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TWN
Info Service on Sustainable Agriculture More of Agribusiness Greenwashing Through “Carbon Farming” In countries where industrial agriculture dominates, “carbon farming” is about tweaking entrenched practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits. In the Global South, in the name of “carbon farming”, an increasing number of companies are taking over large areas of land to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets – resulting in land grabs from local communities. A programme promoted by the global seed and pesticide giant Bayer provides an example of how this entrenched path to “carbon farming” is being used to advance the agendas of agribusiness corporations, with farmers benefitting little (Item 1). Bayer gets increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use. The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with tonnes of its RoundUp (glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically-engineered Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize. Meanwhile, corporate interest in rice carbon farming projects is exploding, with more than half of projects located in China (Item 2). One of the reasons why corporations are targeting rice farming for carbon offset projects is that it accounts for an outsized share (9-11%) of emissions from agriculture. The projects typically claim that the carbon credits they generate will provide much-needed additional income to small farmers who still dominate rice cultivation. In reality, the carbon credit price paid to farmers fluctuates and is relatively low. Furthermore, investigations are revealing dubious accounting tricks, callng into question carbon offsets and market-based approaches to purportedly reduce emissions. In reality, polluting industries maintain their emissions, while shifting the burden to small rice farms, and contributing far less to people’s livelihoods and basic food needs than rice farming. With
best wishes, —————————————————————————————————————- THE CORPORATE AGENDA BEHIND CARBON FARMING By
GRAIN If you live in Africa and you’ve heard of or experienced a “carbon farming” project, it has likely involved a land grab for a large-scale tree plantation. Across much of the global South, an increasing number of companies are taking over large areas of land to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. This is the case in Niger, where the US-based company African Agriculture Inc recently acquired two 50-year leases over a total of two million hectares to plant pine trees for carbon credits. A similar experience is unfolding in the Republic of Congo, where French energy giant Total is planting 40,000 hectares of acacia trees for carbon credits, depriving local communities of their farmland for the next 20 years. But in countries where industrial agriculture dominates, such as the US, Brazil or Australia, “carbon farming” is about tweaking entrenched practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits. This form of “carbon farming” is also now starting to be pushed onto smaller farmers in different parts of the global South, such as India. A programme promoted by the global seed and pesticide giant Bayer provides a good example of how this entrenched path to “carbon farming” is being used to advance the agendas of agribusiness corporations. About a decade ago, the notorious pesticide and seed company Monsanto made a controversial take-over of a digital agriculture company called the Climate Corporation. Through that acquisition it developed one of the first major digital agriculture platforms, which is now called Climate FieldView. FieldView is essentially an app that collects data from satellites and from sensors in farm fields and sensors on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices — when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply, etc. The company says FieldView is already being used on farms covering over 24 million hectares in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe. In 2020, Bayer (which acquired Monsanto in 2016) launched its Carbon Program in the US. In Europe it’s called the Carbon Initiative, and in Brazil it’s Carbon+. To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in Bayer’s FieldView digital agriculture platform. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: 1) reduced tillage or no-till farming and 2) the planting of cover crops. Through the app, the company monitors the implementation of these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets. This past August, Bayer launched a new programme in the US, called ForGround. The main difference with its Carbon Program is that companies can also enrol in ForGround, not just farmers. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim Scope 3 emissions reductions in their supply chains. The giant poultry company Purdue Farms was the first such company to announce a collaboration with Bayer’s ForGround in September 2022. Under the collaboration, farmers who supply feed grains to Purdue will be enrolled in ForGround so that Purdue can track their carbon footprints and market its highly polluting chicken as “sustainable”. Although this is not stated by the companies, another advantage for Purdue will be the in-depth information about its farmer suppliers that it will get access to and that it can use to maximise its profits. It’s not clear if farmers will gain anything from this. The joint press release says only that farmers “may be compensated for tracking their carbon footprint”. On the other hand, farmers could actually be penalised for not enrolling. Those who do not enrol may find themselves unable to sell soybeans and maize to Purdue, or they may be paid less by Purdue for their crops. Bayer is the big winner here. It gets increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use. Getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer. The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with tonnes of its RoundUp (glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically-engineered Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize. Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. The very month that it launched ForGround, it took majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel. You can see in the evolution of Bayer’s programmes that, for corporations, carbon farming is all about increasing their control within the food system. It’s certainly not about sequestering carbon. Bayer’s programme has a short term focus, as it only requires a 10 year guarantee of sequestration. It also has a very low level of verifiability, as checks will be carried out mainly from a distance, through estimates based on data collected by the FieldView app, not regular soil tests. And it is not about generating a new revenue stream for farmers, either. As we can see with the move to ForGround, any benefits are going to go to Bayer and other corporations. This article is based on a presentation made by GRAIN at an online panel session entitled “The New Business of Carbon Farming and Other ‘Nature Based Solutions’: Panacea or disaster?” at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, on 4 January 2023. ———————————————————————————————————— Item 2 CARBON RICE FARMING: A LICENSE TO POLLUTE AT THE EXPENSE OF SMALL FARMERS By
GRAIN Earlier this year, an investigative report by Climate Home News found that the multinational oil corporation, Shell, likely pocketed millions of dollars from rice farming projects in China. If that in itself doesn’t raise eyebrows, the story is more dubious than it seems. The projects introduced irrigation methods that would cut methane emissions and allow Shell to then claim these emissions reductions to offset its emissions or to sell them as carbon credits to other big polluters.[1] What’s more, the report found that Shell had used “accounting tricks” to exaggerate emissions reductions from the project and that 85% of the credits generated by the project ended up in the hands of PetroChina, China’s state-owned oil and gas company. The company that certified Shell’s rice projects, Verra, responded by putting the projects on hold, pending a review. Verra is currently embroiled in other, similar scandals with carbon offsetting projects in other parts of the world.[2] And, while the Shell project may be on hold, Verra and other certification companies are moving ahead with dozens of other carbon offsetting projects on rice farms in Asia and elsewhere. Indeed, rice farming has become one of the biggest targets for carbon offsetting projects. These carbon rice farming projects not only serve as greenwashing tactics for big corporations like Shell, but also unfairly burden small rice farmers in developing countries with the responsibility to reduce corporate emissions. Many of these farmers are already on the frontlines of the climate crisis, with few guarantees that they will reap any benefits from these initiatives. Big business for big polluters One of the reasons why corporations are targeting rice farming for carbon offset projects is that it accounts for an outsized share of emissions from agriculture. According to the International Panel of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC), rice farming accounts for 9 to 11 percent of total agricultural emissions, mostly from methane and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions.[3] The global warming potential from rice farming is said to be almost three to six times higher than from maize and wheat farming.[4] At the same time, rice farming, unlike the farming for other major commodities like maize, wheat and soybeans, is still largely in the hands of small-scale producers. As a result, the vast majority of carbon rice farming projects focus on reducing emissions from small-scale farms.[5] The projects typically claim that the carbon credits they generate will provide much-needed additional income to farmers. In fact, the poverty of small rice farmers is central to how most of these projects’ work. They claim that farmers would not be able to afford the switch to rice farming methods that produce less methane, such as more efficient irrigation systems or climate-friendly rice seed varieties, if it wasn’t for the additional income provided by the carbon farming projects. In reality, the carbon credit price paid to farmers fluctuates and is relatively low, on average between US$15 to 30 per acres per year.[6] Corporate interest in rice carbon farming projects is exploding. Rice cultivation projects are now the second most popular project type in the agriculture sector after manure management system in the University of Berkeley’s database of global voluntary carbon market projects. Berkeley’s Carbon Trading Project database contains all the carbon offset projects and credit issuances within the four major voluntary offset project registries. It lists 275 rice emissions reduction projects to date, with more than half of the projects located in China. These projects are managed by agribusiness companies like Chongqing Gengfang Agriculture Development and Yueyang Agriculture and Rural Development Group, Co.Ltd. International institutions like the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the World Bank and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) are also heavily promoting carbon farming projects for small rice farmers as a way for countries to achieve their national emissions reduction targets. UNEP and IRRI recently established a Sustainable Rice Platform that they co-convene and that serves as a verification body for emission reductions from rice farming around the world. One of the Sustainable Rice Platform projects in Vietnam, which is hailed as the most successful example of carbon rice farming to date, integrates 184,000 hectares of rice fields into what is called the “Vietnam Sustainable Agriculture Transformation” project. Over the last seven years, it received US$238 million in funding from the World Bank on the condition that the project use certified seeds, improve water management and optimise the application of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. In early 2023, Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development announced that they planned to extend the project to cover one million hectares. Yet the project in Vietnam is based on a methodology from the UN Clean Development Mechanism, called AMS-III.AU, the same used in Shell’s much contested carbon rice farming projects in China, and which is now under scrutiny because of integrity concerns.[7]The methodology requires rice farmers to: change their rice field irrigation mechanism from continuous to intermittent flooding and/or a shortened period of flooding; alternate wetting and drying methods; and/or changing rice cultivation from transplanted to direct seeded rice practices to cut the release of methane gas into the atmosphere. The methodology -less demanding on verifications and paperwork- is designed for small scale farmers, but, in the case of Shell’s projects in China, it appears that a large contiguous area of irrigated rice farms was artificially divided into small plots to satisfy the rules of the methodology. Researchers with Climate Home News also found that the project was making dubious claims about its role in making changes to irrigation methods. Some agribusiness companies have begun to connect sales of their products with carbon credits from rice farming. The Israeli-owned irrigation company Netafim is offering carbon credits to rice farmers that buy and use its irrigation equipment. The irrigation company claims that by using its drip-irrigation equipment instead of the usual flooding irrigation system rice farmers can earn 10 carbon credits per hectare of land per year. Netafim acts as project manager and ensures that participating farmers follow certain procedures and submit the necessary data for verification. Only once the carbon credits are sold in the carbon market will Netafim pay the farmers based on a share of the sale price. The small rice farmers must buy the irrigation equipment first and take on the financial risks, without any real guarantee of when and how much they will be paid.[8]
Agriculture and the larger food system are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions, including from rice farming production that is still mainly in the hand of small-scale farmers. And, yes, it is important to reduce the emissions and water use from the 165 million hectares of rice cultivated worldwide. But it makes no sense reducing emissions from small rice farms so that other polluting industries can maintain their emissions, especially when these industries contribute far less to people’s livelihoods and basic food needs than rice farming. Emissions from rice farming can be effectively reduced without carbon farming projects. There are many successful examples of how small farmers can use agroecology, traditional varieties and a combination of techniques, such as direct seeding, intermittent flooding and dryland rice production, to reduce methane emissions and cut back on or eliminate the use of nitrogen fertilisers, which are another major source of emissions in rice farming. ____________________________________ [1] Climate Home News, ‘Revealed: How Shell cashed in on dubious carbon offsets from Chinese rice paddies’, March 2023, https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/03/28/revealed-how-shell-cashed-in-on-dubious-carbon-offsets-from-chinese-rice-paddies/ [2] Climate Home News, “Verra boss steps down after criticism of its carbon credits,” May 2023: https://www.climatechangenews.com/2023/05/23/verra-boss-steps-down-after-criticism-of-its-carbon-credits/ [3] IPCC, ‘Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the 5th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change Synthesis Report’, 2014 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ [4] Linquist et al., ‘Fertilizer management practices and greenhouse gas emissions from rice systems: A quantitative review and analysis’, 2012, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378429012002067?via%3Dihub [5] UNFCC, ‘AMS-III.AU. Small-scale methodology. Methane emission reduction by adjusted water management practice in rice cultivation’, https://cdm.unfccc.int/methodologies/DB/D14KAKRJEW4OTHEA4YJICOHM26M6BM [6] Carbon Credits, ‘Agricultural Carbon Credits and Carbon Farming Guide’, 2022, https://carboncredits.com/what-are-carbon-credits-in-agriculture/ and Indigo Ag, https://www.indigoag.com/carbon/for-farmers [7] Verra, ‘Verra Inactivates UNFCCC CDM Rice Cultivation Methodology’, March 2023, https://verra.org/verra-inactivates-unfccc-cdm-rice-cultivation-methodology/ [8] Sue Surkes, ‘Netafim to introduce carbon credits for rice growers using drip irrigation’, The Times of Israel, 2022, https://www.timesofisrael.com/netafim-to-introduce-carbon-credits-for-rice-growers-using-drip-irrigation/ [9] J. Su, C. Hu, X. Yan,Y. Jin, Z. Chen, Q. Guan, Y. Wang, D. Zhong, C. Jansson, F. Wang, A. Schnürer & C. Sun., ‘Expression of barley SUSIBA2 transcription factor yields high-starch low-methane rice’, 2015, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14673 [10] IRRI, ‘USAID highlights Bayer-IRRI DSR collab at COP27’, 2022, https://www.irri.org/news-and-events/news/usaid-highlights-bayer-irri-dsr-collab-cop27
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