National Farmers Union report suggests nationalizing oil companies and ending the country’s focus on food exports
A report that imagines a future of near-zero greenhouse gas emissions for Canadian farmers includes a scenario in which the federal government purchases the country’s 10 largest oil and gas companies.
“Once citizens owned the resources, we could decide how much to produce and how much to leave in the ground,” said the report by the National Farmers Union.
It also imagines the end of what it describes as Canada’s decades-long agricultural “export mania” that it said has led to things such as the closure of local plants due to the centralization of food processing.
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Cities such as Edmonton have instead embarked on plans to promote zero-emissions food by creating a local “foodshed” consisting of surrounding farmland, much like nearby rivers are part of the local watershed.
The idea is to minimize factors such as transport distances that boost emissions.
The report, which is called Imagine If … A Vision of a Near-Zero-Emission Farm and Food System for Canada, is not meant to outline actual NFU policies, said director of climate crisis policy and action Darrin Qualman.
“Instead, it’s an invitation to imagine what a positive future could look like, so there are some things in this report that are quite intentionally provocative, and that we’re hoping to provoke a wider scope of thought about the future of agriculture than is usually envisioned by farmers.”
The report is written as if it is now 2030 and a new federal agency, the Canadian Farm Resilience Administration, had been created in the 2020s to co-ordinate agricultural emission reduction and climate adaption work.
Its activities include independent laboratories to regularly test soil nutrients and carbon levels. Thirty demonstration farms have been set up across the country to showcase low-emissions practices.
In this future scenario, more than 1,000 independent extension agrologists are helping farmers maintain yields while reducing inputs. Not only have greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture been decreased, things such as farm income and the economies of rural communities are being strengthened.
Qualman said the NFU wants to “get across to farmers a couple of messages: one, the kind of steps that we have to take in order to reduce emissions from agriculture can also be part of a much larger suite of very positive changes that bring a whole bunch of benefits to farmers.
“And two, a big transformation is coming as we move through the next two or three decades, and farmers need to get in front of that to lead and take control because if they don’t, somebody else is going to.”
Several national farm organizations recently formed the Agriculture Carbon Alliance to oppose federal plans to boost carbon taxes to $170 per tonne by 2030.
However, Qualman said “this rearguard focus on the carbon tax just doesn’t help anyone. The future is one where we have to make big changes to a lot of systems, whether it’s building retrofits or starting to find ways to integrate a few low-emission tractors, and finding ways to use fertilizer much more efficiently.”
As a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than CO2, nitrous oxide from nitrogen fertilizer is the big issue for agricultural emissions, not simply what’s coming out of tractor exhaust pipes, he said.
Farmers didn’t affect the atmosphere for 9,900 years after humanity invented agriculture until more inputs were pushed into the system in the last 100 years, he said.
The report describes the current food-production system as something “unprecedented in human history — one that’s massively dependent upon fossil fuels and that emits billions of tonnes of climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases.”
Qualman said “probably the most important insight that anybody can have when it comes to agriculture and emissions is that farming does not produce greenhouse gas emissions; it’s farm inputs that produce greenhouse gas emissions.”
Although the current trend toward precision agriculture involving things such as artificial intelligence and data collection is being touted as one way to boost yields while lowering inputs such as fertilizers, Qualman said it is raising red flags.
The problem is it is “part of a larger push to really entangle farmers in corporate-controlled digital data platforms where farmers start to lose their autonomy and lose control of their data, and the data is aggregated by others and can be used against farmers,” he said.
The report is also critical of what it described as drought proofing against climate change through irrigation megaprojects that help a few hundred farmers on one to two percent of prairie farmland. Producers should instead promote the buildup of organic matter in soil to better hold rainwater, it said.
“Though enhanced soil health alone cannot guarantee a prairie-wide crop in a drought year, neither can irrigation. The former, however, has the advantage of being much more broadly distributed, more sustainable, lower-energy-use, and a source of myriad co-benefits.”
The report describes four key transitions:
- From an agriculture that draws ever more from industry to one that emulates biology.
- From food production energized by fossil fuels to systems powered by sunlight.
- From export-maximizing, far-flung food chains to local and regional production and processing and a reconnection to surrounding foodsheds.
- From food systems shaped by corporations and stock market returns to ones shaped by governments and citizens and the imperatives of emission reduction, sustainability, long-term resilience, risk reduction, justice, and democratic and community control.
Government ownership of Canada’s 10 largest oil and gas companies is seen as part of “important, even revolutionary, changes to accelerate climate reduction.”
Although the report described such companies as “big opponents of effective climate action,” it said an important part of the takeover is better use of workforces skilled in everything from logistics and engineering to construction.
“Energy companies have experience operating in remote and rural environments and building megaprojects — exactly what Canada’s clean energy revolution needed,” it said, pointing to the transition to renewables such as solar and wind power.
It would include governments partnering with industry to design and build electric- and hydrogen-powered farm machinery, restoring Canada as a leading global player in the manufacturing of agricultural equipment, said the report.
