Undaunted by the uproar in the Netherlands over the impact on farmers of rules limiting nitrogen emissions, Canada’s government is now looking to go down a similar route.
The government is proposing to cut emissions from fertilizer 30 per cent by 2030 as part of a plan to get to net zero in the next three decades. But growers are saying that to achieve that, they may have to shrink grain output significantly at a time when the world is scrambling for more supplies.
Also at stake is the estimated $10.4 billion that farmers could lose this decade from the reduced output.
The tension comes as efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions related to energy are lagging, so policymakers are increasingly looking to other sectors, including agriculture . . .
Cattle and fertilizer are key sources of nitrogen emissions.
The war on beef is not going away.
The Financial Post:
Production losses could be significant, according to an analysis commissioned by Fertilizer Canada. Canada could lose over 160 million metric tons of canola, corn and spring wheat between 2023 and 2030 due to the plan, according to the report. That’s nearly double Canada’s expected grain production this season.
Agriculture emissions have soared in recent decades as farmers apply more fertilizer to increase output. Emissions from crop soils rose 87 per cent to about 7.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide over three decades through 2020, according to the latest data from Environment and Climate Change Canada . . .
Farm groups say the additional fertilizer is resulting in more food. Spring wheat yields rose more than 40 per cent in the last decade through 2020, compared with the 1990s, Statistics Canada data show. Similarly, canola yields rose 56 per cent over the same period.
“We are talking about the food supply,” said Karen Proud, chief executive officer of Fertilizer Canada, an industry group that represents major manufacturers and retailers, including Nutrien Ltd., and Koch Fertilizer Canada. “Canada is already among the top countries that use nitrogen efficiently. We don’t have much room to go before we start affecting yields.”
While the reduction target is “ambitious,” it does not “represent a mandatory reduction in fertilizer use” and action will focus on improving nitrogen management, Cameron Newbigging, spokesman for Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada said in a statement. The approach for achieving reductions is still under development and the government is accepting feedback until Aug. 31 and will develop “next steps in the approach” once the consultations are complete, he said.
It may be that Canadian farmers have more room to reduce nitrogen than their Dutch counterparts, who are faced with demands for steeper cuts and may well already have done about as much as they can do without reducing production. Nevertheless, I cannot help noting Proud’s comment (she was referring to Canada) that there is “not much room to go” before crop yields are affected, something that, if true, might, in time, add to greenflationary pressures.
And how have things been going in the Netherlands since I last wrote about the problems there?
Dutch farmers dumped manure and set fire hay on fire along major highways Wednesday, prompting traffic jams in central and eastern parts of the Netherlands, in protest over government plans to reduce fertilizer use and livestock numbers.
Ah.
Writing in Time magazine, Ciara Nugent sees these protests as the latest in a series:
The Netherlands’ farmers protests are probably the largest uprising over environmental regulation of agriculture that the world has seen in the climate action era. But similar tensions have been bubbling elsewhere. Farmers in Spain, Ireland, and New Zealand have all staged demonstrations in their capitals to challenge green reforms in the last few years.
“Reforms.”
She adds:
Populists in the U.S. and Europe, including France’s Marine Le Pen, are seizing on the protests to cast climate action as a conflict between rural heartlands, working people, and urban elites.
Indeed they are. Moreover, as I noted in my earlier comment on the Dutch farmers, “there are many ways to look at the Dutch farmers’ revolt, some tipping over into the conspiratorial fringe . . .”
That said, the way in which most mainstream parties either seem to support or at least go along with measures such as those in the Netherlands has, I suspect, created a political vacuum. Those don’t last for long. Years ago, and in a different context, Mark Steyn wrote this:
In bad times, if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones.
When its effects really start to bite, the “race” to net zero is going to cause major problems for the governments then in charge, and those problems won’t just involve farmers.
Back to Time:
The Netherlands’ pursuit of farming efficiency is an extreme version of agricultural expansion that has taken place across the rest of the world over the last century. The environmental consequences are not limited to nitrogen pollution. Worldwide, the amount of land used for crops and livestock doubled over the course of the 20th century, requiring the clearing of forests that once sheltered biodiversity and helped keep our climate stable by sequestering carbon.
Doubled? The horror. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that over the same period the world’s population has quadrupled, from about 2 billion in 1922 to almost 8 billion today, most of whom eat far better than their predecessors would have done a century ago. Under the circumstances, the achievements of the agricultural sector (including, of course, the likes of Norman Borlaug) are, to say the least, impressive.
Nugent, meanwhile, describes the Dutch, uh, reforms as “bold” and notes that “this may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the global food system.”
Note that “rapid.”
Nugent:
Environmentalists say we need to reduce the toll farming takes on nature, by eating less meat and growing crops in less harmful ways . . .
I do hope the reference to “less harmful” is not to organic farming, a pseudoscientific approach to agriculture that recently led to disaster in Sri Lanka. That was partly because of the speed with which it was introduced, but only partly.
I’ll quote this again from Matt Ridley in the Daily Telegraph:
If the world abandoned nitrogen fertiliser that was fixed in factories, the impact on human living standards would be catastrophic, but so would the impact on nature. Given that about half the nitrogen atoms in the average person’s body were fixed in an ammonia factory rather than a plant, to feed eight billion people with organic methods we would need to put more than twice as much land under the plough and the cow. That would consign most of the world’s wetlands, nature reserves and forests to oblivion.