Farmers have gone to huge lengths to listen, learn and act on waterway quality and while plenty of critics will continue to throw rocks at the sector the efforts are admirable and responsive.
However, farming is now being held largely accountable for NZ’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The sheep and beef sector rightly reacted angrily to learning from the Productivity Commission recently it would have to lose two million hectares of good pasture to tree plantings despite having already reduced its emissions by 30% over the past 25 years while almost doubling its productivity.
Over the past four months no less than four major reports on carbon emissions have thumped into in-boxes, courtesy of assorted government departments and appointees.
They recommended chopping livestock numbers, planting more trees (lots and lots of trees) and maybe looking at electric vehicles.
The bulk of the pressure to help meet the Paris Accord obligations seems to fall again on the pastoral sector.
The overwhelming sense from reading these reports and seeing the media response to them is that NZ’s answer to global warming is to leave it to the rural sector to deal with – it’s a farm problem, not a NZ Inc problem.
But the hard number crunching most recently done by agri-economist Phil Journeaux should give everyone in NZ, both urban and rural, pause for thought.
His work clearly outlines the billions of dollars NZ will forgo as growth stutters under all those extra trees and fewer high-value pastoral protein exports.
With $50 billion less a year earned by 2050 being a best-case prospect, all of NZ needs to decide how far we want to commit to emission reductions.
All NZ needs to appreciate if the biggest players like India, United States, Russia and China don’t achieve their reductions then even our most extreme efforts will only send this country poor, while the world continues to warm.
Richard Rennie
