Don’t even start me on the fact that many of those marginal sheep and beef farms are already carbon-neutral due to the million-plus hectares of native bush, woody vegetation, shelter belts and riparian planting that sequester carbon but currently don’t get credit for doing so.
What irks most is the seemingly blissful ignorance of the economic ramifications. Back in the 1980s, Lange and Roger Douglas deemed agriculture to be a sunset industry. We would transition to a tech and tourism economy. Duh? Remind me how that worked for tech in the Dot Com crash or for tourism in the Covid pandemic?
So, apparently, we’re staring down the barrel of a 24 per cent drop in sheep and beef revenue. That’s nearly $3 billion a year. That pays for a heck of a lot of health and education. It will be the death knell for provincial NZ. We will become the pine plantation of the South Pacific. That’ll be good for tourism (and hay fever)! A dumping ground for wealthy offshore polluters who want to offset their emissions.
Take the President of Federated Farmers, Andrew Hoggard’s, recent comments on India’s dairy industry and the resultant ‘carbon leakage’ if we reduce production and less efficient nations take up the slack.
India’s currently at 23 per cent of world milk production, with ambitions to keep growing at six per cent per annum to be at 43 per cent in 20 to 30 years. They’ve got a carbon footprint per litre of milk that’s about 10 times ours. And when questioned on what sustainability meant to them, they said: “a full belly”.
Hoggard, quite rightly, questioned whether New Zealand’s place in the world is “cutting our own production, cutting our own throats, or is it about taking our know-how and can-do attitude to other agricultural systems in the world?”
But Ardern, Shaw, Parker et al might have the last laugh. The PM loves to go hard and go early just as Roger Douglas did nearly 40 years ago when he wiped farming subsidies overnight. Ultimately Douglas was right in what he did but the collateral damage was brutal and gutted provincial New Zealand for the best part of a decade.
Douglas could have transitioned New Zealand away from agricultural subsidies with a healthy helping of carrots, but he chose instead to wield a huge stick and beat farmers with it.
New Zealand, responsible for 0.17 per cent of total global GHG emissions, seems hell-bent on being a world leader in the fight against climate change. The leading edge or the bleeding edge? Admirable, but ultimately tilting at windmills, when huge emitters such as China and India are doing sweet fanny.
I call BS on the world looking to little old New Zealand to lead the charge. Yes, we must play our role and, yes, farmers must accept a transition into an emissions tax. We already lead the world in producing animal protein with a low carbon footprint. But a carbon tax should not threaten food production (anyone remember the Paris Agreement?) or the viability of our biggest industry and income earner.
Virtue signalling on the global stage might be good for our international profile but will do little for our economy. A cynic could suggest it might help someone looking for a job on that same global stage? But that would be unkind.
Kindness. As weird as it seems, I almost look back on the first Covid lockdown back in March 2020 as a period of initial national kindness. We were nice to one another. We all pulled together. He Waka Eke Noa. We were all in the canoe together.
The past two years have been the most divisive of my lifetime. We’re all rowing in separate directions. I think it’s called being up the creek without a paddle.
