Farmscape for August 28, 2006 (Episode 2231) The Canadian Pork Council is advising swine producers to tread with caution as they begin exploring potential opportunities on the carbon credit market. To help producers avoid problems the Canadian Pork Council and its provincial member organizations are distributing a Carbon Credit Agreement Negotiation Checklist. CPC Environmental Programs Coordinator Cedric MacLeod cautions there are no approved systems in Canada where a producer can trade carbon and receive revenue and, without a domestic approval system, contracting carbon credits can be risky. Clip-Cedric MacLeod-Canadian Pork Council There are emerging opportunities out of the Chicago Climate Exchange that we are keeping a close eye on to make sure that we communicate any new developments in as timely a manner as possible to the producer community. The Chicago Climate Exchange is a voluntary exchange and they do have some protocols that they have developed both for the cropland and livestock agricultural sectors. One in particular would be methane capture and destruction through anaerobic digestion processes. There's been quite a few projects in the US that have traded carbon through the Chicago Climate Exchange from those kind of technologies. Certainly the soil carbon sequestration angle is something that most aggregators are looking at and I think there will certainly be opportunity here in Canada or throughout North America and the world over to trade those packages of carbon. But, at this point, systems are really just getting up and going and how they might affect an individual producer on the ground and in terms of revenue at this point is difficult to predict but there will be opportunities world wide. MacLeod stresses, when considering the sale of carbon credits, it is particularly important to be aware of any potential liability in the event the contracted number of credits can not be delivered. For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane. *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork Council |