Farmers could receive at least $1 billion in Kyoto climate change funding over the next seven years for their efforts to lock up carbon in the soil and to reduce methane and nitrous oxide emissions from livestock herds.
Last week, environment minister StŽphane Dion unveiled a seven-year, $10 billion plan to implement Canada’s commitments through the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Significant emission reductions and carbon sequestration are expected to take place on farms, likely corresponding to an investment of at least $1 billion,” said the minister’s document tabled in Parliament April 13.
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The department said standard farming practices would result in sequestration of 16 million tonnes of carbon per year in the 2008-12 period.
Even more may be taken out of the air “through practices such as reduced tillage, less summerfallow and increased use of forage, which could be incented through the (Kyoto climate fund),” it said. “Incremental emission reductions from agriculture could result from activities such as beef feeding strategies and hog manure management.”
At a House of Commons environment committee meeting, Dion said there will not be a specific allotment of funds to agriculture but Kyoto program planners expect farmers will be able to claim at least one-in-10 Kyoto dollars when they produce carbon-reduction plans.
“The market definition doesn’t say farmers will have this share and others will have this share,” said the minister. “It will be competition, provide your tonne of reductions and you will receive financing. Although we expect for farmers about $1 billion, it’s an expectation of their capacity to provide good results. It’s for them to organize themselves. The best ones will receive financing.”
Red Deer Conservative MP and environment critic Bob Mills jumped in to say he had just spoken to a farmer with 1,100 acres who wondered “when his cheque is coming.”
Dion and departmental officials said they hope to have details worked out by the end of the year.
“He’s out of luck,” muttered Mills.
In a later interview, Mills said the promises to farmers are like most Kyoto plan promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 270 million tonnes annually by 2012.
“It’s in the future,” he said. “After years of promising a plan, they are writing a plan on a serviette and making promises they don’t know how to deliver.”
Mills said a Conservative government also would have to have a plan to implement the Kyoto Protocol that Canada has signed, even though it is skeptical about the practicality of the deal. He said it will include credits for farmers.
“I see it more through a tax incentive system rather than a bureaucratic credit system that they are suggesting,” he said. “But to be honest, I don’t have an answer in how it would exactly work. We have to work on those details.”
Environment Canada climate change official Judith Hull said the key instrument to be used will be a system of credits that can be traded or sold.
She said a system will be worked out to determine the inventory of carbon in the soil of an applicant farmer and then a judgment will be made in future years about how much the farmer’s use of reduced tillage is increasing the total. A credit for the newly stored carbon will be issued, based on the judgment of a carbon panel established by Environment Canada. It, in turn, can be sold to companies trying to buy enough credits to meet their own Kyoto reduction targets.
A system also will be devised to assign some credit for carbon stored in recent years by farmers adopting zero or minimum till practices before the Kyoto Protocol took effect, said Hull.
She said a farmer receiving a carbon credit will not be allowed to return to former farming practices without penalty.
“There will be spot checks,” she said. If farming practices are changed to turn the operation back into a net carbon emitter, the money received for credits will have to be returned.
