Page 63 - Msingi Afrika Magazine Issue 22

Food Health

Nearly all of them are based in areas them to allow for the most critical of €110,000-240,000 (USD 124,483-
where agriculture is dominated by sources of emissions needed for our 271,600) over the first five years![10]
large-scale farms producing a few survival, not to offset the emissions In some cases, the farmer has to pay
commodity crops, such as the US, of corporations like Walt Disney for these costs; in most cases the
Brazil, Australia and France. They and PepsiCo. costs are integrated into the pro-
focus almost entirely on the adop- gramme. But, either way, the high
tion of two simple practices: rota- Another major problem with these costs mean that rigorous verification
tions with cover crops and reduced corporate programmes is the lack is completely out of the question
or no-tillage (no-till), which essen- of permanence. While cuts to fossil when it comes to small farms and
tially involves burning down weeds fuel emissions are real and imme- barely economical for even the
with a broad-spectrum herbicide like diate, there is no guarantee that largest farms.
glyphosate. the carbon sequestered by carbon
credit farming will not be released To bring costs down, corpora-
There are a few exceptions. Yara is back into the atmosphere. Most tions are focussing their efforts
testing a pilot programme in India carbon credit farming programmes on developing remote verification
through its Agora Carbon Alliance, last ten years when carbon needs to systems, where satellite and aero-
and the Dutch agribusiness lender be stored for at least 100 years to plane monitoring, historical soil
Rabobank has a partnership with meaningfully make a difference to records, and models are used to
Microsoft that pays small farmers global warming. Once the pro- estimate the carbon sequestered.
in Asia, Africa and Latin America gramme ends, land can be converted Remote verification, however, can
to plant trees on their lands. Rabo- to a parking lot or ploughed up never be as accurate as soil testing.
bank intends to sign contracts with and doused with chemical fertil- For example, researchers looking
15 million farmers within the next izers without any penalty. Indeed, into carbon credits purchased by
decade. climate change will lead to more Microsoft from a large-scale pasture
weather events, like droughts and farm in Australia where remote
Magical thinking fires, that greatly increase the risks verification was used found that the
of carbon being released from the level of carbon sequestration was
Corporations are pushing ahead soil. To make up for this lack of greatly overestimated. Moreover,
with these carbon credit pro- permanence, carbon credit farming remote verification becomes even
grammes even though there are programmes usually deduct 20-25% less accurate when farmers are not
many well-known problems and from the credits accredited to par- growing large-scale monoculture
limitations. ticipating farmers as a buffer-- but crops using uniform industrial prac-
there is no scientific basis to this fig- tices. It cannot effectively measure
The most glaring problem is that ure. Indeed, one US carbon farming soil carbon changes in complex,
these programmes are all based on company admits it would cost over agroecological farming systems,
offsets. The companies finance their ten times more for credits that are where multiple crops, livestock
programmes by selling credits to based on 100 years of carbon reten- and trees are integrated. In fact,
corporations or governments to off- tion in the soils. No carbon credit even soil testing has its limitations.
set their actual fossil fuel emissions. buyer is willing to pay this much. A recent global survey found that
But it isn’t possible for soils to ab- farming without tillage (no-till) only
sorb enough carbon to significantly Then there is the issue of how to increases the soil organic matter at
offset global fossil fuel emissions. In measure the carbon sequestered. the surface level of the soil, where
a best-case scenario, soils could ab- Annual soil testing and field vis- soil test samples are taken, but when
sorb roughly the amount of carbon its are expensive and, in practice, samples are collected that cover a
that has been historically lost from prohibitive without subsidies or greater depth, there is no significant
industrial agriculture, after which a much higher carbon price. The change in carbon.
there can be no further sequestra- OECD estimates that these costs,
tion. Soil carbon sequestration can combined with financial fees, can An additional problem with cor-
in no way substitute for immediate add up to 85% of the total value of porate carbon farming is the issue
and deep reductions in fossil fuel the carbon credits.[9]The EU’s Life- of “additionality”. To qualify as
emissions.[6]Moreover, since soils CarbonFarming scheme estimates carbon offsets, farmers enrolled in
are one of the only major carbon costs to each farm for validation, carbon farming programmes have
sinks that exist, we should only use verification, and market registration to show that they are sequestering

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