New Zealand aims for greener pastures

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — Over thousands of years of evolution, sheep, cattle and other cud chewers developed a nasty habit. They burp and break wind a lot.

That gives New Zealand a distressing gas problem.

The country's 4 million people share two islands in the South Pacific with 40 million sheep, 9 million beef and dairy cattle and more than a million farmed deer, all producing the methane that many climate scientists say is one of the worst culprits behind global warming.

It may be a small country on the edge of the world, but New Zealand has big ambitions in the fight against climate change. Last year, Prime Minister Helen Clark set a national goal of becoming the world's first carbon-neutral country.

Livestock farmers, long among the country's major export earners, are worried. They say the cost of fighting greenhouse gases could drive many of them into bankruptcy, and they feel they're being singled out because New Zealand has relatively few big industrial polluters.

"There's no other country in the world that's so clean of chimney stacks that its animals are the biggest polluters," said farmer Charlie Pedersen. "It's kind of an ironic situation."

He owns an organic farm with 9,000 head of cattle and sheep in the seaside community of Foxton, 60 miles northeast of Wellington, New Zealand's capital. It's a quiet place of wind-swept sand dunes and an authentic Dutch windmill that's easily missed sitting next to Highway 1, the two-lane road linking Wellington with New Zealand's biggest city, Auckland.

But as president of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand, Pedersen speaks for the owners of 14,000 farms, roughly two-thirds of the country's total, and his voice carries into the corridors of power.

Five years ago, farmers revolted to defeat a plan to levy a tax on each head of cattle, sheep, goat and deer to fund research on controlling their gas emissions. The anger is building again, this time against a proposal to make the farmers the world's first forced to pay if they exceed government-imposed limits on greenhouse gases.

If it goes ahead, the plan could slash New Zealand farmers' profits by half over the next five years, driving big exporters out of business in the middle of a global food crisis, Pedersen warned.

"We're going to put our system under those costs with no opportunity to get any more from the market for our food," he said. "The consumer tends to be -- I'll reluctantly say this -- a little bit of a hypocrite.