Keystone Agricultural Producers suggests, as the provincial government develops a new carbon pricing system, it needs to ensure that system is flexible enough to be changed if problems are encountered or to take advantage of new technologies that are developed.
In September the federal government announced that a carbon pricing system must be in place in all provinces by the end of 2018.
Earlier this month producers attending Keystone Agricultural Producers Fall Advisory Council meeting adopted a policy on carbon pricing which calls for an exemption for farmers when it comes to commodities such as fuel and fertilizer.
KAP President Dan Mazier says it’s important for the provincial government to create a system that does not put farmers at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to food production.
Agriculture is a very carbon intensive situation and the farming is just one aspect. There’s the whole transportation carbon footprint and the processors carbon footprint and all of those costs will definitely get passed onto the consumer.
When we’re talking about this as an agriculture system, we’re hoping from this end of the value chain anyway we can set up things that are going to be much more reasonable so they don’t get out of control.
I think it’s pretty important that what ever system gets developed, if it doesn’t get developed correctly and if there needs to be corrections done, it needs an escape hatch to be able to be adjusted. I don’t want to see a carbon pricing system that we’re locked into for five years and we can’t touch.
I don’t think this government would do this but that’s one thing we’ll be watching for. We don’t know what’s gong to come up. We don’t know what kind of new technologies are going to come.
What we want to do is have that door open to take advantage of that and build resiliency in agriculture and ultimately in our food production system.
~ Dan Mazier, Keystone Agricultural Producers
Mazier says farmers want to move to new production methods and technologies that will reduce or eliminate their carbon footprint and they need a carbon pricing system that’s flexible enough to allow them to do that.
