Mandatory carbon audits are finished

Ulster Unionist Deputy Leader and Agriculture Spokesperson Diana Armstrong MLA has said the Department’s plans to tie carbon auditing to the Farm Sustainability Payment are now effectively dead, with the Ulster Unionists, DUP, SDLP and Sinn Féin all opposed.

Diana Armstrong said:

“This proposal is finished and farming families should take some heart from that. When four parties land in the same place, the Department needs to stop and listen instead of ploughing on.

“I opposed tying carbon auditing to farm payments from the start and said so in Committee. I’m glad others have come to the same view.

“I want to be fair about this. It isn’t carbon footprinting I have a problem with. Plenty of farmers measure their emissions already and find it useful. It’s making it a condition of a payment families depend on to keep going.

“There’s a problem with the thing itself too. These calculators measure what comes off a farm but they don’t properly count what that farm is storing in its hedges, its trees and its soil. Farmers are being measured on half the equation.

“It’s easy to get people nodding along to a question about helping farmers be greener. It’s a different conversation when you tell them what it means on the ground, with fewer cattle, more pressure on families already facing the inheritance tax changes, and jobs going in rural towns.

“Produce less here and we’ll import more of it, from places with lower standards, with the emissions of shipping it halfway round the world on top. Nobody gains from that.

“The Department hasn’t given anybody the full picture here. The evidence base looks rushed and the detail hasn’t been thought through. Until that changes, we are not supporting carbon audits, and neither are most of the parties in this Assembly.”