AGRICULTURAL and environmental consultant Steve Cranston. Photo supplied
THE flaws in He Waka Ee Noa (HWEN) cannot be fixed, according to Hamilton-based agricultural and environmental consultant Steven Cranston.
“From the outset the sole objective was to put a price on farm emissions; there was never any consideration given towards an overall outcome for the climate,” he said.
As proposed, HWEN would not only cost the agricultural industry a fortune, but it would inevitably increase global emissions, he said.
“The world leading emissions efficiency of our dairy and meat producers lies at the heart of a problem HWEN will never solve. It is impossible to put a punitive tax on New Zealand farmers without reducing production.
“That production will be picked up by less efficient producers overseas and all that cost and effort will have come to nought. No amount of bureaucratic tinkering can get around that simple law of economics.”
Another flaw in the design of the HWEN pricing proposal received considerably less attention but was equally fatal, he said.
The flat price on every unit of methane and N2O emitted served more as a tax on farm type, than on farm management practices.
The most emissions efficient farm type was system-5 (intensive) dairy, while high country sheep farming was at the other end of the scale.
“There is no free lunch for merinos, they must work infinitely harder to produce a kilogram of protein, exhaling considerably more methane in the process,” Steven who is the DemocracyNZ candidate for the Waikato electorate, said.
A flat price on emissions meant intensive farmers paid less emissions tax for every dollar they earned, while extensive or low input farmers paid more.
“This quirk in HWEN’s design has gone unnoticed as it incentivises the exact opposite direction of travel to that which our government is seeking to lead the industry in,” Steven said.
“At the same time the Government is spouting the virtues of regenerative agriculture and organic farming, it is simultaneously slapping farmers with a comparatively higher emissions tax.
“HWEN is inadvertently sending farmers a signal to intensify, and there is no way to fix that while a flat rate on gross emissions is retained. This mix-up helps illustrate what a woefully poor understanding this government has of its own policy.”
Three years of research and exhaustive policy design could not produce a pricing scheme to solve these fundamental flaws because the outcome of the process had already been decided – that there must be a price on emissions.
He said HWEN failed to encourage positive behavior change, in treating emitters equally relative to the warming they produced, or in helping Ag NZ to better promote itself to international markets, or to even just apply some plain old commonsense, Steven said. The only way to fix HWEN was to drop its most core principle.
“New Zealand’s position at the top of the production efficiency pyramid means it is in the world’s interests that we maintain production, or even increase that production,” he said. “The objective of any emissions scheme needs to shift from reducing gross emissions to producing food with the lowest emissions footprint.
“That is best achieved by best practice management supported by research and extension. An efficient farmer is typically a profitable farmer, there is no need for a tax to incentivise behavior change. This extension can be provided for by Beef & Lamb and DairyNZ which already receive over $100 million in levies annually.”
There was no need to pour additional money into methane mitigation technologies when methane naturally disappeared after 10 years.
“Methane was never the problem, our emissions have no effect on climate change whatsoever,” he said. “The only reason climate scientists have called for a reduction in methane is to offset the ongoing warming produced by carbon dioxide.
“Farmers are not responsible for offsetting the transport sector and it speaks volumes about the political nature of the Climate Change Commission that they have not been more upfront about the underlying motivation for the farming tax.”
With a general election coming up in October, farmers had the opportunity to rethink how they wanted to approach farm emissions, he said. HWEN was damaged goods, but the political inertia of having both Labour and National Party support meant it could limp on for some time or reform into something equally unworkable.
DemocracyNZ proposed a world leading emissions scheme that collected emissions data and used it to help promote best practice management. An emissions scheme did not need to be a tax to produce a positive outcome, Steven said.
