Explosive new research has shown Australian Beef producers will be slugged $450 million dollars a year on slaughter cattle as the result of the emissions trading scheme.
Senator Ron Boswell raised the issue in the Senate this morning quoting extensively from a submission done by Rockdale Beef Pty Ltd.
Rockdale Beef is owned by Itoham Foods Inc. and Mitsubishi Corporation and operates an integrated beef cattle feedlot, feed mill, meatworks and farming business at Yanko in Southern New South Wales.
Rockdale kills up to 170,000 cattle per year and have longstanding export supply relationships with 12 key countries around the world including Japan.
.
Rockdale Beefs General Manager Paul Troja [ pictured above ] told Agmates today:
.
“What Senator Boswell quoted in the Senate is correct in the sense that the permits we’d have to purchase to cover the cattle we put through the works will equate to $33.60 per head. What Senator Boswell did not quote was that our increased energy input costs from the ETs will equate to another $17 per head on top of that.
That equates to $50 per head. Nearly all of our product is exported. We have no ability to recover those extra costs from our customers at the other end. To survive we will have to pass those costs back to our cattle producers.
Every beef processor in the country is in exactly the same boat. There are approximately 9 million cattle slaughtered in Australia each year. This emissions Trading Scheme will be a $450m indirect tax on Australian beef producers each and every year.
Those costs to producers are unavoidable. We are looking at any way we can to reduce our carbon footprint, but we are dealing with cattle and practically there is no way to offset that.
We will have to look to source many of our materials such as packaging etc overseas where the manufacturers do not have an added cost of a ‘carbon tax’ in their manufacturing process.
If we were to purchase those materials ‘made in Australia’ we would also have to build those additional costs into our calculations and add that to the $50 per head taken off the price paid to cattle producers.”
.
The $450 million dollars a year cost to Australian beef producers is in addition to the costs they will bear through their own farm inputs. Those additional costs will be highest on power, fuel and fertilizer but will also be included in everything that is manufactured in Australia and used on a farm.
These figures show that Farming has to be excluded completely from the ETS or we will simply have no farmers.
.
Have Your Say!
I honestly do not believe that the majority of farmers are aware of the enormous costs the Emissions Trading Scheme will levy on them. ABARE indeed has forecast they could reduce farm profits by 100%. What do you think?
.
Got a tip off, article or have you seen a video or item you’d like to be seen by the Agmates Community? If so please email it to us at news@agmates.com
September 29, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Rowell:
You state that “if the government want to retain agricultural and manufactured exports….”
That is a very big if, for which I see no evidence, on the contrary in fact, for the obvious reason that the ALP holds very few rural seats. Hence Wong buying up farms along the MD, hardly in support of your If!
Worse, the government’s favourite advisers from James Hansen and Peter Singer down to Barry Brook, and Tim Flannery are all opposed to livestock production on the spurious grounds that it creates more potent greenhouse gases (chiefly methane, CH4) than CO2.
Brook and his sidekicks (Russell, Glikson) cannot grasp that livestock do not emit more than they have consumed, or that their pastures result mostly from CO2 and water, and that controlled grazing encourages grass growth and thus CO2 uptake.
The molar weight of CH4 is less than that of CO2, so livestock are on balance carbon positive, even if CH4 is ostensibly a more potent GHG than CO2. Brook and Russell of course ignore livestock’s (indirect) consumption of CO2 in their article in Australian Science (Nov-Dec 2007)
“Annually, Australian livestock produce about 3 million tonnes (Mt) of methane. Using the 100-year Global Warming Potential, GWP, this 3 Mt of methane represents 63 Mt of CO2-e. As a comparison, all of Australia’s passenger vehicles produce about 43Mt of CO2.
Using the 20-year factor of 72 (which comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s
Fourth Assessment Report), it is clear that this 3 Mt has an impact on global warming, during the following 20 years, that is equivalent to 216Mt of CO2 emissions.This is more than the atmospheric heating caused by emissions from all of Australia’s coal-fired power stations!”
But there is NO evidence for the Brook-Russell claim that ALL CH4 molecules emitted by livestock this year will stay airborne for 20 years. This flatly contradicts the IPCC itself (AR4, WG1, p.142) which states that:
“most CH4 is removed from the atmosphere by reaction with the hydroxyl free radical (OH)”,
with the result that since 1990 there has been virtually no increase in the atmospheric concentration of CH4 (IPCC, ibid.).
What then becomes of the Brook-Russell allegation that Australia’s livestock annually release more CO2e than the country’s vehicle fleet and fossil fuel power stations?
What the IPCC data means is that if all Australia’s livestock were slaughtered now to please Peter Singer (see his Submission), Wong, Brook, and Russell there would be no net reduction in CO2e, already at the “dangerous” perhaps catastrophic level of 455 ppm CO2e according to Garnaut.
September 25, 2008 at 6:35 am
Perhaps, if the government want to retain agricultural and manufactured exports,then it will have to find a way they can all compete with other exporters who are not constrained by this impost.
Ultimately if it is that producers have to pass on the impost to retain competitiveness, then consumers must be the final receivers of the impost.
This being the case, a more reasonable method of collection would be via a broadly based indirect tax applied to consumption, not production.
Rebates for exporters affected.