Green Financing for Agribusiness Continues Business-as-Usual

agriculture-countryside-cropland_-Credit- UNCCD

Across the world, the most notorious players in the expansion of industrial agriculture are turning to “green finance” to raise money. They include oil palm plantation companies, fish farming behemoths, pulp and paper manufacturers, meat and dairy giants, pesticide producers and commodity traders. Agribusiness is one of the fastest growing sectors in the global market for so-called thematic financing instruments – green, social or sustainable. The total value of green bonds devoted to agriculture and land, for example, shot up by 59% between 2019-2020.

Green finance may be promoted by private financial companies but it depends heavily on governments. For example, governments generate demand through public-private partnerships (PPP) in infrastructure, social services and other projects which ensure that the returns on the companies’ investments are guaranteed or “de-risked”. Governments are also needed to commodify or privatise land and natural resources that corporations can use to sell carbon credits and “green” projects to access green finance. So far, the vast majority of green bonds have been issued by public banks and government-backed entities, development banks, governments and institutional investors such as pension funds and asset managers.

The food system accounts for over a third of all global greenhouse gas emissions, and agriculture takes up the largest share of emissions within this sector. For agribusiness, therefore, there is a huge opportunity to access green finance for operations they claim will reduce their emissions. They are working aggressively to push for so-called “nature-based solutions” with an emphasis on land use and the agricultural sector. These “nature-based solutions” are supposed to offset corporate greenhouse gas emissions by planting trees, protecting forests or tweaking industrial farming practices to store carbon in plants and the soil. But “nature-based solutions” have been widely criticised for distracting from and postponing the real emissions cuts that must be made, and for depending on a massive grab of indigenous peoples’ and peasants’ lands and forests.

As the article below points out, the marriage of big finance and corporate agribusiness depends on the financialisation of nature and the relentless dispossession of people’s control over their lands, forests, waters and biodiversity. The formula remains the same: capture public goods and spending to maximise profits for a select group of investors, while providing large polluting corporations with access to a new source of “green” money to maintain business as usual. Food sovereignty – the only viable solution for climate justice – can only be built when people take back control over their lands, seeds, knowledge, and the money supply too.

https://grain.org/e/6720

- Third World Network