Farming industry told to get a grip on CO2 emissions
Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow where only one grew before would be worth more than all the race of politicians put together.”
While I might be paraphrasing a bit, it’s now close to 300 years since the satirist, Jonathan Swift, wrote these words – and it would be fair to say that it has been a sentiment which the farming world has clung onto, through thick and thin, across the centuries.
However, last week, it could be interpreted that the venerable race of politicians got a bit of their own back when the updated version of Scotland’s Climate Change Plan was published.
For, while agriculture did play a leading role in the publication, the emphasis has moved away from the overriding imperative to produce more, regardless of cost.
On the plus side the acknowledgement within the 250-page report of the importance of agriculture, food and drink to the Scottish economy – including the £3.3 billion worth of gross output and 67,000 jobs in rural areas – had to be welcomed. So, too, did the recognition that for the country to live up to its high ideals of reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions it has to avoid “off-shoring” greenhouse gas emissions by reducing our own production – at the cost of importing more goods, many of which might have been produced to lower standards across the board – and which would also come with a much increased food mile burden.
There is also an acceptance that, as it involves biological processes,
farming will always have some emissions; the plan stresses that a fine balance must be found to ensure greenhouse gas reductions can take place while Scotland continues to produce the high quality and sustainable food which its climate is suited to doing. But these supportive words are accompanied by a stern message – that the industry is not simply going to be excused its 7.7 million tonnes CO2 equivalent contribution to the country’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but will have to play a crucial role in reducing them – and over a frighteningly short time-scale.
In fact, that figure has to drop to 5.5m tonnes by 2030 – a 30 per cent reduction over the next ten years. And while we might sometimes point to the fact that emissions have dropped by around 15 per cent since 1990, it’s a sad fact that just about all of that is due to the fall in the number of both cattle and sheep over the period.
And so the simple arithmetic means that to meet the target, for each of the next ten years emissions will have to fall four times faster than they have been doing since 1990. The livestock sector accounts for around two thirds of agriculture’s emissions – so it has, rightly, been the
focus of attention, with a report on how the issues can be addressed already produced by the group working under the chairmanship of Jim Walker.
But all the other sectors of the industry also have an important role to play.
To this end, and amidst little fanfare, last week also saw the first meeting of the Arable Climate Change Group which has been given the task of drawing up a similar sort of policy development plan for the cropping, horticulture and soft fruit sector as has been done for the beef sector.
And while a farmer-led approach which gives the industry some real input into how the necessarily revolutionary changes in policy can best be introduced should be welcomed, it does also insulate the politicians from any blame likely to be attached to unsavoury steps required to meet the required ends. The latest group is chaired by arable stalwart Andrew Moir and it is hoped a plan can be drawn up by March – but its first action was to launch an appeal to everyone involved in the sector to feed ideas into the review, to get as broad a range of ideas as possible. Take the time to do it now at www.sasa. gov.uk/accg