The Soil Grab Greenwashing by Agribusiness

Farmers at work

Over half of the soil organic matter in the world’s agricultural soils has already been lost, with over 2 billion hectares of farmland badly affected. This translates into declining crop yields, increasing pollution of water systems from fertiliser run-off, and because soil organic matter is mainly composed of carbon, the release of enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. The industrial food system is the source of over a third of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the past couple of years, nearly all of the biggest corporate players in agribusiness have launched or joined initiatives to restore carbon in agricultural soils. Some estimate the capacity to sequester up to 3.4 Gt of carbon per year in agricultural lands. With a price of about USD$20 per tonne of carbon sequestered on today’s carbon credit markets, that’s a lot of money that’s potentially out there to be made. These carbon farming programmes however amount to a big soil grab, warns a recent report from GRAIN.

The most glaring problem is that these programmes are designed to greenwash pollution and are all based on offsets. The companies finance their programmes by selling credits to corporations or governments to offset their actual fossil fuel emissions. But it isn’t possible for soils to absorb enough carbon to significantly offset global fossil fuel emissions. Another major problem with these corporate programmes is the lack of permanence. Most carbon credit farming programmes last ten years when carbon needs to be stored for at least 100 years to meaningfully make a difference to global warming.

The corporate interest in carbon farming further provides a powerful incentive to draw farmers into digital platforms. The companies intend to make their digital platforms one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

These corporate carbon farming schemes should not become core parts of national emission reduction plans. Only through a vast programme of agroecology, land redistribution and the re-localisation of food systems can we effectively build carbon back into the soils and cut emissions in the food system.

- Third World Network

Source: https://grain.org/e/6804