Page 61 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 22

Food Health
Food Health

Farmer looking at
erosion in field. Photo:
populationeducation.org

FROM LAND GRAB TO SOIL GRAB

the new business of carbon farming

by GRAIN | 24 Feb 2022

• The world’s largest agrochemical the re-localization of food systems can governments have sidelined such
companies want to use carbon credit we effectively build carbon back into alternatives. Small farmers with the
programmes as a smokescreen for the the soils and cut emissions in the food knowledge, practices and seeds to
emissions of big oil, food and tech system. maintain healthy soils have been
corporations. pushed off of their lands and
• Faulty carbon sequestration schemes ndustrial agriculture is much criminalized. Researchers exploring
reinforce a model of industrial like a sprawling mine. To get ways to reduce fertilizers by build-
agriculture and food that erodes soils big yields, lands are mined of ing up plant root systems or soil
and is responsible for over a third of Inutrients and then increasing biodiversity have been marginalized,
global greenhouse gas emissions. amounts of chemical fertilizers are underfunded and shut down. Mean-
• Farmer organisations and civil society added to make up for the loss. The while, millions of hectares of fertile
groups in several countries are strug- chemical fertilizers themselves are forests, savannahs and peasant farm-
gling to stop governments from passing produced by mining minerals and lands and pastures have been cleared
legislation that would make these extracting fossil fuels elsewhere. to make way for sterile plantations
corporate carbon farming schemes core growing only a few chemically-de-
parts of national emission reduction There are ways to farm without pendent varieties of commodity
plans. depleting soils, but, over the years, crops.
• Only through a vast programme of agribusiness corporations and
agroecology, land redistribution and

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