G’day I’m Steve Truman editor and founder of Agmates – Australia’s largest online rural & regional community.
The name chosen by Crikey for this Enviro blog is ironic in that is exactly what Rural and Regional Australia will be under the Rudd Governments Emissions Trading Scheme.
Ross Garnaut said as much yesterday in his final report.
“Regional communities and industries are likely to be more vulnerable to these impacts than urban centres, due to their reliance on agriculture and other natural resource-based industries, and low levels of infrastructure stock.
Regional communities, in particular farming regions, have already been subject to structural change to a much greater extent than metropolitan centres in recent history (Productivity Commission 1998).”
Ross Garnaut should know, he was the architect of Australia’s free trade policy that has delivered indisputable benefits for the Australian economy through two decades of low food prices to consumers and the resource trade with China.
The structural change that Garnaut refers to is the decimation of Australian Rural communities that deregulation has wrought over the last two decades.
One would think that the massive contribution that Rural and Regional Australia has already made to the health of our economy and our environment would be recognized as we move forward into a carbon constrained economy.
The legislated ban on tree clearing, that is a ban on opening up new land to the production of food and fibre has come at a cost of $600m a year to Australian farmers in lost productivity, whilst single handedly allowing Australia to meet it Kyoto commitments to date.
Once again our farmers and rural communities are to be sacrificed to the political whim of the day. Australia contributes just 1.3% to Global Emissions. Regardless if we are talking cuts of 10% or 25% we are talking about cutting Global emissions by 0.13% – 0.325%.
Unless the four world Super emitters China, USA, Russia and India who contribute 42.5% of global CO2 emissions agree to commit to similar emissions anything we do here in Australia will have zero impact on predicted future global climate change. Garnaut is saying exactly this is todays media.
“If Australia slashed greenhouse emissions to zero tomorrow it would have almost no effect on global warming but inflict great economic damage”, Professor Ross Garnaut says.
Why is Rural & Regional Australia once again to be “rooted” under an emissions trading scheme that is in reality designed to help Kevin Rudd & Labor bathe in the warm glow of good intentions, with little or no regard to the enormous costs to ordinary Australians and the infinitesimal benefits it will bestow on the global environment?
10 Comments
Hi Steve
I think we country people should be embracing the possibilities that this new ‘green world order’ could produce.
For example in marginal areas farmers could be paid, based on a carbon tax, a guaranteed income for capturing carbon (something Garnaut has alluded to) on their farms instead of ploughing dusty fields in the hope of good rainfall. It’s kind of like what happens at present with wind turbines – each one located on the farm pays an income to the land owner, the land has a value in the marketplace because is has a guaranteed return and the farmer is happy because his bank manager (and his wife!) see a regular income coming in each year.
You might worry about rural communities in this scenario but there will be industries popping up to cater for this like collecting native plants and seeds, planting trees, harvesting timber for building products, tourism …..
Doesn’t sound scary to me – just a different way and doing things.
G’day Brad,
You are correct in what you are saying …….. However Garnaut in his report really struggles to find some future benefits for farmers with a lot of could be’s and will be’s for which the science or technology as yet is still on the drawing board.
What he does say is that farmers will incur cost from day one. Costs that cannot be passed onto consumers. Here is just one example. Beef cattle that go to slaughter. A cost of $450 million a year will be imposed on cattle producers on top of the increased costs of farm inputs.
Indeed the head of ABARE has warned that Agriculture is doomed under the ETS which in his view and the view of Ag economists will cut farm profitability by up to 100%.
The ETS in its current form will be the death of Family farming in Australia
Cheers – Steve
Steve,
Interesting thoughts but it seems to be based upon the idea that business as usual is right and the way it should be and that anything that changes that system is wrong.
Climate change is not occuring because China and India want a first-world economy but it is due to unsustainable practices of first-world economic systems which lead to GHG emissions. Climate change, is unfortunately here to stay, at least for the next 100 years. As such the possible treatments for climate change are two fold: mitigation and adaptation.
By creating systainable systems we can treat both mitigation and adaptation. The CPRS and the ETS are about climate change mitigation; there is no denying that fact. Whilst people may be able to adapt to a changing climate quickly, eco-systems will not which is why we need to mitigate not just adapt.
The Australian agricultural sector has never been the leading light in terms of adapting to climate. (Unless you believe that using European crops and European farming methods in the driest, most infertile, inhabited content is somehow adaptation.) Australia, particularly, is going to need to understand very quickly how climate change effects us, as it is our continent, after Africa that is going to be hit the hardest. We need to be able to change our systems and change fast and continue to be able to change as soon as we know what is going to happen. If we don’t – we will perish.
It is all not doom and gloom because we have the ability to change.; we have the knowledge and we have the resources. This may mean the end of family farming as you stated, or it may be the exact opposite, returning to a system of less intensive agriculture which is highly dispersed and varied. The possibilties are endless and frankly the business opportunites are just waiting to be seized.
I agree with Brad. Also, the largest ghg emission (AGO), water intensive (CSIRO Land & Water) and cleared land use (AG SoE) food commodities are beef and dairy. Australia has the highest per capita population of livestock in the world (UNFAO Livestock’s Long Shadow), and we are the biggest consumers, yet we are the driest continent with constant droughts and water shortages. If people CHOOSE to produce and consume these highly resource intensive foods, then they should pay the price. As well as the direct ghg, land & water issues, last year 66% of the grain we produced was fed to livestock. Is that an efficient use of precious resources? The growing middle classes in China and India are following the western diet and we are exporting more meat and dairy to those countries. Self-destructive craziness! The progressive alternative is for our federal and state governments to provide support (including financial) to farmers to change to more environmentally sustainable options where possible, and encourage a reduction in consumption of highly inefficient and environmentally damaging commodities. If we can change our production and habits in transport, energy and other critical areas, it has to happen in agriculture and food as well.
G’day Shay,
Your comment is fairly typical of Urban Australia’s attitude to Rural & Regional Australia. I think this metaphor sums why rural people are so concerned about the ‘Structural Changes” to rural and regional Australia. Structural Changes is such a nice term for something that involves families rural families and communities going bankrupt, schools, shops and hospital closing in country towns. So much nicer to call it “Structural Changes.”
You know at Agmates we like to keep things simple: He’s a little story about Urban folk (the chicken) and Country folk (the pig) that sums up the different perspectives that we both have towards sharing the burden when it come to cutting our emissions.
As the sun rose one morning in the farm yard the Chicken and the Pig were having a chat. It was the farmers birthday and they wanted to do something nice for the farmer as he was really good to them.
CHICKEN: Lets do something really special for his birthday”
PIG: “Good idea, what do you have in mind?”
CHICKEN “I think we ought to make him breakfast in bed for his special day”
PIG: “Hey great idea, But what will we make him?
CHICKEN: “He loves Bacon and eggs, lets do that!”
PIG: Yeh not on your life. For you, that’s just a contribution. For me, it’s a total commitment.”
The farming sector has already contributed more than any other group in Australia to cutting our carbon emissions through the stopping of land clearing (at a cost of about $600m a year through lost production). Does the Australian public now expect them like the PIG in the story to make the total commitment?
Is that what it takes for us to cut our emissions – wiping our our entire rural community?
G’day Sharon,
I don’t actually disagree with anything you have said. Australian farmers are among the best in the world in their ability to adapt to our harsh climate. This has been proven over the last century.
Given a chance they will also adapt to a carbon constrained economy. Thats the point. Under the proposed ETS farmers are given zero …. thats right zero assistance.
Even thought according to ABS and other policy making authorities we export 70-80% of everything we produce. Exporters cannot recover the added costs from world markets. Our competition internationally, ie South America, USA, Indonesia etc have no inbuilt costs of an ETS on their product.
Our Farm exports are fully trade exposed and those additional costs will be worn by farmers. That is why Ross Garnaut in his report quotes the cost impediments to farmers not consumers.
Put simply unlike a power station farmers have zero ability to pass those costs onto consumers either through export or domestically. No farmer anywhere in the country will qualify for free permits. As I said in an earlier comment ABARE has warned the ETS will cut farm profits by 100%.
What solutions does Garnaut offer for farmers – Farming Roo’s – that a suggestion that is so impractical – it’s a cruel joke.
Ross Garnaut has come out in the media today and stated:
But still we’ll plow ahead with an ETS that will give Urban Australians a “Green warm and Fuzzy Feeling”, Make the Rudd Government look good at the UN. Oh by the way in doing that it will just happen to devastate rural Australia.
Do you and the Australian public prefer coal-fired stations over your own farmers? Because that is what the ETS under its current guise will deliver.
If we end up not being able to produce enough food in Australia to feed ourselves
we can import everything we need. Milk from China perhaps?
If RARA land, especially of the non-coastal variety wants to get benefits out of an ETS – then they need to start pushing for a carbon credit supply market. The capability to create officially recognised packages of carbon abatement, bring them to market and then sell to carbon producers is the missing half of any proper emissions trading system.
At the moment it seems to be only geosequestration from coal that comes within a bulls roar of fitting into some carbon credit supply process. But if that supply process were to be expanded to account for everything from new native forestry based carbon sinks through to soil carbon sequestration – RARA land would stand to benefit enormously.
Having the ag sector focus their lobbying efforts on special treatment will be a political cul de sac. Focusing instead on the carbon abatement capabilities of the industry would put regional communities on a much stronger footing -if in nothing else than the PR stakes alone.
“We can store carbon – let us into the market” is a much more widely supportable response than “I’m just another special interest pleader looking for preferential treatment”
G’day Possum,
Could not agree with you more. Garnaut says as much in his report -
“The agriculture sector as a whole has a lower known technological and economic potential to reduce emissions intensity than other sectors of the economy. There is currently a lack of well-quantified and well-costed mitigation methods available to agriculture. The agriculture sector lacks cost-effective mitigation options for some major sources of emissions.”
The difficulty for Ag is that those technologies are some way off, in the case of carbon stored in soils Garnaut say “Possibly decades”.
The Rudd government must get its initial policy setting right – otherwise Australia will have a significantly smaller Agriculture sector by the time technology allows the measurement of the full carbon cycle in Agriculture.
RARA does have the ability to adapt, and as i witnessed at recent landcare conference, many are actively taking steps towards better land management. adaption is not the concern as such, its the conditions in which it is expected to occur. As i’ve said elsewhere, and others indicate here, plenty of option for landowners to integrate land uses and e.g. have ’sequestering’ vegetation on marginal country to compensate for cow’s burps etc. But if the ETS is ignoring key parts of agricultural sector when it comes to C storage (e.g. soil carbon and storage in crop residue and the foodstuffs themselves) then it is a flawed proposal. And yes, if the ‘costs’ of compliance cannot be passed along to consumers (yes, all of us) who are ultimately responsible for the pollution by demanding to be fed, then it is again flawed.
The issue is not adapting – that is the easy part in principle. what makes it a struggle, and what is going to really hit RARA with the added pressures of the proposed ETS, is that the options to effect those adaptations are not always practially there. Not enough support for changing management practices (to improve generations of mistakes, that have come about again because we ALL wanted food, income etc) is one factor. I think the more serious one though, is the movement towards ‘bigger is better’. As commented above, a move ‘back’ (or ‘forwards’) towards smaller, integrated farming practices would both help the environment and the rural communities, but while the majority of consumers make their decisions based on expecting the cheapest and most abundant amount of anything, at any time of year, then the pressures down the supply chain will probably stifle what i think is the best answer (smaller-managed integrated/patchwork landuses)
As consumers, we can all effect change through what we buy, and get a positive flow-on effect: if we keep buying things from farming practices we disagree with, we’re just supporting that continued practice! So bringing about better land management is not just up to the landholders, it’s right across the board. Where the concern seems to be for RARA under this flawed ETS, is that whilst cultural and land management practices can undergo a steady change, the requirements that the proposed ETS would expect will probably only benefit a few larger players, reduce the viability of many regional areas, and probably also increase our dependence on imports too… which btw might come from much worse farming practices than ours! To work properly, the ETS needs to apply the one rule to everyone (i.e. no free permits to the big and dirty end of town); it needs to do its accounting uniformly (i.e. trees, grasses, and soil biota all sequester and emit carbon, therefore they should all be in the equations); and it needs to accommodate the reality that because we all have an impact, we all put in, and if that means paying a true value for our resources (e.g. $2 of rice might really be $10 if the environmental impacts were really valued, just like a $2 plastic lunchbox might be $20).
So, I don’t think RARA is griping about change – I’m in RARA more than I’m in the urbanites, and I embrace change. I don’t think RARA is complaining about an ETS either. What is being objected to is the proposed implementation – and it is right that we should all be asking for this to be done well, not done because it’s the political flavour of the month. Granted, too much time deciding could be time wasted, but if a rushed process means a wheat farmer bears a greater cost than a coal-fired powerstation (on the pretence of smoothing our adaptations) then where is the holistic benefit in a scheme like that?