The National Farmers' Federation (NFF) has told a federal review of Australia's Safeguard Mechanism that food production must be protected as demand for carbon credits grows. The mechanism caps emissions at big emitting facilities and makes them buy Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) when they exceed their limit, and the current government has tightened those limits.
In its submission the NFF pointed to the sale of Rushy Lagoon, one of Tasmania's largest farms, partly funded by the government's Clean Energy Finance Corporation and planned to become a pine plantation, as an example of how intervention can distort land use. It said it does not accept that more demand for land-sector offsets automatically benefits regional communities, since the gains are often concentrated among project participants.
Where land is mapped as important to production or to a regional economy, the federation argued, that should be weighed before it is converted to carbon sequestration, because land committed to a carbon project is in most cases restricted or barred from productive use.
The NFF opposed any change that would bring agricultural businesses directly under the mechanism, saying tools to measure the sector's largely biological emissions are still being developed. It also warned that lowering the threshold could indirectly capture grain storage and handling, processing, fertiliser production and port facilities, and asked the Commonwealth to publish analysis of which sites each option would cover before any change.
Instead it wants more support for carbon methods that sit alongside production, such as soil carbon and animal effluent management, which it said could cut farm emissions in ways that make commercial sense while adding high-integrity ACCUs to the market.
Photo: Steven Penton / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Source: Beef Central
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