Heather du Plessis-Allan: The plan the Government has for farmers is an expensive exercise in stupidity

This can’t happen: The plan the Government has to force farmers to pay for their emissions.

They cannot persist with this plan as it is.

In its current form it is going to be a devastating for farming communities…and given how important farming is to our national income… it’s going to be terrible for our economy.

If they persist with this, they will shut down up to 20% of lamb production, 20% of our wool, and 14% of our beef.   

If it translates directly into the number of farms that go under, that’s one in five sheep farmers who are not going to be able to keep farming.

Think about what that means for everyone else who relies on those farms:  The meat processors? We won’t need as many of them.  The transportation companies? We won’t need as many of them. They will close. The rural communities? They will die as people pack up and leave. The schools? They’ll shut. The shops? They’ll shut. 

Sheep and beef accounts for 92,000 workers in this country. 

If this leads to a straight 20% loss of workers, that’s 18 and a half thousand people. 

And then there’s the cost to the economy.  A 24% drop in net revenue means we could lose up to 2.88 billion a year in sheep and beef exports alone. That’s more our entire education system costs us every year. It’s a huge amount of money to pass up.

And it’s not going to stop climate change from happening. It runs the risk of making it worse. New Zealand farmers are the most efficient farmers in the world.  They produce the least carbon emissions per animal.

You take 20% of our meat out of the word, some other country is simply going to step in and take up the slack and they will not farm that meat as efficiently as us, so every animal of ours that they replace, they will put more emissions into the atmosphere than we would’ve.

This plan is an expensive exercise in stupidity. We are definitely making our country poorer and possibly making the planet hotter, for what? 

For bragging rights. 

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