The current and former heads of ABARE have joined the growing chorus of Agricultural Economist who are warning that the Emissions Trading Scheme will have dire consequences for Australia’s trade exposed Agricultural industry.
Dr Brian Fisher, former head of ABARE for 18 years has expressed grave fears for the future of Australian Agriculture under the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme.
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“Introducing a scheme ahead of other nations was not prosecuting Australia’s national interest, it was prosecuting somebody else’s and we are going to be damned if we do.
There is absolutely nothing to be gained by going first here. We are a very, very small country. We constitute about 1.3 odd per cent of emissions on the planet.
The government should focus its domestic climate change policy on adaptation because it will be “years” before there is an international agreement on emissions trading between the 190 countries involved in the ongoing negotiations.”
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Dr Fishers views reinforce what Agmates said in the article: “ETS in Aust & NZ will Zero impact on global emissions”
In fact if you are one of the 1,000’s of informed Agmates readers you will have know for at least 2 months that the ETS in its existing form is disastrous for Australian farmers. Rural Press finally 10 weeks later have picked up on that fact. On the 5th of July we wrote:.
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“What the main stream media have missed in the flood of coverage is the potential devastation to rural Australia the emission trading scheme will be.”
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Dr Fishers successor at ABARE Phillip Glyde [pictured below], supports his views. He points out that regardless of whether or not agriculture was included in the ETS from 2010, the impacts on farming through the use of emission intensive inputs would be significant.
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“In the cropping sector, 39 per cent of the input costs to cropping came from emission-intensive inputs, while in livestock those costs were about 17 per cent.
There’s only one solution to all of this, particularly while the rest of the world doesn’t introduce an ETS or have emissions trading schemes excluding agriculture – it is to continue down the path of productivity improvements.
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The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), located in Canberra, is the Australian government’s own economic research agency and is respected for its professional independent research and analysis.
It is incredulous that the chief architects of the Emissions Trading Scheme Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Agriculture Minister Tony Burke and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong are ignoring their own Economic experts advise.
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Have your say!
Q. Why do you think that the architects of the ETS are going to knowingly cripple our Agricultural industry with an ETS that will have zero impact on global emissions?
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