There was a glum irony plastered over the banners at the recent Australian Farm Institute (AFI) conference on emissions trading: the event's chief sponsor was Land & Water Australia (LWA), which the day before learned it was getting the axe from Canberra.
There’s a number of conclusions that might be drawn from this:
- LWA failed to make a good enough case for itself in a cost-conscious environment;
- Agricultu re has failed to impress on Canberra the need for every gram of research muscle it can muster if it is to successfully deal with the physical and political implications of climate change;
- Canberra is fundamentally hypocritical, wanting on one hand to drive adjustment to a low-emissions economy through an emissions trading scheme, but on the other hand to not fund the research capability that will ease that adjustment;
or- it might be, as it seemed after the two days of the conference, that agriculture's response to emissions trading is still so unfocused that there is little point in maintaining LWA's flagship initiative, the Climate Change Research Strategy for Primary Industries (CCRSPI), intended to co-ordinate research around climate change.
AFI held its first conference on emissions trading a little over a year ago. The event encouraged agriculture to wake from its slumber and consider the groin-level bouncer it was being bowled in the form of emissions trading.
A year on, the ball is a lot closer, and those who have crunched the numbers have found that agriculture isn't wearing a box.
It's not the detail that needs to be sorted: agriculture still has to resolve some fundamental questions.
Some sectors of the industry are favouring ag standing outside the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) and engaging with the system through other mechanisms; others say that not to be covered under the CPRS as soon as possible will be business suicide.
We don't know what tools Australia's export-focused farm sector will have to help its international competitiveness from 2011, when the CPRS will start to bite farmers through energy and transport costs—and by some assessments, bite hard.
And we seem to be no closer to getting methods that will fairly and cost-effectively measure and validate agriculture's extraordinarily complex emissions profile.
Presumably, all these things are being worked on, but there is no sign that they are being considered in a co-ordinated fashion.
That, of course, was an objective of CCRSPI, and that's gone.
So what's the chances of next year's AFI conference—presuming it finds a sponsor—being able to move past these issues?
Email a friend