New Zealand’s Ministries of Agriculture, Climate Change and Environment have released a draft plan that will guide pricing on agriculture emissions that come from belching cattle and sheep. This plan will see New Zealand become the first country in the world to have farmers pay for the emissions that come from their livestock. Farmers are expected to start paying for their emissions by 2025.
The proposal will take a farm-level approach to differentiate levies on individual farms. There will be distinctions between short and long-lived gas emissions and their impacts. Farmers will be able to use a centralised calculator to figure out their own levels of short and long-lived gas emissions.
These calculations will be used to establish levy costs, rather than going by national averages. It would also allow farms that worked on reducing their emissions to pay less, encouraging more to take up technologies and practices that minimise emissions. This includes the use of feed additives and on-farm forestry to offset the gas emissions.
Greenhouse gas emissions have become a hot topic for New Zealand as nearly half of these gases are estimated to be generated by the agricultural sector in the form of methane gas. It comes from the estimated 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep stocked by Kiwi farmers, who far outnumber the country’s human population of just over 5 million.
The taxes collected from this initiative will be used to fund research development and advisory services for farmers. Some of this money may also be allocated to a dedicated fund for Maori landowners. The proposal is also recommending an oversight board be formed to work with a Maori board to advise on levy rates and pricing, and how this revenue should be spent.
Chair of the primary sector partnership, He Waka Eke Noa, Michael Ahie, estimates that with the recommendations in the draft plan, methane levels could drop by 4-5.5%. he stated that the plan would enable sustainable food and fibre production for future generations while working to meet the country’s climate commitments.
However, there are experts like ANZ Bank’s agricultural economist, Susan Kilsby, who warn that implementing this plan would be the biggest regulatory disruption to the sector since the removal of agricultural subsidies in the 1980s. The Green Party has also criticised the plan for not being clear on how farmers and growers can be helped to shift to low emissions. They expressed disappointment in the report that itself indicated more work was needed on many of the key proposals, yet there were just eight more lambing and calving seasons before the scheduled 2030 methane target deadline.
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