“It is just scare tactics,” Mr [Mick Keogh] said. “The release of the Garnaut report, followed by the Green Paper, is all carefully stage-managed, beautifully set up so the public will be scared out of their wits and looking for a solution.”

Yesterday, the NFF called on the Government to petition for new accounting rules under the Kyoto Protocol to ensure agriculture’s sequestration of carbon was acknowledged and its “rigid and short-sighted accounting rules”, which emphasised reforestation but ignored pasture growth, were overthrown. President David Crombie said a “full and sober analysis of how Australia will be impacted is essential”.

NFF chief executive Ben Fargher said agriculture could be “significantly, disproportionately impacted”. “Our farm sector is responsible for 12 per cent of GDP, 1.6million jobs, $30 billion in exports and 93 per cent of our daily food supply, and it could be devastated if theETS isn’t geared to account for the positive part agriculture plays in the carbon cycle,” he said.

RURAL

IT all boils down to one simple question: will cows be taxed for burping and farting?

The complex debate about the introduction of an emissions trading scheme to tackle climate change is causing panic among farmers.

The release of the Garnaut report yesterday only served to increase their fears. Ross Garnaut’s report acknowledges the initial difficulties of measuring gas emissions on Australia’s 155,000 farms, but says a broad-based scheme should include agriculture at some stage.

The only question now is whether it will be included in the initial 2010 version of the scheme or introduced at a later date.

Every major farming organisation, including the National Farmers Federation, the Australian Farm Institute, NSW Farmers and Agforce in Queensland, has expressed alarm over the threat an ETS poses to the $100 billion sector. Even if it is excluded, groups warn the costs of production will increase sharply, thereby driving up the price of food.

Australia is likely to become the only country in the world other than New Zealand to impose an ETS on agriculture.

Government modelling in NZ shows farm profitability plummeting to zero.

Under calculation methods imposed on Australia by the Kyoto Protocol, a fully grown cow is deemed to emit the equivalent of two tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. With 30million cattle in Australia, that makes cows a major emitter.

Agriculture has been determined by the Department of Climate Change to be responsible for 15.6 per cent of all greenhouse emissions — 90.1 million tonnes a year. Of that, 59.3 million tonnes are estimated to arise from the digestive processes of sheep and cattle.

The Garnaut report shows the ratio of permit costs to the value of agricultural production to be higher than any other sector.

The draft report also predicts a dramatic decline in the level of Australian agricultural export volumes as a result of climate change.

The executive director of the Australian Farm Institute, Mick Keogh, said the Government’s claims agriculture would suffer a decline because of climate change, when production would at least double by 2050, had created cynicism. Far from a potential decline under global warming, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics research on climate change showed there would, at worst, be a slowing in the rate of growth.

“It is just scare tactics,” Mr Keogh said. “The release of the Garnaut report, followed by the Green Paper, is all carefully stage-managed, beautifully set up so the public will be scared out of their wits and looking for a solution.”

Industry groups have argued that agriculture was dealt with harshly under Kyoto, measuring only emissions and ignoring the fact animals were “alchemists”, consuming grass that used up carbon as its prime engine of growth.

Yesterday, the NFF called on the Government to petition for new accounting rules under the Kyoto Protocol to ensure agriculture’s sequestration of carbon was acknowledged and its “rigid and short-sighted accounting rules”, which emphasised reforestation but ignored pasture growth, were overthrown. President David Crombie said a “full and sober analysis of how Australia will be impacted is essential”.

NFF chief executive Ben Fargher said agriculture could be “significantly, disproportionately impacted”. “Our farm sector is responsible for 12 per cent of GDP, 1.6million jobs, $30 billion in exports and 93 per cent of our daily food supply, and it could be devastated if theETS isn’t geared to account for the positive part agriculture plays in the carbon cycle,” he said.

Farmers themselves are critical of the Government’s failure to explain how an ETS would work. Chris Griffin, a dairy farmer from Moe, in Victoria, said most of his colleagues had no understanding of what an ETS would entail: “There is not a lot of science out about what impact it could have.”

Credit: John Stapleton