OPINION
The warning from the head of the Climate Change Commission, Rod Carr, is blunt. As I reported over the weekend, he says, “If we do not figure out how to make milk and meat protein with low emissions, the countries that can afford to buy elsewhere will do so.”
Carr reckons we have about 20 years to get it right and he also reckons it’s time to “stand up to those that are in the way”.
Who’s in the way? I’d say, although Carr is more circumspect, that the list includes any political party proposing to delay the reduction of farm-based emissions. This will put farming at risk and the entire economy along with it.
That means National, which wants to keep agriculture out of the emissions trading scheme for at least another five years. The party will also scrap the “ute tax” and the powerfully effective clean-car discount.
But climate-action delay is climate denial because the effect is the same.
It also means Act, which wants to abolish the Climate Change Commission. I guess that’s one way to ensure you don’t have to listen to pesky warnings from Government agencies about impending disaster.
And Labour? It’s been guilty of ignoring Carr’s advice as well. We’ve discovered that Labour, when it doesn’t have to listen to the Greens, simply will not move far or fast enough.
If you find Carr too hard to listen to, what about Nestle? Or Fonterra?
Fonterra controls most of our milk processing and Nestle is not only the biggest food manufacturer in the world, it’s also the biggest customer for Fonterra’s milk products.
What Nestle says and does affects New Zealand farm exports perhaps more than any other single factor.
In July, the company announced it has abandoned its policy of buying carbon credits to polish up its environmental credentials. Instead, it instituted a new strategy to reduce emissions to net zero, in its own operations and right throughout its supply chains.
This is known as a “Scope 3″ strategy, where a company accounts for the emissions of its suppliers and customers in calculating the impact of its climate-related policies.
Nestle’s net-zero target date is 2050, which is late. But the company says it has “concrete plans” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in “most of our fresh milk sourcing markets” by 20 per cent by 2025 “and more beyond”.
That will put real pressure on dairy farms in this country.
Judging from the farm-related policy announcements of National and Act, you’d think they are unaware of this.
Perhaps they are also unaware that Nestle runs more than 100 pilot projects, including 20 dairy farms aiming for net-zero, in the US, Switzerland, South Africa, Pakistan and right here, in partnership with Fonterra, in Taranaki.
Already on some of those farms, herds and electricity use are down while milk yield and carbon sequestration in the soil are up.
At the Taranaki farm, near Whareroa, the targets are to reduce emissions by 30 per cent by mid-2027 and achieve net zero within 10 years.
The companies plan to share what they learn with other farmers and help them adopt the techniques and technologies that work best. The aim is scale: Fonterra and Nestle plan to put about 50 farms into a support programme and scale the whole thing up from there over the next three years.
At its annual shareholders meeting in Rotorua last November, Fonterra announced it was on a similar track to Nestle with its Scope 3 emissions. According to Fonterra, “73 per cent of global consumers” care about the “sustainability” commitments of dairy producers.
Chief executive Miles Hurrell said it wasn’t good enough that New Zealand dairy has a carbon footprint only a third of the global average. “We can’t sit back,” he said.
“Customers and consumers expect more, and doing nothing simply isn’t an option. We need to maintain this advantage and keep pace with their expectations.”
Meanwhile, we have oat and almond milks, rice-based KitKats (courtesy of Nestle), and coconut icecream. Plant alternatives to dairy are becoming mainstream and it’s not even, primarily, for reasons of climate. Lots of consumers value the health advantages of eating less animal fat.
And as Carr has also noted, 30 per cent of British consumers under the age of 30 rarely, if ever, eat meat.
So why does anyone think the political parties with their heads stuck in the sand on climate action are doing farmers any favours?
The angry denialists of Groundswell can be quite noisy and they’ve got some political parties buzzing around them like bluebottles. Clearly, though, they don’t represent most farmers.
Equally clearly, for rural New Zealand to survive economically, our climate policies need to include agriculture as quickly as possible. And they can do that off the back of the work to lower emissions already under way.
It’s not just Fonterra, and Fonterra isn’t even in the forefront. From high-tech laboratory-based innovation to low-tech regenerative farming practices, the New Zealand countryside is full of people proudly making a difference.
And yet, when it comes to political representation, the parties of the right are selling them dreadfully short.
So here’s a thing that might seem strange but is true: the Greens are the only party in Parliament that have consistently advocated policies to advance the interests of New Zealand farming in a climate-crisis world.
It’s the green movement, here and internationally, that is defining the future of agriculture.
It’s this movement, with the Green Party as its parliamentary wing, that gives consumers the ability to take effective climate action. And that’s what causes Nestle and Fonterra to take emissions reduction seriously.
On the other hand, National argues the Federated Farmers’ line, that low-emissions targets here will “close farms and send production to less carbon-efficient farms overseas”. The word for this – improving our emissions profile while causing the world’s to get worse – is “leakage”.
It takes hardly a moment to spot the flaw. Fear of leakage means we should not do anything until everyone else is doing at least as much as us. But how long would we be waiting?
Time is running out. Doing nothing yet just means doing nothing. It’s another form of denialism.
The alternative is to show leadership, gain market advantage from it, and cause others to follow our example. We can do that and keep doing it, as long as we get on with it. We’re not the only country in the world thinking about how to pivot.
National’s policy on climate actually says, “Doing nothing is not an option.” And it adds, “National will work with farmers and growers, not against them, to reduce agricultural emissions and meet our net zero target by 2050.”
Such empty rhetoric: the party’s policy settings will increase emissions and isolate agriculture from its markets. And every time they allow farmers to believe the rural economy doesn’t need to reform, they’re not “working with them”. They’re betraying them.
Not that this is only about the markets. Farmers also have some inherently green reasons for voting Green.
Why wouldn’t they? They are kaitiaki, or guardians of the land. They manage a big range of environmental impacts every day.
They’re far more likely than most of us to be affected by floods, droughts and the devastation caused by slash and other poor land management. They are in the forefront of the fight against new diseases in the ecosystem and every threat from insect, plant and animal pests.
They know what’s at stake because they live in the midst of it.
There’s a myth abroad that people in cities are conducting a “war on farmers”. Why? City folk don’t hate farmers.
We might get upset at some practices on some farms: mistreatment of animals, pollution of waterways, destruction of native bush. Refusal to contemplate climate-related change. Surely most farmers feel exactly the same way.
There’s no town and country divide, but there is a climate-action divide. We all have to choose which side to stand on.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Choppers have helped firefighters battle two scrub fires near Wairoa. One is suspicious.