The resolution approved by a variety of Sask. commodity groups is a response to expectations for a national carbon tax
Saskatchewan crop commodity groups want governments to compensate farmers for carbon sequestration.
A resolution that made the rounds at the CropSphere conference directs crop associations to work together to formulate a unified front in advance of what they feel is a pending carbon tax.
The resolution was put forward by Dave Sefton, a director of the Saskatchewan Flax Development Commission, and fine-tuned by John Bennett, a director of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers.
The target of the original resolution was the federal government. Sefton said the Liberals recently signed an agreement at the Paris climate conference that he believes will lead to a national carbon tax.
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“I think there is going to be something come down the tube, and we as producer groups need to get our strategy lined up,” he said.
Sefton said the former Liberal government of prime minister Jean Chretien wasn’t going to pay farmers for the carbon they sequestered through zero till practices.
“In fact, they were prepared to expropriate it and claim it as a government credit towards the Kyoto agreement,” he said.
Bennett, who spent a lot of time on the carbon credit file during his tenure with the Saskatchewan Soil Conservation Association, said the Chretien government was originally going to expropriate the sequestered carbon but then decided to compensate farmers through a carbon lease system that was never implemented.
He said Sefton’s resolution needed to be amended to include lobbying the Saskatchewan government because the current federal plan says provinces will be responsible for implementing a carbon tax.
“Unless they fall into squabbling, it’s the provincial government we need to pay attention to,” said Bennett.
He said Saskatchewan has spent $1.6 billion rebuilding coal-fired power generation plants with carbon capture technology, saving 400,000 tonnes of carbon a year.
By contrast, the SSCA’s Prairie Soil Carbon Balance project has determined that farmers sequester more than eight million tonnes of carbon annually by direct seeding 23 million acres of farmland.
Bennett said the SSCA wants to get all the crop commodity groups in one place to work on a strategy that will recognize and reward farmers for contributing to the removal and storage of greenhouse gases.
“It is absolutely crucial in this thing that we do not go off as a whole bunch of interested parties, that we have a very co-ordinated response,” he said.
Sefton has been practising zero till on his family farm near Broadview, Sask., since 1990.
“It would be a considerable amount of carbon that has been sequestered over the years,” he said.
sean.pratt@producer.com
