Fieldays: Agriculture Minister Todd McClay defends removing farmers from Emissions Trading Scheme - The Front Page

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Minister for Agriculture and Trade Todd McClay are set to announce support for farming and moves to get rid of red tape around forestry.

McClay is opening Fieldays today, where thousands will head to the Waikato for the 56th running of the largest agricultural event in the Southern Hemisphere.

He told The Front Page there’ll be “a number of announcements” made by the week’s end.

“Some of them are going to be around support on farm and new ways of doing things, nothing overly significant. But, I do have announcements towards the end of the week around forestry.

“It’s very similar to what we’re doing in agriculture: giving certainty, getting some of the rules that aren’t working [and] creating costs out of the way, and setting up a framework so foresters, as much as farmers, have a clear understanding of what their obligations are and then can make decisions for themselves how to best meet them.

“Where the cost of a regulation is greater than the benefit of the outcome, that’s red tape and the Government is just not going to do that. But we’re not saying we shouldn’t have rules. We’re saying we want better rules,” he said.

Amended legislation to stop agriculture from being added into the Government-run Emissions Trading Scheme will be introduced this month - keeping New Zealand’s biggest emitting sector out of the market.

The ETS requires polluting companies to buy credits in exchange for emitting and a partnership group of government and agriculture reps were working to find a way to price farming outside of the scheme.

He Waka Eka Noa is now being disestablished, to be replaced by the Pastoral Sector Group, tasked with tackling methane from farming.

McClay said our food producers are some of the most carbon-efficient anywhere in the world.

“If all we do to meet our climate change obligations is have them produce less or close farms down, we know that the food we produce will be picked up by some other country.

“But we must meet our obligations internationally to reach net zero by 2050 ... We want to do it in such a way as we reduce emissions without reducing production,” he said.

Agriculture would have been added to the ETS from 2025 if He Waka Eke Noa failed to find a way forward.

Industry leaders are praising the Government’s move to keep agriculture out of the ETS - while others, like the Green Party, have said the Government is simply just kicking the climate can down the road with this legislation.

McClay said that it was “far too blunt a tool” to meet those targets.

“If New Zealand was one of the worst carbon emitters when it came to agriculture, maybe fair enough. But we’re not, we’re one of the most carbon-efficient, and all it would do is push production to the United States or to Europe, where we know that for every time they produce food, they emit more carbon, which would be worse for climate change.”

Listen to the full episode to hear more from McClay about:

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