Colin Todhunter
Today, in the mainstream story, there is much talk of a’food transition ‘. Huge agribusiness and’humanitarian’structures place themselves as the saviours of mankind due to their much- promoted strategies to ‘feed the world’ with ‘accuracy’ farming’, ‘data-driven’ farming and ‘sustainable’ production.
These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and environmental destruction related to the current food system. The same bodies accountable for spiralling rates of disease due to the toxic food they produce or promote.
In this narrative, there is no space for any mention of the kind of power relations that have actually formed the dominating food system and many of the existing problems.
Tony Weis from the University of Western Ontario provides useful insight:
World farming is marked by severe imbalances that are among the most durable financial traditions of European imperialism. A number of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers in spite of having large shares of their workforce participated in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities.”
He adds that this commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the facility of plantations and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the very same time as they were progressively marginalised.
In the 2018 book The Divide: A Quick Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel explains the procedures associated with Europe’s wealth build-up over a 150-year period of manifest destiny that led to 10s of millions of deaths.
By utilizing other nations’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more useful to then reassign the rural population in your home (by stripping individuals of their productive ways) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by enormous violence (burning villages, damaging homes, taking down crops).
In more current times, neoliberalism has actually even more reinforced the power relations that underpin the system, sealing the control of farming production by global corporations and helped with by the policies of the World Trade Company, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Corporate food transition
The food shift is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability. It imagines a specific future for farming. It is not organic and relatively couple of farmers have a place in it.
Post-1945, business agribusiness, largely backed by the United States state, the Rockefeller Foundation and banks, has been promoting and instituting a chemical-dependent system of commercial farming. Rural neighborhoods, eco-friendly systems, the environment, human health and indigenous systems of food cultivation have been ravaged in the process.
Now, the similarity Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta are working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate farmerless farms driven by cloud and AI technology. A cartel of information owners and exclusive input suppliers are strengthening their grip on the global food system while expanding their industrial model of crop cultivation.
One way they are doing this is by driving the ‘environment emergency situation’ narrative, a contested commentary that has actually been carefully promoted (see the work of investigative reporter Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology and tying this to carbon balancing out and carbon credits.
Numerous business from various sectors are securing big areas of land in the Global South to develop tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can offer on international carbon markets. In the meantime, by supposedly ‘offsetting’ their emissions, they can carry on polluting.
In nations where commercial farming dominates, ‘carbon farming’ involves customizing existing practices to declare that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then offer carbon credits.
This is explained in a current presentation by Devlin Kuyek of the non-profit GRAIN who sets out the business program behind carbon farming.
Among the first significant digital farming platforms is called Climate FieldView, an app owned by Bayer. It gathers information from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, just how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to use, and so on. FieldView is currently being utilized on farms in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe.
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 advise farmers on the execution of simply two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: decreased tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.
Through the app, the business keeps track of these 2 practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the getting involved farmers have actually sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and offer these in carbon markets.
In August 2022, Bayer introduced a brand-new program in the United States called ForGround. Upstream business can use the platform to market and offer discount rates for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. However Bayer’s huge target is the downstream food business which can use the platform to claim emissions decreases in their supply chains.
Places like India are also laying the groundwork for these kinds of platforms. In April 2021, the Indian federal government signed a Memorandum of Comprehending (MoU) with Microsoft, permitting its local partner CropData to utilize a master database of farmers.
Microsoft will ‘assist’ farmers with post-harvest management solutions by developing a collective platform and catching agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather condition data, market need and rates. In turn, this would develop a farmer interface for ‘clever’ agriculture, consisting of post-harvest management and circulation.
CropData will be approved access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will consist of farmers’ individual information– Profile
- of land held– cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local weather and geographical conditions.
- Production information– crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, equipment in possession.
- Financial details– input expenses, average return, credit rating.
The mentioned goal is to utilize digital technology to enhance financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and circulation.
Nevertheless, this initiative also includes supplying information on land holding deeds with the objective of carrying out a land market so that investors can buy up land and integrate it– international equity funds concern farming land as an important property, and international agritech/agribusiness business prefer industrial-scale farms for presenting highly mechanised ‘accuracy’ agriculture.
‘Data-driven agriculture’ mines information to be made use of by the agribusiness/big tech giants who will know more about farmers than farmers learn about themselves. The similarity Bayer and Microsoft will gain increasing control over farmers, dictating precisely how they farm and what inputs they utilize.
And as GRAIN notes, getting more farmers to use decreased tillage or no-till is of huge advantage to Bayer. The sort of lowered tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer needs splashing fields with its RoundUp (harmful glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically crafted (GE) Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.
Bayer also plans to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has actually taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be offered to farmers who are registered in ForGround and the crop will be offered as a biofuel.
GE has always been a solution in requirement of a problem. In addition to its associated money-spinning harmful chemicals, it has actually stopped working to deliver on its promises (see GMO Myths and Truths, published by Open Earth Source) and has sometimes been devastating when rolled out, not least for poor farmers in India.
Whereas traditional breeding and on-farm practices have little or no need for GE innovations, under the guise of ‘environment emergency situation’, the information and agritech giants are commodifying knowledge and making farmers based on their platforms and inputs. The commodification of understanding and engaging farmers to rely on proprietary inputs managed by algorithms will define what farming is and how it is to be performed.
The intro of technology into the sector can benefit farmers. But understanding who owns the technology and how it is being used is vital for understanding underlying inspirations, power dynamics and the quality of food we wind up eating.
Net-zero Ponzi plan
In its short article From land grab to soil grab: the brand-new service of carbon farming, GRAIN says control instead of sequestering carbon is at the heart of the matter. More than half of the soil raw material on the planet’s farming soils has actually currently been lost. Yet, the primary perpetrators behind this soil catastrophe are now modifying themselves as soil saviours.
Under the guise of Green Revolution practices (application of chemicals, artificial fertilisers, high water use, hybrid seeds, extensive mono-cropping, increased mechanisation, etc), what we have seen is an exploitative kind of agriculture which has actually depleted soil of its nutrients. It has likewise led to placing farmers on business seed and chemical treadmills.
Likewise, carbon farming draws farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and huge tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are significant buyers of carbon credits). The companies mean to make their digital platforms one-stop buy carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic recommendations, all provided by the business, which gets the included benefit of control over the information harvested from the taking part farms.
Those best put to gain from these programmes are the equity funds and the rich who have been purchasing up large farmland locations. Monetary managers can now use digital platforms to buy farms in Brazil, sign them up for carbon credits, and run their operations all from their workplaces on Wall Street.
As for the carbon credit and carbon trading market, this appears to be another profitable Ponzi plan from which traders will make a monetary killing.
Reporter Patrick Greenfield states that research into Verra, the world’s prominent carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (₤ 1.6 bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that more than 90% of their jungle balanced out credits– amongst the most commonly utilized by business– are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent real carbon decreases.
The analysis raises questions over the credits purchased by a number of internationally popular business– some of them have identified their items ‘carbon neutral’ or have informed their customers they can fly, buy brand-new clothing or eat certain foods without making the ‘environment crisis’ even worse.
Washington-based Verra runs a variety of leading ecological standards for environment action and sustainable advancement, including its validated carbon requirement (VCS) that has provided more than a billion carbon credits. It authorizes three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest security programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves.
Although Verra challenges the findings, just a handful of Verra’s rain forest tasks showed proof of logging decreases– 94% of the credits had no advantage to the climate.
The risk to forests had been overemphasized by about 400% usually for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge research study.
Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Task, has been researching carbon credits for twenty years, wanting to discover a way to make the system function.
She says that business are using credits to make claims of lowering emissions when the majority of these credits don’t represent emissions decreases at all:
“Rain forest protection credits are the most typical type on the marketplace at the moment. However these problems are not just limited to this credit type. These issues exist with almost every sort of credit.”
Authentic food transition
The ‘food shift includes’ locking farmers further into an exploitative corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market requirements of international corporations, carbon trading Ponzi plans and personal equity funds. Farmers will be decreased to business labourers or profit-extracting representatives who bear all of the risks.
The predatory commercialisation of the countryside is symptomatic of a modern-day colonialist frame of mind that cynically weakens native farming practices and utilizes flawed premises and fear mongering to legitimise the roll-out of innovations and chemicals to allegedly deliver all of us from environment breakdown and Malthusian disaster.
A real food shift would involve transitioning far from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm to a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises regional food security, diverse cropping patterns and nutrition production per acre, water table stability, environment resilience, great soil structure and the ability to manage developing insects and illness pressures.
It would involve localised, democratic food systems and a principle of food sovereignty based upon self-sufficiency, agroecological concepts and regenerative farming (there are various concrete examples of regenerative farming, much of which are explained on the website of Food Tank).
This would likewise include assisting in the right to culturally proper food that is nutritionally dense and free from hazardous chemicals and ensuring regional (communal) ownership and stewardship of common resources, consisting of land, water, soil and seeds.
This is the basis of real food security and genuine environmentalism– based on short-line supply chains that keeps wealth within local communities rather than it being siphoned off by profit-seeking entities half a world away.
Colin Todhunter specialises in advancement, food and agriculture and is a Research Partner of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his “mini e-book”, Food, Dependence and Dispossession: Cultivating Resistance, here.
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