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NZCPR CAMPAIGNS
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Owen Jennings
As a former dairy farmer I was shocked to learn that Fonterra is selling its brands’ business. Call it emotional attachment rather than hard-headed commercial reality. For all my dairy farming years I heard that we needed to be closer to our consumers, that branding was an integral part of extracting profit from product sales and that we needed to better understand what our customers wanted. We needed to own the food chain – ‘plough to plate’.
National wants economic growth. Opening up the agricultural sector to less regulated gene editing and the more wholesale use of GMO’s could be a quick way to get quantum leaps in production. But there are no guarantees and the evidence for increased production from gene manipulation is scant. Yet the changes are being hustled through.
It is time to call a loud “halt” on our international signings. We should start backing out of the Paris Agreement in lock step with other countries and build a national and then international case to have ruminant methane removed from all research, reduction commitments, or taxing.
We seek boldness from the Coalition and industry to tackle the huge injustice of condemning farmers for being polluters when the latest science is clear: ruminants are not a problem. Saving millionths of a degree by decimating our most successful industry is as ludicrous as cutting off your hand to spite your elbow. Could we return to sanity, please?
New Zealand farmers feed 40 million people and the IPCC was crystal clear in the Paris Agreement – do not take any climate mitigation action that “threatens food production”. Our farmers produce food more efficiently, both environmentally and economically than any other country. It makes a mockery to penalise them.
What is new is that the Coalition Government has decided to tax the Methane on its way around this natural, been-there-forever, cycle. It sounds more like a blatant tax grab than an honest attempt to deal with climate change.
