A Winnipeg lobby group opposed to development of what it considers large industrialized farms has complained to Canada’s environmental auditor that Agriculture Canada is breaking the rules by not accurately assessing environmental impacts before implementing programs.
Beyond Factory Farming has complained about the environmental impacts of government agricultural policies and promotion of the biofuel sector.
On Oct. 18, after receiving the biofuel response from Ottawa, the group’s community organizer, Glen Koroluk, said the government responses were too narrow, clearly underestimated environmental impacts of subsidies and policies, and showed that the government does not do proper environmental impact assessments before developing new policies.
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He said it is a critical issue because the country is on the cusp of a new five-year agricultural policy whose subsidies will favour large operations and more intensive agriculture that will damage the environment.
“By following the logic of the first five-year plan, we are on the brink of spending billions of dollars of taxpayer money on a new agricultural policy without properly identifying the environmental impacts that will result from its implementation,” Koroluk wrote.
The Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program that will be reworked, renamed and incorporated in the next framework is a “perverse” program that favours large operations vulnerable to cyclical income pressures rather than smaller, more diversified operations that rarely qualify for CAIS support.
“The CAIS program may well be providing these enterprises with the financial cushion that allows them to expand and concentrate production beyond environmentally safe limits,” wrote Koroluk in a call for an investigation.
Several days earlier, he had received a government response to a petition asking for detailed calculations on the environmental benefits of investing tens of millions of tax dollars in biofuel production.
The government responded that greenhouse gas emission reductions attributable to biofuel production cost $5.39 per tonne. The ethanol expansion program that is budgeted to spend $97 million by 2009 “compares favourably with other federal actions related to climate change that were undertaken within the same time frame,” said the response.
The government said the impact of a mandated five percent use of biofuel in Canadian tanks by 2010 will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by four million tonnes each year.
Koroluk complained that the calculations were based on a narrow definition of benefit that underestimates the impact of fertilizer and fossil fuel used to produce the biofuel product, as well as the impact of expanding the cropland base to produce the feedstock.
