THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Thursday, November 30, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 8 a.m., in camera, to study the acquisition of farmland in Canada and its potential impact on the farming sector (consideration of a draft report); and, in public, to study the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
Senator Diane F. Griffin (Chair) in the chair.
(The committee continued in camera.)
(The committee resumed in public.)
[English]
The Chair: I welcome you to this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry. That’s a welcome for our guests who we have on the screen.
I’m Senator Diane Griffin from Prince Edward Island, and I am the chair of the committee. I would like to begin by asking the other senators to introduce themselves, and we’ll start with the deputy chair.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Senator Ghislain Maltais from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Doyle: Norman Doyle, Newfoundland and Labrador.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Jean-Guy Dagenais from Quebec.
Senator Pratte: André Pratte from Quebec.
Senator Petitclerc: Chantal Petitclerc from Quebec.
[English]
Senator Marwah: Sarabjit Marwah, Ontario.
Senator Eaton: Nicky Eaton, Ontario.
[Translation]
Senator Gagné: Raymonde Gagné from Manitoba.
[English]
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Mercer: Terry Mercer, Nova Scotia.
The Chair: Thank you, folks.
Today the committee is continuing its study on the potential impact of the effects of climate change on the agriculture, agri-food and forestry sectors.
For our witnesses, we welcome by video conference from Paris representatives of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. On our right is Mr. Guillaume Gruère, Senior Policy Analyst, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, Natural Resources Policy Division. On the left is Mr. Ben Henderson, Policy Analyst, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, Natural Resources Policy Division. Thank you, gentlemen, for accepting our invitation to appear.
I will now invite the witnesses to make their presentations, but I would also like to remind them, as per the instructions they’ve previously been given, that their presentations should not exceed 7 to 10 minutes in length. Following the presentations by the witnesses, there will be a question and answer period with the senators.
The floor is yours.
Guillaume Gruère, Senior Policy Analyst, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, Natural Resources Policy Division, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Thank you very much, chair. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We would like to thank the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry for its invitation to participate in the discussion it is having on agriculture and climate change policies.
Generally speaking, as you may know because you have been discussing it, agriculture and climate change considerations revolve around two key issues; the agriculture sector’s impact from climate change and the sector’s contribution to climate change via its emissions of greenhouse gases.
First, without adaptation action, our work has shown that agriculture is projected to be the second economically most damaged sector from climate change. Even if impacts will differ significantly by country or region, it is a key concern for agriculture.
Second, agriculture is one of the major greenhouse gas-emitting sectors. Direct emissions from the sector present about 10 to 12 per cent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. It is the largest emitter of methane --CH4 -- mostly from ruminants, and nitrous oxide --N2O -- mainly from manure and fertilizers, two gases with significantly higher global warming potential than CO2. Therefore, moving below the 2 degree targets of the Paris conference will require agriculture to play a role in emission reductions globally.
How to address these issues? My colleague Ben Henderson and I will rapidly discuss three core elements of what we see as a holistic climate change policy for agriculture based on recent and ongoing work we have done at the OECD.
The first thing we’re going to talk about is that our governments can help agriculture adapt to climate change. The second is policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the sector. And the third is the need for governments to ensure agriculture and climate policy coherence.
I should say before I start that we won’t talk too much about forestry in these remarks because we mostly focus our work on the agriculture and agri-food sector.
The first point here is adaptation of agriculture to climate change. We have two messages under this heading today. The first is that adaptation actions are needed, but they should account for local conditions. I emphasize the word “local.” Existing evidence shows that there is a need for agriculture to undertake climate change adaptation actions, if only to reduce projected damages. Changes in temperature, precipitation patterns and the multiplication of extreme weather events are expected to impact agriculture productivity globally, but these impacts are also expected to vary significantly across locations.
For instance, 2014 OECD projections of the impact of climate change on wheat production were found to be small but negative in North America as a whole; negative but more important in Europe, on average again; and much smaller and even positive in some scenarios in countries like Korea and Japan. Of course, more specifically, these effects differ among countries in a region, within countries and across production systems. So the first message, again, is local conditions.
The second important message is to recognize that government policy should complement farmers’ own adaptation actions. Farmers already are taking actions to adapt to climate change. Government’s role is necessary in the presence of market failures or when the provision of adaptation acts as a public good.
In the context of agriculture, we see three necessary actions for which governments need to be involved. The first is generating and diffusing information and knowledge to agriculture actors, developed via research and development, on climate risks, on tools to assess and monitor risks for farmers, and on responses to risk via training and extension systems.
The second pillar is removing disincentives to farmers' adaptation actions, so policies that could provide disincentives, such as input subsidies in the agriculture sector, pricing support schemes and excessive support for insurance that will encourage farmers to actually go in the other direction.
The third pillar is ensuring that infrastructure investments are climate-proof.
There are other non-agriculture policies also needed for good adaptation strategy. For instance, having well-defined and well-functioning water allocation regimes in place will help reduce water-related risk for the sector, particularly for irrigated crops.
Several OECD countries have introduced policies that consider both local conditions -- diversity of context -- and a focus on the enabling environments. For instance, in the United States in 2014, the USDA launched a Climate Hub initiative that divides climate adaptation actions into different regions, about 10 of them across the United States, or hubs. Each of these climate hubs assesses the key vulnerability of local agri-food systems and proposes targeted extension programs to help prepare farmers for specific risks and offer solutions that are adapted to their problems.
We will now move to mitigation, and I’ll invite my colleague to discuss that.
Ben Henderson, Policy Analyst, Trade and Agriculture Directorate, Natural Resources Policy Division, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: Good morning, everyone. I will be discussing the potential role and impacts of carbon pricing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
Recent OECD research shows there are many cost-effective solutions for agriculture to lower its greenhouse gas emissions. However, the costs and benefits of these solutions vary a lot, making it difficult to identify practices that make economic sense everywhere. For this reason, carbon pricing policies are useful because they can decentralize the decision-making process about which options to choose so that emissions reductions occur where they are cheapest today. They can also steer innovation and investment towards lower carbon technologies for the future. The broader the number of sectors and greenhouse gases covered by a carbon pricing instrument, the more cost-effective it will be, which means lower costs to the economy, government and households in reaching any particular emission reduction target.
Concerns about the competitiveness impacts of carbon pricing for agriculture are understandable and can occur but will depend on factors such as the trade exposure of the sector, the extent to which other countries price or regulate emissions, and the approach used to implement carbon pricing.
The most desirable and direct carbon pricing approach is either tax emissions or to use an emission trading scheme with auction permits. There are presently challenges associated with the measurement of agriculture emissions, but ongoing development of protocols for the measurement of these emissions could and should eventually ease these constraints, allowing greater participation by agriculture.
Furthermore, in situations where a country or small group of countries implement these types of policies alone, they can suffer a loss of competitiveness. However, if momentum from the Paris agreement for the inclusion of agriculture in national plans to lower greenhouse gas emissions spreads among countries, these risks will fade. In the meantime, it’s possible to implement carbon pricing in ways that reduce or eliminate competitive risks.
One approach is to include agriculture as a voluntary auction or offset market, from which government and other sectors that are required to pay for emissions can purchase emission reductions. The Australian Emissions Reduction Fund is an example of this. Free permit allocations for agriculture and emission trading schemes can work in a similar way. While these policies don’t adhere to the “polluter pays” principle, they provide many of the same benefits as other forms of carbon pricing, such as a carbon tax.
Finally, we have a large ongoing project at the OECD due for completion in 2018 that aims to address all of these issues on carbon pricing.
Mr. Gruère: I’ll finish with the third part about the necessity to have a coherent policy approach to climate change in agriculture. We talked about adaptation mitigation and the need to be consistent among those, and it is also the core agriculture policy.
Reviewing policy coherence between adaptation mitigation objectives is needed to avoid counteractive climate actions in agriculture. We have run an economic analysis based on farms in Finland, and it demonstrated a number of policy trade-offs; for instance, instruments like a nitrogen fertilizer tax that would help mitigation but not necessarily adaptation.
Another instrument, crop area payments that are decoupled from production, which is something you see in the European Union, is found to help adaptation but could deter mitigation objectives for Finnish farms.
We’ve also done policy reviews in France and in the Netherlands that suggest different approaches may be used to foster synergies and address trade-offs among those objectives at the policy level.
As mentioned before, core agriculture policy may also deter the ability of the sector to achieve its climate change objectives. We recently published an international literature review on the barriers to adoption of climate-friendly practices in agriculture, those that address both mitigation and adaptation, and the review identified a large number of potential barriers among which misaligned policies appear to be prominent.
To conclude, I have three general points. Climate change is a major challenge for agriculture and the agri-food system, notably because of the uncertainties it generates. Governments should act to help reduce these uncertainties by contributing to bolster the sector’s resilience to shocks and encouraging the sector to reduce the future impacts it may face. Governments can do so by removing agriculture policy incoherencies and introducing well-chosen cost-effective policy instruments both on adaptation and mitigation.
[Translation]
Thank you for your attention.
[English]
The Chair: Terrific. Thank you for your presentation.
We’re going to go to questions now. We’ll ask people to be succinct in their questions and probably the presenters should also be succinct in their answers. We have a lot of people around the table, and we will keep going until we get everybody satisfied in terms of questions or until the clock strikes the hour, whichever comes first.
Let's begin the questioning with Senator Mercer, who has to leave, and then we'll go to Senator Maltais.
Senator Mercer: Thank you, Senator Maltais, for giving me your spot.
One of the things you didn’t cover was the opportunities that global warming has presented for moving agriculture farther north. In our country, it is an opportunity for us to start moving some farms farther north because of greenhouse gases, not necessarily crop-based agriculture but perhaps animal-based agriculture.
Have you examined the opportunities that may be presented by a positive result of this very negative problem we have?
Mr. Gruère: Should we respond directly or wait for more questions?
The Chair: You can answer them one at a time. Senator Mercer has to leave shortly for an important meeting, not that this one isn’t important, so you will have to answer him first.
Mr. Gruère: Thank you.
I don’t think we have considered that issue specifically, but when we do assessments of the impacts of climate change, we also see some blue zones on the map, so we are aware that this could happen.
What you are also talking about is the extension in the North, and that is something most modellers don’t look at. We are more able to model those crops and livestock activities that exist currently, so that’s something we haven’t looked at very carefully. However, if those opportunities appear, I’m not sure we would consider that governments have anything to do with that in particular.
Senator Mercer: We know that by 2050 there will be 9.7 billion people on the planet. I’m still looking for some group that is actually focusing on this and asking the question: How are we going to feed 9.7 billion people? I haven’t been able to find anyone who is addressing this topic. It would seem to me that when the G7 meets on a regular basis, food security for the world should be on the agenda, but it never seems to be. Is the OECD giving any attention to this very real problem?
Mr. Gruère: You’re talking about climate change and food security, I presume. The work we’re doing is going the direction of looking at the trends of what different scenarios would mean in terms of emissions.
If you’re actually going fully towards food security objectives and you don’t consider emissions reductions, or if you’re on the other end trying to reduce emissions, what does it mean to food security? We have work ongoing on this.
Ben may wish to add something.
Mr. Henderson: We have a global model looking at issues such as food demand going forward to 2050, but the OECD has focused, as have some other organizations, on food security. The FAO, for instance, is doing a lot of foresighting work on this issue.
I would say that we’ve been here before. If you look at past growth in productivity, we’ve managed to double production within the time frames necessary to do it again in the future. It’s not insurmountable, but it is a challenge given the growing resource constraints, but the OECD is not specifically looking at this issue, at least not our group at the moment. But there are a lot of people looking at that.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: You based your study on an OECD study that was done in Finland. I am surprised to see that you did not take a country that is more like Canada in terms of its territory. Of course you know that, in Finland, three quarters of the livestock eats natural feed. Reindeer in particular do not eat hay during the winter. They have to migrate to find food that contains no chemical fertilizer. They graze on natural hay.
Finland is a very small country and dairy products like butter, cheese, milk and its derivatives are imported from Denmark.
I would have liked your study, for example, to be based on Germany, Poland or Ukraine where the land is similar to Canada’s. If you had gone further south, you could have looked at what is happening in the United States, in Mexico, in Argentina, and in Brazil.
I quite agree that agriculture is responsible for 2 per cent of greenhouse gases. In your opinion, what would we need to do in Canada to get that number to zero?
[English]
Mr. Gruère: So I take it that there are two questions here, the first one on the study that we had in Finland and other countries. Obviously, this is particular country. On the study that I mentioned, I should say that in our presentation we actually used findings from a lot of different studies, and this one in particular was a farm-level or even plot-level assessment of the effects of some policies on adaptation and mitigation effects. So it was really farm-level, and we needed good data that we could adapt to our model. It was a very specific data requirement. We weren't really just choosing this particular country. There were attempts to also work in this particular model, the same type of model and questions, in Korea and in part of the U.S. Midwest, but it didn’t go through. We can only talk about the Finnish example in this case. We are very much aware that other countries have other types of situations that are extremely important, including those that you mentioned about natural-fed livestock activities.
Then the second question is, of course, what could we imagine for Canada? It’s difficult to give you a simple answer, obviously. There are different mechanisms, including some that my colleague just talked about, that could help move in this direction, but it’s going to be a difficult process, in any case.
Mr. Henderson: Certainly, I think the first step is incentivizing improvements in efficiency with regard to production versus emissions of greenhouse gases. There are many strategies available that could increase productivity, even in grazing systems, and thereby reduce emissions per unit of output of product.
Mr. Gruère: Livestock.
Mr. Henderson: That’s right. This applies to livestock animals and grazing systems. Grazing management strategies that can increase above-ground biomass and soil carbon sequestration feature prominently in these types of strategies.
There are also ways of treating feed, feed additives and options like that. I suppose they won’t be as relevant in grazing systems as in our confined animal systems, but there are options available around grazing management. The important thing is to get a price incentive through a carbon pricing system to incentivize those practices.
I should also add that our global assessment that we’re looking into now will cover Canada, and we’ll have something more specific to say when that’s completed in 2018.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: As Senator Mercer pointed out, the population is increasing and we will have to produce more in Canada. We are a country that produces and exports food commodities that are very important for humanity, whether in Asia, in Europe, or in India. How can we operate Canada’s agricultural land to the maximum at the same time as we reduce greenhouse gases?
[English]
Mr. Henderson: I’ll start answering that question.
Again, I think countries such as Canada that are quite efficient in the way that they produce food stand to gain in many respects as the world constrains carbon emissions, particularly if they do so at a global level across agriculture. Those countries that are more efficient could indeed benefit.
You’re right; agriculture is different to other sectors in that it produces food and that food demands are increasing rapidly. It’s important that we don’t damage agriculture’s ability to satisfy the world’s food demand. That’s why, when we think about carbon incentives, it’s not only about taxing carbon, although that’s an ideal way to do it from an economic efficiency point of view. We can also think about offset schemes, where regulated industrial sectors can purchase emission reductions from agriculture. What these end up doing is acting as an additional revenue source for agriculture. They’re voluntary. Farmers take them on only if it benefits them. We’ve seen from our simulation modelling that the effects on food production are close to zero, compared to a baseline situation, with these types of policies.
Mr. Gruère: Just to complete that, we know some countries are interested in moving in the direction of reducing emissions while keeping a highly productive and competitive sector. Recently, you might have heard that New Zealand is moving in this direction. They still haven’t decided the way to go, but they are also facing similar issues to Canada in the sense that they are exporting. It’s not necessarily the same sector; it has a lot of dairy. Some of the suggestion is also to go toward net zero rather than absolute zero. Absolute zero is often seen as not possible for the agriculture sector if we want to feed the world, or it’s very difficult. However, net zero, as my colleague mentioned, if you also considered all of the opportunities to absorb the carbon or to use agriculture as a way to offset emissions from others and even from the sector itself, you can move in the right direction. So there is progress in this direction, and new technologies might help as well to improve productivity without increasing emissions, even in the feeding of animals, in the crop breeding, et cetera.
[Translation]
Senator Maltais: Your New Zealand example does not hold water because, at the moment, Queensland, with some of the best land in New Zealand, is overrun by mining and agriculture has dropped to fifth place. Queensland was the cradle of agriculture in New Zealand.
Find me another country like Canada, where we can increase agricultural production with the fewest greenhouse gas emissions.
[English]
Mr. Henderson: There are two broad strategies. One is to improve the productive efficiency of the livestock sector. The other is to look for ways to reduce emissions, absorb emissions from the atmosphere through sequestration opportunities, such as building up soil carbon. Planting trees on agricultural land is also an opportunity to do that.
We haven’t looked specifically at Canada. We know these approaches work well elsewhere. Take Australia, for example. It’s different to Canada, but the beef sector there has recently announced, on its own, that it will aim for carbon neutrality by 2030 by using a range of measures, including those that improve productivity and sequester carbon.
Senator Doyle: Senator Maltais and Senator Mercer stole my question. I was going to ask you about the expanding population in the world and how we might we able to respond to it in the future, outside of the current practices we’re using in farming.
How effective, in your opinion, can hydroponics and greenhouses be? I know they’re doing a lot of it in Europe, in Belgium. How effective can it be in their contribution to fill the need in the future, to respond to global need? Is that a factor? Is that something we can use in the future?
Mr. Gruère: That’s a difficult question. I’m not sure we have specific answers, but it’s an interesting question.
What I know from greenhouse agriculture is that it has made a lot of progress in productivity. It’s among the most actively productive areas in the world for fruits and vegetables, particularly in the Netherlands. They have made efforts to reduce the energy they use for that. In some cases, they use a lot of energy, at least in northern countries like the Netherlands. We’ve also seen development in the Mediterranean region where the sun is not missing and it helps to preserve the humidity. There are potential gains in productivity and perhaps using energy more efficiency, but then in the southern Mediterranean region, this issue is the efficient use of water and whether water is better used there than for other uses.
Do you have anything to add on that, Ben?
We haven’t done any particular studies on hydroponics and greenhouse agriculture, so I’m not sure we can respond more than that.
Senator Doyle: Thank you.
Senator Oh: Thank you, witnesses.
Recently, the OECD participated at the 2017 UN Climate Change Conference taking place from November 6 to 17 at the World Conference Centre in Bonn, Germany. Can you please update us on this conference?
Mr. Henderson: Sure. I was there. I wasn’t there in the negotiations. There was an announcement made, which Guillaume can inform you about.
I will just say there was a lot of optimism there. There were good exhibitions on what various research organizations in countries are doing to address climate change. There was a particularly good session on soil carbon sequestration. The IPCC has long cited that as an option that can really make a big difference. Eighty per cent of the sector’s total mitigation potential comes from measures to build soil carbon; it’s a really big sink for the world to exploit.
Until now, there has been a lot of difficulty in finding ways to measure and verify reductions in emissions through these approaches. But there seems to be a lot of progress being made on modelling approaches, which can make use of data and do a good job of predicting how practices can build soil carbon and address this important issue.
There were other side events that touched on some of the issues that you mentioned about feeding the world, food security. In particular, there was one on livestock, which made the point that even with existing practices in the world, if the bottom two thirds of producers could produce as well as the top third, we could see food production increase by around 25 per cent, for example.
There were a lot of positive messages coming out of that, but that’s as much as I witnessed while I was there.
Guillaume can mention something about the announcement.
Mr. Gruère: Yes. I wasn’t present at the event, but we followed remotely as to what was happening on the negotiation side. There were subsidiary bodies discussing agriculture, and for the first time there was an official decision on agriculture. As far as we know, it was the first decision of the UNFCCC on negotiations that mentioned agriculture. The decision was pretty short, but the conference of party members agreed to discuss a number of topics in the coming years around the use of agriculture, adaptation and climate change mitigation as well. It suggested a number of topics that could be discussed in those discussion opportunities.
Even though it’s not changing the world on agriculture, it’s a step forward. In the Paris conference, agriculture was not stated specifically under a particular decision. So we see that as progress, but let’s see what happens with the discussions as they move forward.
[Translation]
Senator Dagenais: Thank you, gentlemen. I would like to go back to the offset methods. In Canada, we have supply management, which, at times, doubles or triples the price of our agricultural products compared to our neighbours to the south. Then the government has just added a carbon tax on top. We are not very familiar with offset methods. It is not clear, because the carbon tax is new in Canada. However, like it or not, it will affect the price of agricultural products. We have to save the planet. We have to think about greenhouse gases, but we also have to think about remaining competitive.
In OECD countries, which you mentioned earlier, what offset methods exist at the moment? We must not forget that agriculture goes on around the world; everyone involved wants to have the best prices and to be able to sell their products. If the products become too expensive, sooner or later, the countries have to be compensated in some way.
So, in the OECD, which offset methods do you provide to your farmers so that their agricultural products remain competitive?
[English]
Mr. Henderson: In terms of the offset schemes that we’re aware of, including the one scheme in Australia that I mentioned, the Emissions Reduction Fund, I understand you have a scheme in Alberta as well. Our understanding is that because these schemes are voluntary, they don’t impose additional costs on the agricultural sector and agricultural production. So as far as we’re aware, there’s not a big price effect on having a voluntary offset scheme.
This is something we need to look into a bit more. Perhaps there are situations where farmers may choose to undertake methods to reduce emissions which generate more income than standard agricultural production. I suppose that could have a price effect, but we’re not aware of that being a strong effect in the system. Mind you, these are relatively new. They’re in their infancy, so it remains to be seen.
There are other approaches that are compensatory within an emission trading scheme. For example, in the scheme that New Zealand has, the Labour government, in their campaign, talked about giving agriculture essentially a free allocation of permits. This would allow the sector to voluntarily undertake emission reductions and sell those permits to other sectors, if they can sell them more cheaply than other sectors can provide their own emission reductions. By being voluntary and being an asset given to farmers rather than a cost being imposed on them, we don’t see a big price effect there. Those are two of the main mechanisms.
It’s possible that if there are price effects, which would impact most strongly on consumers, particularly poor consumers, there are mechanisms to transfer some of these revenue from these carbon-pricing schemes back to consumers to offset some of those higher costs.
Mr. Gruère: I think my colleague responded really well to your question. I think the only place he mentioned, in his intervention earlier, where there could be some price issues is when you have a mandatory carbon pricing system. In some cases, that could have some effect on consumers, but it’s not guaranteed and it could also be absorbed by the sectors.
We also have cases where if you use taxes, it doesn’t really affect the response either, so it’s just money from the farmers to the taxpayers. It all depends on the way you implement those tax systems, whether it’s effective and whether the money comes from the customer or the taxpayer, depending on the situation.
Senator Petitclerc: I seem to have a habit of asking questions on organic agriculture and organic farming, so I will continue in that vein.
First, thank you for your presentation.
We’ve talked, and I’ve asked many questions, to different witnesses, both on the side of the adaptability and resilience of organic agriculture and their potential contribution in reducing emissions.
Many witnesses have mentioned that this type of agriculture presents a lot of challenges to them in Canada in terms of data collection, for example, research that is done or not done in this specific sector in Canada, and more challenges in terms of financial support that they get or don’t get.
I want to hear from your international perspective on, first, the role that you believe organic agriculture plays, can play or should play; the results that you have seen; the best practices, maybe; and different models you feel are relevant.
Mr. Gruère: Again, I’m not sure we have the right evidence to provide a full and comprehensive answer to your very good questions. In the past, we have compared different farm management practices to support what we call green growth in agriculture, which means increasing the economic output of agriculture at the same time as reducing the impact on the environment.
One of them was organics. We compared conservation practices, no-till farming practices, organics and biotechnologies. There was no single solution, as you can expect. It was very much context-dependent as to whether different practices are effectively greener and more output-intensive.
In terms of organic, the debate we can see — and we don’t have a particular piece on organic — is there are trade-offs between the cost for farmers and whether they’re able to achieve better environmental outcomes. Sometimes they do that at the cost of efficiency and therefore do not produce as much from their land. That can become a problem. When you look at an area and want to reduce emissions, you have to use more land to produce the same amount or use more manure from livestock that also emits.
A number of questions can be asked as to whether organic is the solution. You have to be pragmatic about that. This is not the OECD position, but I personally think organic farming has a role to play among other types of solutions. In some cases, the practices used in this area could be beneficial for more conventional types of agriculture.
There’s potential, but there are also some questions we can see in the research. We don’t have a particular statement or recommendation on organic farming, as far as I know. But I’m happy to provide this document I mentioned that compares the different farm management practices from the perspective of green growth, and you can check for yourself what is useful in there.
Senator Petitclerc: Thank you.
Senator Gagné: We know that pricing carbon is one of the policy means for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting the 2015 Paris climate agreement. Some of the world’s leading experts say the progress is quite slow and generally the price on carbon is still much too low to be effective.
I was wondering if you could comment on what would be an effective carbon rate, and I would like you to comment on Canada’s strategy to reach the targets.
Mr. Henderson: We agree. We’ve looked at the evidence, as you have, and the level of ambition is not enough to achieve the 2-degree warming target set in the Paris agreement. It falls a long way short, in fact.
You’re right; carbon pricing is being adopted very slowly. I understand that at last count 39 national jurisdictions that have applied or started to apply these mechanisms, but the prices have been set too low.
Research shows that a reasonable contribution from agriculture to meeting these targets could be around 1 gigatonne per year by 2030 in CO2 equivalent terms. The same study, which I can give you details about later, shows that with carbon pricing typically observed in the world of around $20-per-tonne of CO2 equivalent dollars, we get about 20 per cent of the way there that we need to for agriculture. It’s pretty clear that an effective carbon price has to be much higher than that. I think the Canadian example or instrument that is being discussed is suggesting a price of around $50 Canadian per tonne. That’s much closer to the mark.
An effective carbon price in economic terms depends on how we value damages from climate change, and that’s a tricky thing to estimate. There are suggestions at the OECD of a price of around 30 or 40 euros per tonne. But as I’ve said, we have an ongoing study, and by next year, we’ll have a more precise answer as to the effect of different price levels, including these which I’ve discussed.
The Chair: I’m not seeing any other questions, so I would like to thank our guests. This was extremely interesting. I know we had some technical difficulties, and you were very good to persevere with that.
Thank you, senators.
(The committee adjourned.)