Transition payments seen as environmental target solution

Glacier FarmMedia – A York University professor says transition payments could help Canadian farmers adopt and adapt to environmental policies.

Rod MacRae, associate professor in the faculty of environmental and urban change, said Canada has an “implementation problem” when it comes to policies for environmental improvement.

He said the problem has been around for decades and cuts across all levels of government and political parties.

Why it matters: Funding and flexibility are needed for farmers to adopt practices that meet various environmental policies set out by government. 

“Nobody seems to want to address it and I’m hoping you will,” he told the standing committee on agriculture.

MacRae said there are good sustainability targets within agriculture but the goals can’t be met because programs are deficient. He cited the Canadian Agricultural Partnership and various funds among them.

“These problems are essentially that they’re largely voluntary, focus on grants or contribution agreements and are not targeted,” he said. “They focus on best management practices and not systems change. They focus on the supply side without demand side elements and they have limited transition planning associated with them.”

Under questioning from committee members, MacRae said there has to be a transition process applied to any type of change. This begins with the small changes to programs that improve efficiency, then substituting certain processes and practices, and finally redesign.

He said transition advisory services across Canada and transition payments are key.

These payments are generally short-term, he said, usually within a three-year window or reduced over time.

“The idea with transition payments is not to completely substitute for what the market can provide to farmers. It’s more to take away some of the riskiest elements of the transition process,” he said.

Then farmers are in a better position to take advantage of market opportunities, he said.

The payments should be associated with recognized and authenticated protocols to create market confidence. Getting advice from transition advisory services, for example, could result in a payment.

MacRae said money could come from multiple sources.

“We already have the Canadian Agricultural Partnership model, which is an FPT model. You could have the money coming from different places,” he said.

Eric Toensmeier, executive director of the Perennial Agriculture Institute and author of The Carbon Farming Solution, said the notion is interesting but observed there aren’t one-size-fits-all practices.

“I don’t think it would be appropriate to mandate that all farmers must implement a particular practice because each piece of land is a bit different and each farmer and their market…is different as well,” he replied when asked by Bloc Quebecois committee member Yves Perron.

Flexibility for farmers to determine the practices that are right for them is important, he said.

“Also, there may be sort of a ladder where you might begin with a practice like cover cropping and then step up to adding shelterbelts and continuing to add additional practices over time,” Toensmeier said. 

“It would be useful to build a new mechanism that allows farmers to continue to ratchet up their climate impact in that fashion.”

MacRae said studies show financial barriers are the reasons many farmers don’t shift to more sustainable practices, but there are also psychosocial barriers. He described these as things like status in the community and how a banker interprets what his client is doing.

These types of barriers also should be addressed within the transition period, he said.

– This article was originally published at The Western Producer.