00:00Dear politicians in Brussels, please tell Denmark that we have to make the carbon tax, of course, but do it in other countries also.
00:09The planet is suffocating, the climate disasters are becoming more and more devastating,
00:14and the fight against greenhouse gases is an imperative for Europe.
00:18But the means to achieve this are far from consensus, especially when it comes to the agricultural sector.
00:24I am in Denmark, one of the most ambitious countries in the EU in terms of the reduction of greenhouse gases.
00:30The last initiative of the Danish government is the establishment of a carbon tax on agriculture from 2030, a world first.
00:39The measure, which must still be voted on by the Danish parliament, is controversial.
00:44According to these detractors, it will have little effect on the carbon footprint of agriculture.
00:55The European Union wants to become carbon neutral by 2050,
00:59with the intermediate objective of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or GES, by at least 55% by 2030.
01:07But according to experts, GES emissions from agriculture should be reduced by half.
01:13The sector generates 11.4% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe.
01:19Most of these rejections are due to farming.
01:22They mainly come from the digestion of food by cattle and sheep, and from the storage of manure by cattle and porcine.
01:30Add to this the emissions produced by the spread of chemical fertilizers,
01:34and the manure spread by farmers or excreted by cattle.
01:39France, Germany and Poland are the largest emitters of GES of agricultural origin in the European Union.
01:46But Denmark, a major exporter of dairy and pork products, is no exception.
01:52Agriculture is the second source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country, after energy.
02:05Agriculture occupies more than half of the territory of Denmark, an area almost entirely dedicated to farming.
02:12I am here in one of the porcine farms of the Silland region, which is with cattle farming.
02:20These are the main targets of the carbon tax that the government wants to impose on farming,
02:26a measure whose effectiveness does not convince at all.
02:30The landowner is responsible for the Danish Association for Sustainable Agriculture.
02:36On this farm we have 800 sows, they produce around 28,000 pigs a year.
02:41I sell the pigs when they are 30 kilos to Germany and Poland and other countries,
02:46because I get the best price on that market.
02:49I can say we use the best technology to keep the pollution as low as possible.
02:54These pigs are three weeks old.
02:56The crate here in here is very clean all the time because the floor is open,
03:01so the poo-poo, it goes down to the floor.
03:04And under the floor we have a technology with some pipes that cool the manure all the time,
03:10and it makes some energy.
03:12So we use the energy from cooling the manure to heat up the house for the small pigs,
03:17which is a really good idea and good for the environment.
03:21We don't have this pollution up there, so we don't have the steam,
03:25the damp of the nitrogen going to the system, to the ventilation we have up here and out in the air.
03:34Here we have the manure tanks.
03:36This one, we just got a new top on, so we don't get any pollution to there.
03:40There's also a lot of gas from methane going up, so this is stopping that.
03:46And the other tank, we have to change the top because it was old.
03:52Now I know where the smell comes from.
03:54Now you know where the smell comes from.
03:56We use the manure from the pigs in the fields, so also there it's going around in the system.
04:05And we also have a plan of taking the manure to a place where they can make energy out of it.
04:1140% of all the gas in Denmark is from biogas,
04:15which means that we take the manure from the cows and the pigs and put them to a factory,
04:20so they put out to the consumers, to the citizens.
04:27According to the farmer, the introduction of the new tax will be counterproductive.
04:32Everybody, especially Danish farmers, we want to be the greenest and the best.
04:36If we get the tax, we'll have problems to keep doing that because we cannot invest in the green technology.
04:43This is the only country who wants to make taxes, and taxes is not good from the market.
04:48If we get a carbon tax, I'm not going to be competitive to the other countries,
04:52so I'm going to stop having my sows.
04:54I'm still going to have the fields and trying to get along,
04:58but I'm not being able to have a production like this.
05:04Do you have one question to ask to Brussels?
05:07Yeah. Dear politicians in Brussels, please tell Denmark that we have to make the carbon tax, of course,
05:14but do it to all the other countries also.
05:16All the countries in the world would be best, but at least in Europe, that we can do it at the same time.
05:21It's not good for one small country who is really dependent on the competition.
05:29The Danish Parliament, behind me, will soon have to vote on the new tax that the government wants to impose
05:41on the greenhouse gas emissions of agriculture.
05:44What inspired Europe?
05:46Brussels, in any case, has renounced a carbon pricing of agricultural origin.
05:51I submitted these points to one of the experts of the European Scientific and Consultative Council on Climate Change in Copenhagen.
06:01If we look at the emissions from agriculture in Europe, since 2005, very little has happened in terms of reducing emissions.
06:11And one of the reasons is that there's no incentive for farmers to do so.
06:18So if you think, for example, of how you handle manure, technologies to treat it better, they're costly.
06:24If you actually had a gain by paying, in the Danish context, less of a tax by installing these things,
06:30you would have an incentive to actually install it.
06:33There are some farmers in Denmark who do not agree with this new tax,
06:39and they say that as long as the EU is not harmonized in this field,
06:44it will create a competitive disadvantage for Danish farmers, who will eventually move out.
06:49So do they have a point?
06:51One of the critics of implementing a greenhouse gas tax in Denmark, in agriculture,
06:56has been a concern of what is called leakage, so that the production, and thereby the emissions, move to other countries.
07:02And that's where the EU, as such, has a large role, because the more common policy we have in Europe,
07:10the less leakage there will be for the individual countries, because other countries also have to reduce emissions.
07:15I think we need to implement some sort of pricing mechanism in agriculture, to give an incentive to reduce emissions.
07:22And the other thing is to look into the common agricultural policy, and see how we can revise that.
07:28Because as it is today, a large amount of the subsidies are going to greenhouse gas intensive productions,
07:36and not to less carbon intensive production forms.
07:42Under the pressure of farmers, the European Executive has in any case renounced this year
07:47to integrate specific measures for agriculture in its climate goals for 2040.
Comments