A TD has warned that the failure to allocate €49 million in Carbon Tax funds to agriculture in Budget 2022 will make greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets for farmers harder to achieve.
Independent TD Denis Naughten was speaking in the Dáil on the issue, where he argued that allocating €49 million to agriculture in the budget “would have been a way to not only reduce carbon emissions in agriculture but across the economy”.
“Of the total €412 million to be allocated in Carbon Tax funds next year, there will be little or nothing allocated to actual carbon reductions, which will make it far more challenging for our economy – and farming in particular – in the remaining years left to the end of the decade when we are to reduce overall emissions by 51%,” Naughten claimed.
“In Budget 2022 farmers should have seen an allocation of €49 million but this is to be postponed until [the next Common Agricultural Policy], which to me is just another way of saying that the carbon taxes to be allocated to agriculture are just to replace government funding up to now allocated for co-financing of CAP measures.”
The Roscommon-Galway deputy claimed that this “already seems to be happening”, asserting that government funding committed for the retrofitting of homes is being replaced with money from the Carbon Tax.
“What is really frustrating is that, if the carbon taxes had been allocated to agriculture, it could have made a real impact on our country’s emissions,” he argued.
According to Naughten, carbon taxes should be used to “fast-track” research on carbon sequestration on pasture lands and hedgerows; and that “better grass management alone” could help address air quality, ammonia and nitrates issues, as well as reducing methane emissions and boosting sequestration through soils.
Naughten outlined some areas where the Carbon Tax fund would have been a benefit to farmers, including an environmentally-focused payment for suckler cows; a strategy for import substitution of fresh foods and protein; and funding the use of sheep wool for the insulation of homes.
The TD concluded: “Why could our carbon taxes not be used to connect up the dots within agriculture or between farming and the wider economy? This is the talk we heard from the climate agenda but is it not about time that we start to put money where it can actually make a real difference?”