Climate and agricultural policies that aim to boost carbon markets will fail to curb emissions from planet-warming while allowing powerful agribusinesses to greenwash their polluting operations and tighten their control over the food system.
That’s according to Agricultural Carbon Markets, Payments, and Data: Big Ag’s Latest Power Grab, a report released Wednesday by Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group, and the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank .
While farmers could play a key role in curbing the climate crisis by adopting agroecological practices capable of sequestering more carbon in the soil, the report warns that US lawmakers from both major parties are taking a “market-based” approach — focused on the buying and selling of so-called “carbon offset” credits generated by minor changes to industrial monoculture production — that will likely tighten Big Ag’s chemical-intensive stranglehold on the food system and disenfranchise smallholder farmers, all while simultaneously failing to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
“Carbon markets have become a top strategy for agriculture and climate, despite a history of fraud, failure to reduce emissions and greenwashing by companies,” said report co-author Jason Davidson, Senior Food and Agriculture Campaigner at Friends of the Earth, in a statement. “Such corporate plans will increase the power of the largest agribusinesses, share data from private farms, and fail to address the climate crisis.”
“Instead of another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing climate best practices.”
As the report explains: “The idea starts with providing credit to farmers who engage in certain practices, such as other companies, usually large corporations. These companies, in turn, use their purchases of such credit to justify claims of environmental responsibility.”
Although these companies “may still be emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, they claim to have ‘offset’ those emissions by paying others to pollute less or actively sequester carbon, often to the point of which they claim they now have a ‘net zero climate impact’, the report said.
A recent research found that 94% of rainforest carbon offsets sold by a leading market player yielded no measurable climate benefits, further casting doubt on the notions of “net-zero” and “carbon neutrality” that companies promote around them maintain or expand their own polluting activities while presenting themselves as green.
Despite mounting evidence of the ineffectiveness or counter-productiveness of “net-zero” commitments, a fifth of the world’s largest companies have made such commitments, meaning demand for carbon offsets is growing, the report notes. In the meantime, the federal government is providing important support for such programs, including indirectly through the Inflation Reduction Act and directly through two bills embedded in the Fiscal Year 2023 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.
The first, the Growing Climate Solutions Act, directs the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to “list private carbon market intermediaries on its website and comprehensively list protocols used to measure carbon sequestration,” the report explains. The SUSTAINS Act, meanwhile, threatens to give government legitimacy to “new systems for carbon offsetting in the ground” that “could affect their value in voluntary exchange” and “stoking the fires of a speculative industry that deprives resources of effective mitigation and regulation.” of pollution.” Additionally, through its pilot program, Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, the USDA is poised to offer more than half a billion dollars in grants to several agribusiness giants.
According to the message:
Big agribusinesses use the system to deepen their own monopoly power. Programs run by companies like Cargill, Bayer, Nutrien and Corteva pay farmers to adopt certain farming practices that either depend on the companies’ proprietary technologies or require farmers to use their digital farming platforms.
[…]
Under these private carbon offset programs, agribusiness giants are defining low-carbon agriculture and promoting large-scale, chemical-dependent monoculture farming methods that can harm the environment in the long run and further consolidate their market power. By controlling the same private, unregulated carbon offset markets where they trade on their own account and set their own prices, they also face massive conflicts of interest.
“We cannot trust the companies that got us into this climate crisis to get us out on their terms and timeline,” said report co-author Claire Kelloway, director of the Open Markets Institute’s food program. “Companies are designed to serve their investors, not the public, and these carbon offset programs will do just that, by bringing farmers into their networks, protecting product sales and holding back meaningful regulation.”
A joint statement by Friends of the Earth and the Open Markets Institute detailed three major pitfalls of private soil carbon credit schemes:
- Agricultural carbon markets precede science to market something that cannot be reliably measured. There is no scientific consensus on how long and under what conditions carbon remains in soil. Soil-secured carbon can be released by changing land management practices or by severe weather that cannot store the carbon in a useful timeframe to combat climate change. Without basic market foundations of information sharing and consistent commodities, selling and buying offsets is little more than speculation.
- Carbon sequestration verification programs allow agribusinesses to collect and monetize detailed agronomic data and drive new users to their digital farming platforms. This further incentivizes and promotes their products like Bayer’s Roundup and GM seeds, consolidates corporate market power and destructive chemical-intensive industrial monocultures. However, the use of agrochemicals kills soil organisms that support carbon sequestration.
- Carbon payment programs, especially those of seed and chemical companies, are not designed for smaller and more ecologically regenerative farms. In general, the largest farms benefit most from carbon payments, further marginalizing family farms and driving consolidation. Farmers contract to years, even decades, of more expensive practices that produce credit for big ag with minimal payment guarantees.
“There is no doubt that farmers should be supported in the transition to ecologically regenerative methods,” says the report. “But the evidence shows that using carbon offsets is a counterproductive and unfair approach that lets big polluters off the hook and misses the needs of family farmers.”
Davidson said that “rather than another handout to Big Ag, the Biden administration and Congress must support farmers in pursuing climate best practices.”
As Congress debates the next farm bill, the report’s executive summary urges lawmakers and the USDA to take the following steps:
- Ensure USDA programs do not encourage private carbon payment programs and reject corporate contributions to conservation programs that require farmers to share ownership of carbon credits with corporate donors.
- Invest in existing programs with a proven track record of funding environmental improvements in agriculture, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) and the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP); Direct funds into practices that have been shown to improve on-farm biodiversity, conserve water, improve soil carbon sequestration, reduce use of synthetic inputs, and build farmer resilience in the face of drought and flooding.
- Encourage tree planting as part of the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP).
- Regulate air and water pollution from the largest and most polluting farms, including working with the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] set limits for agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.
- Protect farmer data by ensuring the right to transfer and remove data from digital farming platforms. Ban the use of farmer data collected through carbon payment programs to speculate on futures markets or to target farmers with personalized advertising.
Specifically, a separate report released Wednesday by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that 3 out of 4 farmers who applied for EQIP and CSP funds in 2022 were rejected.
“We have no time or resources to waste on ineffective approaches to addressing the climate crisis, particularly those that greenwash corporate pollution and risk increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” Davidson and Kelloway wrote. “Congress and the USDA must direct the billions of dollars being invested in low-carbon agriculture toward proven and transformative solutions.”
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