With its proposal, the Blue Bloc will put pressure on the government to find more money for the green transition and hopes for a quick and broad agreement.
The goal of the initiative is to secure jobs in the Danish food industry, while fulfilling the climate ambitions, says the Liberal Party’s chairman, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen.
– The government’s proposal has many good beats. But it risks costing thousands of jobs. It requires funding to avoid.
– So we show that there are other ways. Where we are still ambitious in the environmental part, we are more ambitious in the climate part, and where we also take the industry into account, he says.
The government’s proposal includes a binding climate target for agriculture and an increased requirement for CO2 reductions of 7.3 million tonnes by 2030.
The blue proposal has no binding reduction target, and without such a broad agreement, according to the Radicals, is not realistic.
Minister of Food and Agriculture Rasmus Prehn (S) is also disappointed with the lack of climate goals from the blue parties. He calls the play “a scam”.
– It is deeply disappointing that the blue block comes up with a proposal without a binding goal. It is deeply unambitious, he says.
However, Prehn also says that there are parts of the bourgeois proposal that are interesting and that the government will include in a forthcoming compromise proposal.
The Unity List’s rapporteur for green conversion, Peder Hvelplund, believes that the government, after a blue bloc’s joint proposal for a climate plan for agriculture, should make a narrow agreement.
– The government has been treading water for far too long to accommodate the right wing. Now we know the supreme ambitions of the right wing, and they are, to put it mildly, an expression of a colossal climate failure.
– The right wing clearly confesses suit and shows that they are only interested in gilding their friends in agriculture, and that the climate and nature crisis can sail its own lake if it is up to them, he writes in a comment.
Rasmus Prehn emphasizes, however, that it is the government’s ambition that a broad agreement should be reached.
However, it looks really difficult to bet on a broad climate agreement for agriculture. This is the assessment of the Althingi’s political commentator Erik Holstein.
– The government’s options in the negotiations have been clearly curtailed.
– It points more in the direction of a settlement to the other side with the support parties, he says.
The Blue Bloc’s proposal includes a desire to invest DKK 750 million annually in the green transformation of agriculture. That is more money from the state than the government is planning.
Among other things, the money will go to extracting more lowland soil and more marginal areas.
According to the blue parties, the government’s proposal will take out 88,500 hectares of lowland land and marginal areas, while the blue ones will now take out 100,000 hectares. The government rejects that it is possible to take over their proposals of 88,500.
The money will be found by the five blue parties, among other things, by reintroducing participant payment for Danish education for foreign students as well as residence requirements for the right to unemployment benefits.
The rest is taken from the government’s reserve for 2022, which is set aside in the draft Finance Act.
Agriculture & Food and the Danish Society for Nature Conservation see blue block proposals as “very ambitious”.
Source: The Nordic Page