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Richard Dawkins
Sheep and beef farmers are urging the Government to do more to stop productive farmland overrun by pine trees.
An environment select committee recommendation tightening the temporary exemptions that would allow land converted after 4 December 2024 to enter the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has failed to allay farmer concerns.
Federated Farmers meat and fibre section chair Richard Dawkins says the Government had a chance to stop our productive farmland and rural communities being completely overrun by pine trees – and they blew it.
Farmers were promised that whole-farm conversions to carbon forestry would be brought to an end but the rules, as they’re currently written, won’t even come close to achieving that goal, he says.
“Unfortunately, what’s being proposed completely misses the mark and will achieve only a minor reduction in whole-farm conversions.
“Unless the Minister steps in and makes urgent changes, we’ll continue to see our productive hill country swallowed up by permanent pine forests at an alarming rate.”
The Government are currently proposing to put a 25% cap on registering forestry in the Emissions Trading Scheme – but that will apply only to land classes 1 – 5.
Dawkins says that might sound like progress on paper, but in reality only 12% of carbon farming conversions have happened on that land anyway.
“The remaining 88% of conversions have been on classes 6 and 7 – on which two-thirds of this country’s sheep and beef farmers operate.These farms are the engine room of the agricultural industry. So, what protections do they get under the new rules? Practically none.”
Beef + Lamb New Zealand (B+LNZ) chair Kate Acland agrees that the select committee recommendation leaves the door wide open for the continued wholesale conversion of productive sheep and beef farmland into carbon farms.
While the select committee has proposed tightening the temporary exemptions that would allow land converted after 4 December 2024 to enter the ETS, it has not fixed the land use class rules – the very section driving most conversions, says Acland.
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