Climate-smart corporate farming. What’s not to like?
Date: 23 September 2014
Today, governments and businesses will gather in New York to launch a new climate initiative; The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA). But look a little deeper into GACSA’s strategy and who’s signed up to it, and things look a little less smart.
Today, governments and businesses will gather in New York as part of the UN’s Climate Summit to launch a new initiative: The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA). Agriculture is both a driver and a victim of climate change. Industrial farming is responsible for up to 30 per cent of total global emissions. Unmitigated climate change would have devastating effects on crop productivity, worldwide. Yields from rain-fed agriculture in Southern Africa could be halved between 2000 and 2020.
You may, therefore, be pleased to hear that GACSA, initiated by the UN and the World Bank, claims it will aim to help the global farming sector adapt to climate change, increase yields and cut emissions. But look a little deeper into GACSA’s strategy and who’s signed up to it, and things look a little less smart. The governments and global corporations signed up to the alliance are hoping that a series of false solutions will let industrial farming off the hook and continue their control of the global food system unimpeded.;
Take Yara for example, the world’s biggest chemical fertiliser company. It’s a leading force in the worldwide expansion of industrial agriculture. Yara makes around £9bn a year by promoting expensive chemical inputs that require an emissions-intensive production and degrade soils. Yet Yara claims it promotes ‘climate smart’ farming by increasing productivity of farming land, thereby, it claims, reducing the need for deforestation. Other corporate cheerleaders for GACSA include McDonalds, Walmart and GM seed company Syngenta.
The world over, small-scale farmers are developing ways of feeding communities that work with rather than against nature. This is called agroecology. It helps ensure the long term health of soils, ecosystems and the climate by growing food at a small scale, maintaining crops diversity and avoiding chemical and fossil fuel inputs. It’s not only better for the climate; it helps communities keep control of their own food systems without relying on corporations for inputs. Yet GACSA does more to promote business as usual than agroecology.
The proposed framework for GACSA contains no criteria for what can be considered ‘climate-smart agriculture’. So farming that increases emissions, deforestation and the use of chemical fertilisers can all claim they are good for the planet. The UN and World Bank want ‘climate-smart’ farming to be funded by carbon trading. This means that corporations in any sector can supposedly ‘offset’ their climate impact by paying others to reduce their emissions and do less damage. This could put a high price on ‘carbon sinks’ like forests and therefore encourage land grabs. Carbon trading has so far failed to contain, let alone reduce, emissions worldwide. GACSA could therefore provide large corporations with dire social impacts like Yara and McDonalds to green wash their image with the ‘climate-smart’ label and avoid much-needed government regulation.
WDM and campaigners around the world are calling on those at the New York Climate Summit to drop the Climate-Smart initiative. To transform agriculture’s impact on the climate, the power and impact of corporations needs to be challenged. Instead of backing green wash, governments must help communities claim control over their own food systems to make them work for people and the planet.
Top photo: One of the corporate cheerleaders for this new ‘climate smart’ initiative. Photo credit: _skynet