ONCE AGAIN farmers have good cause to say a resounding 'merci' to the French.

Thanks to their involvement in drawing up the final proposals for the climate change conference in Paris, agriculture has been given a 'get out of jail free' card and is now being recognised as part of the solution to reducing greenhouse gas production in the decades ahead.

Like any summit, there was a lot of smoke and mirrors to the much-publicised Paris deal. The commitment is to prevent global temperatures rising by more than two degrees, with a vague reference to making this even lower, if possible. But there are few sanctions for those that fail to deliver and once again blind eyes were turned to those building new coal-fired power stations to pursue industrial development.

Time and future reviews will decide whether the process is delivering, but agriculture won a major concession. Farm lobby organisations now need to use this to counter unrealistic and arbitrary targets for reducing greenhouse gas production from everyday farming activities.

The success for agriculture was in no small way thanks to COPA, which represents European farm unions. It helped secure recognition that food security was as important as climate change mitigation. The Paris event was about long term aspirations, and one50 year certainty is that the world population will continue to grow.

That makes food security vital, both for developing countries and for those that rely on food imports, since increased demand in the face of restricted supplies can only drive up prices.

Because this was formally recognised, article two of the COP 21 agreement says that climate change mitigation policies can only be pursued in a way "that does not threaten food production".

This is a big concession for agriculture. Green groups have been pressing for unrealistic targets to cut methane emissions from livestock; they also want new targets to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and the European Commission had bought into some of these arguments.

In reality, any such measures in Europe would have had little impact on a global scale, so long as others are building new power stations.

But for the EU progress has been more about being seen to do something, than measures supported by science. This is why we ended up with unrealistic targets for biofuel use, and why future targets for methane are around in Brussels.

The farming lobby, thanks to Article 2, can now argue that these can only be imposed if they can be effective without threatening food production. But this does not mean the farming lobby can simply play this card and seek to block any change. Farmers need to make clear to the commission and the wider public that they accept the need for climate change measures, because they are the first in society to suffer from changes to weather patterns.

If, as scientists predict, we are on our way to warmer, wetter summers and winters it will certainly adversely effect Scottish and indeed European agriculture. That means it is in farmers' interest that climate change is tackled in a way that is effective.

However, the industry needs to be wary of any arbitrary attempts in the UK or Europe to press for limiting temperature increases to 1.5 rather than 2 degrees.

It also needs to be wary of targets not based on science. But it needs to make clear that agriculture wants to be part of the solution, and wants to play a key part in delivering on the Paris aspirations.

If this is to happen, the commission must be ready to invest a lot more time and effort in finding ways to cut methane output from livestock, without affecting farm productivity or food production. That is a big challenge, but one the commission will have to accept rather than simply imposing targets, thanks to the Article 2.

If farming is to be seen to deliver, more will also have to be invested to allow the industry to produce a carbon balance sheet. This would show how carbon from producing food under commercial conditions is offset by farm land in general, and forestry in particular, acting as a sink or means of carbon sequestration.

That is the real gift of the Article 2 concession, in that it should allow science rather than arbitrary targets to govern decision making. That means farming has, rightly, been recognised as special compared to other industries.