investors buy land and plant trees to earn carbon credits, will not change behaviour.
These credits are sold to polluters to offset their carbon dioxide emissions but the land investor does not have to harvest the trees and because the credits are linked to the land it effectively locks it up in forestry forever.
“That is consigning land to provide no more economic value.”
Land use change should be driven by economics but that has been skewed by the Government paying planting subsidies and giving favourable treatment to foreign forestry investors.
Hickson recently went through the North Island’s east coast, which had a forestry boom several decades ago, and saw empty farm buildings and communities.
Economically, the region is going backwards because of the scale of land use change.
“We have a real-life example in the East Coast, evidence of what can happen because trees were planted there a long time ago.
Farmers should be able to claim credits for the carbon sequestering vegetation on their land, an issue that should be renegotiated in international climate change agreements, Hickson says.
Silver Fern Farms sustainability head Justin Courtney says while the firm supports the objective of NZ’s climate change goals, mitigation measures must be sustainable for rural communities.
The right trees planted in the right place can enhance the environment, biodiversity and the values used to promote the marketing of NZ meat.
“We do not want to see further hollowing out of rural communities through large-scale, monoculture pine plantations on productive finishing country.
“We have been meeting farmers on our national roadshow and there is anecdotal evidence supporting concern that speculation around carbon policy is driving productive, food-producing land into plantation forestry.”
The Alliance Group has invested $12m in its Dannevirke plant – in the area of significant land use change to forests – increasing its sheep processing capacity by 20%.
“Our farmers in the lower North Island have been telling us they want us to be able to service their processing needs and this investment underlines the confidence we have in the region,” chief executive David Surveyor said.
An ANZ Agri Insight report says forestry expansion to offset carbon emissions is only buying time until effective and efficient ways to reduce NZ’s carbon dioxide emissions are found.
The report warns Government policies offer incentives to increase the planting of trees.
“Policy changes, grants towards planting costs and the opportunity to gain revenue from carbon credits will all incentivise more trees to be planted.”
