NZ, US to discuss emissions initiative

Trade Minister Tim Groser. File photo / Richard Robinson

New Zealand will make progress on its agricultural emissions initiative in talks with the United States in 10 days, Climate Change Negotiations Minister Tim Groser said yesterday.

Mr Groser will be in Washington for the third US-New Zealand Partnership Forum in Washington - a meeting aimed at improving relations between government and the private sector - and said he would talk further with the US.

Prime Minister John Key announced in New York last week that New Zealand would drive a global alliance on research to cut greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

Former Environment Minister Simon Upton, who negotiated the Kyoto Protocol and chairs an OECD group on sustainability, has been appointed a special envoy to promote the alliance with other countries. The United States, India, and the Netherlands have expressed some support for the initiative which was "very general at this stage".

"We are trying to keep the specifics open to take on board much more important countries than New Zealand's views about how it is best structured."

But it was about globally co-ordinated research to "delink the increase in agriculture from an increase in emissions".

He said it was "too simplistic" to suggest it was about other countries' funding New Zealand to advance its research on the subject.

"We won't use our money to fund other countries' research and they won't fund ours but what we want to do is get co-ordination going."

He said the benefits could be enormous in the long-run. "This may have the potential to solve New Zealand's underlying problem with the whole climate change framework."

He said that the inclusion of agriculture in the Kyoto agreement (2008 - 2012) affected New Zealand worst because 49 per cent of its emissions were from agriculture. The next closest was Australia at 14 per cent.

Mr Groser said the initiative would have significance for developing countries - which are outside the Kyoto protocol - because many of them had large agriculture emissions, too: 21 per cent of India's; 15 per cent of China's and 54 per cent of Brazil's. "They like us have a shared interest in finding technological solutions to the relentless growth of agriculture emissions associated with increased food supply."

Developing countries are being pressured to join the next climate change agreement and cut their emissions at a time when productivity gains in food production were slowing and demand for food was increasing.

Mr Groser said it was estimated that food production would have to increase by 50 per cent by 2030 and by 100 per cent by 2050. "We have to avoid putting developing countries in a position where they choose either climate change [agreement] or food security because we know they would go down the food security root." He said any solution that involved cutting back production in developing countries or in food baskets such as New Zealand were "an absolute nonsense".

Massey University vice-chancellor Steve Maharey told the Herald last night that he would be writing to Mr Groser saying that it was great to hear about the initiative "we are all set to roll with this if you would like to build us into it."

"I think they are on to a winner," he said.

Massey University, an agricultural specialist, has recently formed a consortium called the Food Innovation NZ initiative, including Ag Research, Plant and Food Research, Fonterra, and it signed a knowledge-sharing agreement with Wageningen University in the Netherlands.