Mike's Minute: We are too reliant on pine trees

The problem with committing to things that may well come back to haunt you, is down the track, at some point, the mistake starts to hit you in the face a bit and some hard decisions are required. 

My sense of it is we have become too reliant on pine trees to meet the Paris climate target. 

The sheep farmers have worked that out as the protests around land conversion have once again been reignited, with posters put up by the Meat and Wool folk with the line: "I am not the problem". 

Since 1982 we have gone from 70 million sheep to 25 million. 

In the last seven years a quarter of a million hectares has been swapped from sheep to trees. 

This of course was always going to happen. What's the easiest way to meet a target on carbon? Trees. 

Cutting and slashing, whether its farm production or the economy, in general was never going to be palatable. So trees were easy. 

But you might have noticed a couple of major things have happened; 

1) Paris looks increasingly shaky in terms of people meeting targets, or indeed people even being interested in meeting targets. 

2) Stuff grown on the land with legs is fetching very good money all over the world and as far as us earning a living goes, we have never made more from farming. 

Carbon offsetting, which is what planting trees is called, has restrictions in other countries. But I bet you anything you want that other countries aren't as reliant on sheep and cows as we are. 

We used to have tourism back us up. But last week's numbers tell the sad story - dairy is worth $20 billion, while tourism is at $12 billion. Even offal comes in at $9 billion. 

Tourism used to vie for first place, hence the Government threw another $13 million at it yesterday to try and attract another 70,000 or so new visitors. 

Trees also kill communities. Farming is life. A forest isn't. 

As laudable as Paris was all those years ago, if we had thought about it, if we had been less evangelical, we might have stopped to think just what it was we were asking of a small economy. 

And the simple truth is we were asking so much, a quick shortcut like trees was always going to be adopted with alacrity. 

Saving the planet, as people get tossed off the land, is not an equation we should be proud of. As the protest poster with the photo of the sheep says, I am not the problem. And it's right. 

The zealots are.

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