EU farmers should pay for their greenhouse gas emissions, Denmark’s climate minister has said, as Brussels struggles to rein in a sector projected to become the bloc’s biggest polluter by 2040.

Lars Aagaard said in an interview that the farmers deserving “most success on the European market” should be those who emit the least carbon per tonne of food produced. This could be achieved by charging them for their emissions under the bloc’s cap-and-trade emissions trading system (ETS), which already covers power generation and heavy industrial sectors.

“We should start to discuss how we can get a pan-European regulatory framework . . . putting the agricultural sector into something similar to the ETS,” Aagaard said.

Denmark is among a group of countries pushing for the EU to set an ambitious target of cutting the bloc’s emissions by 95 per cent by 2040 compared with 1990 levels. Aagaard said this would not be achievable unless pollution from farms was reduced.