Power surge from Brussels
Up to last May, climate change wasn’t among Commission President José Manuel Barroso’s stated priorities.
Wednesday brought a new European Union energy package, promising an “industrial revolution” of renewable energy and huge cuts in the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
This ‘rush of blood to the head’ is not what one expects from the European Commission. The Eurocrats seem determined to poke their nose into every EU citizen’s business and to control his/her life, but the least we could expect of them is a slow, steady approach, not sudden, huge decisions.
Even though the targets they set last week are for 2020, they are another big shake-up for EU farmers, still coming to grips with the Single Farm Payment, suddenly sprung on them three years ago. It’s hard enough for farmers and the food industry to plan, with Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson offering to cut food import tariffs by 50%, in WTO talks.
Then, along comes his boss, Barroso, with energy proposals that could turn EU farming upside down, again.
In March, he wants heads of state and the European Parliament to agree to adopt “the most ambitious climate policy presented by countries or regions in the world”.
Europe must lead the world into a post-industrial revolution towards a low-carbon economy, says Barroso, just like that.
Perhaps the biggest consequences for farmers could be in his plan to cut 2020 EU greenhouse gas emissions by at least 20% (compared to 1990), or by 30% if agreed with other developed nations (which would be nearly four times the current target).
Agriculture is one of the main players in greenhouse gas reduction. For example, the nitrates directive action programme is expected to contribute 2.4m tonnes per annum of the 15.2m tonnes greenhouse-gas-reduction target here in Ireland. Forestry here will contribute 2m tonnes.
Around the world, livestock produce more greenhouse gas than transportation, and the United Nations says the environmental costs, per head of the world’s expanding livestock population, must be halved.
So there could be huge implications for Irish livestock farmers in a 30% greenhouse-gas-reduction target.
Perhaps Barroso hopes many farmers will give up livestock, and, instead, produce crops for the biofuel he wants as a replacement for at least 10% of vehicle fuel in the EU by 2020 — or turn their farms over to other renewable energy sources, which he wants to power 20% of EU energy needs by 2020.
Either way, there is a good chance his proposals will become law before long.
Climate change is a fashionable political cause, and the UK, for example, has welcomed the radical EU energy policy proposal.
The proposals may also be welcomed in Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic, where fuel refineries have been affected by the halt in Russian oil supplies through the Druzhba pipeline in Belarus.
Many European countries, such as the UK and the Netherlands, have had their warmest year on record, and 2006 also saw extraordinarily fast snow melt and heavy rainfall in central and south-east Europe, raising the Danube River to its highest levels in over a century. Natural disasters linked to climate change are predicted to kill around 40,000 people in Europe by the end of the century.
On the other hand, EU industry will oppose calls for drastic cutbacks to reduce greenhouse gases.
Even the EU’s powerful farming lobby may opt for radical measures to head off the feared long-term effects of ‘peak oil’, the point at which half of global oil production has been consumed, and beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline, and prices rise accordingly.
Many industry experts predict that ‘peak oil’ will happen by 2020, and the impact of that trend on food production, processing and transport looms on the horizon.
Some have called for a new “decoupling” — the separation of the food and energy markets, by cutting agriculture’s dependence on oil, by promoting local and organic food systems, reducing international trade in food, and revising EU energy policies that promote bio-fuel production at the expense of foodstuffs.
Either way, interesting times lie ahead for farmers.
