Canada: Provincial carbon tax eats into any profits made by BC greenhouse growers

If you ask retired greenhouse grower Linda Delli Santi what she misses most about farming, she would say it’s the smell of her tomatoes and bell peppers and seeing bins full of fresh vegetables after a day of picking. What she doesn’t miss is waking up at 3 a.m. to check the greenhouse boiler, or climbing up and down ladders during the workday. She also doesn’t miss having to pay the provincial carbon tax, which she says cost about $50,000 a year and ate into any profits made by her five-acre greenhouse in south Langley.

“We’re not talking small money. It’s big,” says Delli Santi, who is now the executive director of the BC Greenhouse Growers Association. It appears Delli Santi isn’t the only food producer in B.C. to suffer from the carbon tax. According to the BC Agriculture Council, the carbon tax has added about $45 million in direct annual costs to food production since it was implemented in 2008.

It’s things like the carbon tax, as well as issues such as competition and innovation, that food producers say need to be addressed by the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture if they are to reach the province’s goal of generating $14 billion in revenue by 2017.

Agriculture Minister Norm Letnick says his ministry is trying. The agriculture sector makes $10.9 billion a year, and the province has a $66-million budget for working with the industry. The ministry recently agreed to the framework for Growing Forward 2, the second five-year policy that co-ordinates federal, provincial and territorial agriculture policies. While the distribution of funds still needs to be negotiated, Letnick says B.C. should receive $110 million from Growing Forward 2 over the next five years. Unlike the previous Growing Forward, more dollars will be shifted from risk management to innovation. Market expansion into countries such as China and Japan is also a top priority, Letnick says.

“If you innovate, you become more productive. More productive means costs go down, and you can also innovate to increase markets,” he says. “As market shares increase, volumes increase, so cost of production per unit goes down. It also opens up a whole set of opportunities for revenue generation.”

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Source: vancouversun.com