Canada's greenhouse gas reduction effort will include fertilizer industry

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

by SUSAN MANN

The agricultural industry wants to ensure it’s involved in consultations when Environment Canada starts developing regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions growth in chemical and nitrogen fertilizer production.

Currently, many farm-related groups say they don’t have enough details on what the government has in mind for regulations to determine what impact any new measures will have on the industry and in turn on farmers.

But spokesmen for both the Canadian and Ontario Federations of Agriculture have expressed concern that the regulations could negatively affect the prices farmers pay for fertilizer and other production inputs.

On May 15, Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced plans to reduce Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. In a May 15 news release, Environment Canada called it a fair and ambitious target that’s in line with other industrialized countries. Canada has formally submitted the target to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change.

When she made the announcement in Winnipeg, Aglukkaq also noted the government will introduce chemicals and nitrogen fertilizer production regulations to curb greenhouse gas emissions. She identified the two as the largest sources of emissions in Canada’s manufacturing sector.

Other regulations would target reducing the greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas production and ones for the natural gas-fired electricity sector.

The Canadian government has already introduced regulation to reduce emissions in the transportation sector, the country’s largest source of greenhouse gas and in electrical generation.

Environment Canada media relations adviser Mélanie Quesnel says by email details on the proposed regulations for chemical and nitrogen fertilizer production will be “provided in due course.”

She says regulating the chemical and nitrogen fertilizer sectors “would curb emissions growth by codifying existing good performance and provide regulatory certainty to industry.”

The expected costs and benefits associated with the proposal would be determined “during the regulatory development process,” she writes, and the included when the proposed regulations are published for public comment on Canada Gazette 1. She didn’t say when that would be.

Drew Black, environment policy director for the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, says Environment Canada hasn’t yet started developing the regulations. The federation wants to ensure it is part of the regulations’ development so farmers “don’t end up with higher input costs.”

Black says one of the federation’s concerns is the regulations could potentially increase farmers’ input costs for nitrogen fertilizer. Another is depending on what the government has in mind for chemical production regulations, the proposals may limit investment into bio-economy focused businesses, such as bio-plastic facilities or companies making high-value chemicals from agricultural products. The regulations could also potentially impact the ethanol production industry.

“I haven’t been able to find out the specifics yet to really gauge what the size of the impact would be and whether it’s something we should really be concerned about at this point,” Black notes, adding the Canadian federation is going to be following the development of regulations quite closely.

CropLife Canada, which represents plant biotechnology and crop protection manufacturers, “wasn’t consulted on the greenhouse gas emissions targets,” notes senior communications officer Erin O’Hara by email. “At this point we simply don’t have enough information to comment on this.”

Clyde Graham, acting president of the Canadian Fertilizer Institute, says similar to other industries the fertilizer sector has been having discussions with the federal government about its greenhouse gas emissions and achievable targets. “I have to leave any further announcements about the regulatory approach to the federal government.”

Don McCabe, president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, says, “I would expect there would be a higher cost of production to come on to chemicals and fertilizers” as a result of the regulations. But the “reality is it’s impossible to judge what that cost might be until you know what approach the regulation is going to take.”

This is why the Ontario federation supported a cap and trade system for Ontario, which means agriculture itself is not directly regulated  “but has a voluntary opportunity to provide offsets to a market to reduce costs,” he says. “If these regulations federally come in, there is no opportunity for us to actually get rid of that cost. We just have to pay it.”

The Ontario federation doesn’t have enough details on what is being included in the regulations. “All we’ve heard is politics to this point,” McCabe notes, adding the federal government is still out of sync with meeting its 2020 emissions reduction target.

In 2005, Canada’s total greenhouse gas emissions were 731 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and that’s up about 25 per cent from 1990, according to a document, called Canada’s Emissions Trends, on Environment Canada’s website. When Canada signed the Copenhagen Accord in December 2009, it committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions to 607 megatonnes by 2020, or 17 per cent below 2005 levels, mirroring the reduction target set in the United States. BF