Dairy Farmers Hardest Hit By Carbon Tax
AUSTRALIA - Dairy farmers will be hardest hit when the Australian Government’s carbon pricing scheme begins on 1 July 2012. In the first year the scheme could cost dairy farmers A$4200 per farm.
23 December 2011
1 minute read
The proposed scheme will place an explicit price on greenhouse gas emissions from the stationary energy, transport and industrial processing sectors, as well as on non-legacy waste and emissions from oil, gas and coal production.
While direct emissions from the agricultural sector are excluded from the scheme, farmers will still be affected by the imposition of a carbon price through higher input costs and lower prices received for farm goods.
Dairy farmers are expected to experience the largest percentage increase in input costs arising from the carbon pricing scheme over the next four years (0.24 per cent a year) because they use more electricity than other agricultural sectors.
ABARE expects that dairy farm receipts will fall over coming years due to processors passing on the likely increases in dairy processing costs, because dairy processing, similar to dairy farming, is heavily reliant on electricity use compared with other processing industries.
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