Jem's Nuffield Adventure: Paris

We spent 2 nights in Paris, and had time for a fleeting look around the city to see the major sights. We visited the Eiffel Tower, Sacre Couer church, Notre Dame, Arc’Trione (all spelt wrong sorry), and walked the river path for a few km’s. All great to see in a quick 3 hour self guided tour. The rest of this blog is a bit boring – so you’re excused from reading but it was good for my brain to write it all down.

We visited the New Zealand embassy and met with Carmel from the OECD. Organisation of Economic co-operation and Development. OECD consists of 34 member countries, with developed market economies committed to democracy. Member countries get together to discuss all aspects of their economies, so that they may learn from each other and thus maybe change laws and policies to improve economic growth and development.

OECD is most famous for its work in education; however they also work in Agriculture of course. Subsidies are measured in all countries and compared and contrasted. New Zealand has next to no Ag subsidies, but Australia has a few with the diesel rebate and also drought assistance.

Over the years, subsidies have changed from government price support measures on Ag commodities (eg setting the price of wool), to more direct spending given to farms, such as the EU, CAP (EU farmers getting paid just to own the land). The latter has a far less distorting effect on global commodity pricing, but does largely distort the price of land.

The big emerging countries of the world, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, are not members of the OECD, however will become members in the future. These countries are likely to start offering more subsidies to their farmers, as they develop, and follow the same path that our economies have already been on. Generally OECD countries, are trying to lower subsidies, but it is hard to not let a country follow the same path that ours have to high economic growth.

CAP reform in the EU was spoken off critically, as a redistribution of subsidies to less developed economies, rather than a reduction.

We also spoke with Monty from the NZ embassy who works on a global research alliance on Ag greenhouse gases. They aim to bring countries together to find ways to grow more food without growing greenhouse gas emissions. With the world all focussed on reducing emissions (Kyto protocol), agriculture is being held responsible for a reasonably large % of emissions. As we aim to improve productivity, we have to aim to do this without increasing agricultural emissions.

There is a lot of controversy around the issue, but it was interesting to learn that all governments in the world believe that industrialisation (human greenhouse emissions) are causing to climate change, rather than the other belief that the world is always evolving and changing, and the temperature is just on an upward trend at the moment.

A report was recommended to read, was called ‘livestocks long shadow’

Swifty’s thoughts on the subject;

Domestic animals are just part of the carbon cycle; if we were to remove the cows then the termites would eat the grass, and release the carbon just the same as the cows. So we should not be worried about anything that is part of the cycle, but rather inputs such as tractors, fuels and oils.

Now we are on the train to Geneva, Switzerland, but we scoot back into France straight away to visit some farms.