Agroforestry in the Amazon

Maria Viera

”The two first years, while we cleared the land, we survived on rat, palm heart, the flour from the babassu  palm and other wild plants,” Maria Viera says when she receives us in her home in the small settlement Nova Esperança, where the road ends and the vast Amazon takes over. 

She is just 57 years but looks older, and that is no wonder when we hear her story. Nine children she has carried, of which six are still alive. She has diabetes, a wound with emerging sepsis and just three teeth in her mouth. But she is full of life, just like her husband Luis. He can’t sit still for a second; he talks incessantly and is excited that we have come all the way from Sweden to visit them and their farm. 

It was twenty years ago that Maria and Luis left their life as poor farm workers in the poverty ridden Northeast and settled here on the fringes of the Amazon, where the government gave them land. Of the twenty four families that settled here, only seventeen are left; the others perished from malaria or other diseases, or they simply gave up. The colonization of Mato Grosso is part of a policy that gives settlers land for free. Maria and Luis got a barrack to live in when they came here.

Brazil is infamous for its high inequality, and in particular the unequal land ownership. Many millions of the rural population have no land; they work as farm labourers. Since the 1990s, they have occupied land in many places. Some of the occupations ended in blood, such as the one in 1996, in Eldorado de Carajas in the state of Pará, where 19 persons died and 40 were wounded. A land reform has always been on the political agenda, but it has been easier for the government to let the landless have land in the Amazon than to make reforms in conflict with the interest of the mighty land-owners. During the presidency of Lula, the colonisation gained momentum and between 2003 and 2008, 519,000 families got land. 

Maria and Luis think their life is good now and their farm is an example of how you can have a decent life with small means and a small ecological footprint. Solar panels produce enough electricity for a few lamps, a TV and a radio, not more. They have their own well water from the mountain, led by gravity into the house; the sewage water goes into the fish pond. Even though there is a gas stove, most of the cooking is done on the wood stove – they get firewood  from their own forest. Today there is a road. Even if that is not passable in the rainy season, it is a great improvement compared to the mule path that was there when they came. 

We are offered a simple but good and nutritious meal of beans, rice, meat and lettuce – all from the farm. It is a typical meal, according to Maria. For breakfast they drink home-grown coffee and bread made from the wheat that they buy.

Luis showing us sweet potatoes from the agroforestry.

Luis proudly shows us the agro-forestry cultivation that covers around a fifth of their hundred hectares. Here they grow coffee, cacao, bananas, papaya, and mango, alongside trees such as teak and eucalyptus. In all, there are 83 different species, an impressive variety. Luis taps a trunk of teak.

“This will give me 1,000 reais (around 500 dollars) and I have four thousands of them. I am a millionaire,” he says with a content smile.

Under the shade of the trees, smaller bushes, herbs and vegetables grow better than in an open field. Luis and Maria also raise various animals and sell calves. But the calves are now fourth in economic importance, taken over by coffee, cocoa and palm heart from the pupunha palm, all crops from the agro-forestry. Luis and Maria farm organically, but they are not certified. They sell their crops locally and there is no special organic market available. 

Agro-forestry can contribute with another possible stream of income. At least one ton of carbon per year can be bound in growing biomass and in the soil as increased organic matter. This gives opportunities for selling so called carbon credits to those that emit carbon dioxide. Consumers can compensate their air travel and companies can compensate their carbon foot print by paying for carbon credits. In this way, they can claim to be carbon neutral. Therefore, Petrobras, the parastatal oil company of Brazil, supports the project in Nova Esperança. It is in their interest to find ways to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from its operations.

The carbon credits could be worth more than 100 dollars per month for the participating farmers, a considerable increase on the average income of around 200 dollars. In this way, it could constitute a strong incentive to plant trees and manage the land in the best way possible. But there are also some snags with this business idea. It is complicated and expensive to measure how much carbon is actually stored in the ground. Therefore much of the money will go to consultants and certification bodies involved in the verification. The income is also very fluctuating. Between 2009 and 2010, the price of carbon credits fell by 90 per cent on the Chicago exchange. While it does create new income opportunities for farmers, it also creates new dependencies. By participation in the carbon market, farmers are obliged to manage their land in a particular way for long periods of time. Critics mean that carbon credits and climate compensation amount to a new form of colonization, albeit with an eco-friendly veil.

“We don’t emphasize the carbon credits but rather the economic and environmental advantages of agro-forestry,” says Paulo Nunes, coordinator of the NGO Poço de Carbono Juruena.

(this is an extract from The Earth We Eat, a book for which we (Gunnar Rundgren and Ann Helen Meyer von Bremen seek a publisher).

Carbon Markets - a corporate Trojan Horse?

Carbon farmers

Both the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, FAO (2003), and the World Bank promote that carbon emission trading should encompass also carbon sequestration (sinks) in soils, i.e. that farmers could get paid for increasing soil organic matter. The carbon sink capacity of the world's agriculture and degraded soils is said to be 50% to 66% of the historic carbon loss from soils or some 42-78 Gt of carbon (FAO 2009). Measures in the farm sector for mitigation of climate change are among the cheapest measure to take, and in many cases, they also lead to other environmental improvements (reduced water pollution). Increased soil organic matter also leads to richer soils; to soils that can keep water and resist erosion longer. A major hurdle is that there are so many farmers and their conditions are very diverse;  it is very hard to determine exactly how much carbon a farmer will capture if he or she does this or that. To measure it on an individual level will be very costly. A new scenario emerges where farmers in developing countries can sell their services as carbon farmers to governments and companies in the developed countries. This could become a business replacement for aid, or a way to compensate developing countries farmers for absurd subsidies to their competitors in developed countries. 

But it also means that a larger part of their activities are integrated into the world economy, in the market economy. It can also be seen as a new frontier of exploitation, where the rich countries will use the land in developing countries as "dumping" ground for their waste, which is what this eventually amounts to. 

I recently wrote a report for UNEP where I had drawn this graph: 

Carbon changes in the soil

download report

It is important to keep in mind that once farmers have got compensation for the carbon stored in their sold through the means of carbon credits, they are forced to maintain practices that keeps the carbon there. One could say that they actually don't own their soil organic matter no more.They don't control how they manage their own soils.

Australia has already a Carbon Rights Act: 

The Carbon Rights Act 2003 establishes a statutory basis for the ownership and protection of carbon rights, in order to facilitate trading. It enables a carbon right to be registered on the land title as a separate interest in that land. The Act provides that a carbon right may be registered with the consent of all parties having an interest in the relevant land.....Owning a carbon right is like owning land. The title guarantees who owns the land (or carbon right). The market will determine what the land (or carbon right) is worth, based on a wide range of factors including how the land is used.

In this way, carbon payments can become a Trojan horse for large scale corporate take over of the land. 

Farmers question what they’ll get out of cap-and-trade

Getting African carbon farmers to market

Pay farmers 'to deposit carbon' says businessman

Potential of Carbon Markets for Small Farmers

Africa’s pollution and land grab threat from UN carbon market
Biofuel demand and CO2 quotas drive violent land grabs in Honduras
Land grabbing in the neocolonial order
Land grabbing, corporate farming to deepen hunger, poverty, and unemployment: Moot

There are similar issues around carbon credits for forests, for instance read: 

Carbon Rights in REDD+

Beyond Carbon: Rights-based Safeguard Principles in Law
Forest carbon rights for poor at risk – study
It is your forest but my carbon

carbon projects drives land grabbing and GMOs?

Carbon credits rarely deliver money to projects and communities on the ground. Out of a total carbon market volume of $144 billion in 2010, only 3,370 million (0.2%) was for project-based transactions, with only a very small proportion of that likely to reach the community level. Most of the money stays in the global North, even though projects themselves are in the South. Those that benefit most from carbon trading are financial speculators such as J.P.Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Merryl Lynch, who buy and sell carbon credits like they do any other internationally tradable commodity.

Says a briefing from the Gaia Foundation. They claim that there private companies will draw all benefits from carbon offsetting projects. I am inclined to agree with them that there are big risks for that, and that ultimately, carbon credits, mitigation banks, payment for environmental services (TEBB) represent a giant leap towards privatization of our common nature resources. I have written about it many times. 

The Polluter Gets Paid Principle

Ecosystems: Invaluable and worthless

I can also recommend a paper by Sian Sullivan:
The environmentality of ‘Earth Incorporated’: on contemporary primitive accumulation and the financialisation of environmental conservation

Having said that, I don't really agree with some other analysis in their briefing. Two other points are that 1) it is very hard to measure the real offsets in soils, 2) GMO crops and land-grabbing are likely to be strong features in carbon offset projects. There is a certain merit in both point, but rather limited in my view. There is no indication that carbon offset farm projects will use more GMOs than food production. And the same land grabbing are explained by increased food prices, meat production, production of export crops and bio fuel. I don't defend land grabbing, but it is essentially a function of inequality and power relations regardless of the purpose for which land will be used. Huge land grabbing has taken place in most parts of the world in stages.  Just look at the Americas, earlier colonial land grabbing and even massive land grabbing of forests some hundred and fifty years ago in my native Sweden - or even the classic enclosures in England some five hundred years ago. With increased pressure on land, we will see more in the future, if local communities power over their resources are not asserted. I do realize that it is very hard to measure actual carbon sequestration in soils, but don't think it is a valid argument against agriculture carbon sequestration projects. It is difficult to measure most effect from farming, because it relies on local eco systems and because it is carried out by half a billion people, each one doing a bit differently. But with that logic you could also not make statements on effects of farming on environment, biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle or almost anything else as they are all site specific and hard to measure.

Gaia contradicts itself somewhat, when calling for "the use of agro-ecological farming systems to minimise agricultural GHG emissions, and to restore soil carbon. These approaches also provide numerous “multi-functionality” benefits for adaptation, ecosystems, human health, equitable access to resources, and long-term food security." This is a clear example on where it is really hard to measure carbon offset, compared to large-scale carbon offset programs. Don't misunderstand me, I support the use of organic and agro-ecological farming, but if you argue about its benefits for carbon sequestration, people will compare those with other farming systems. 

"Agriculture, with its intensive use of fossil fuels, synthetic agro-chemicals, machinery, transport and intensive livestock rearing, is clearly a significant contributor to climate change. But done properly, the right kind of agriculture can also be a major part of the climate solution.", says Gaia. I couldn't agree more.

Carbon prices will not drive innovations

Cap and trade or carbon taxes may be useful to make us save energy but it will not drive the kinds of innovations that are needed according to a new study.

It is commonly argued that a high carbon price will drive innovations. e.g the EU Climate Commissioner said that last year and famed Harvard University professor Michael Porter says "A carbon tax would lead to a rethinking of energy use, drive innovation in the green economy and yield profits for "first movers," 

This conventional wisdom is now contradicted:

A carbon price can be a useful tool to nudge the adoption of mature technologies, but it does little to pull forth disruptive new technology or stimulate the advance of basic knowledge upon which new technology is built."

Says a recent report from the ITIF . The report shows by many examples that innovations of the kind and scale we need to cope with climate change, are beyond what markets can sort out.

In the current energy and climate debate, most advocates argue that putting a price on carbon emissions through either a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade program is the key to spurring breakthrough energy innovation. This conventional wisdom is based on the notion that higher dirty energy prices will provide the right market signals to entrepreneurs, who will then develop breakthrough clean alternatives. But advocates of the price approach provide little to no evidence for this notion, for the simple reason that there is little to no evidence for it. In fact, over the past century, in major innovation after major innovation, the pursuit of research and public support for early-stage technology and markets, and not price signals, have driven breakthrough innovation.

Real break-through innovations originate in research-driven technological development. Markets drives innovations in mature technologies where market barriers apart from price are minimal. Apart from being valuable in developing strategies for climate change, and play down the value of carbon pricing for driving innovation, I think the research is also challenging the frequent claims of how superior markets are to drive innovations. Antibiotics, internet, most progress in aviation and nuclear industries have been results of public funded research, and certainly not by entrepreneurs.

The study does recognize that carbon pricing, whether cap and trade or tax or something else, can encourage saving by consumers and drive technologies oriented to that. Also uptake of existing technologies that are close to being competitive can be speed up by carbon pricing. Critically, the authors note that a carbon price could also be used to generate needed revenue for targeted investments in clean energy innovation.

Other articles on similar topic: the Greens in Australia

Australia should be spending $2.5 billion a year on new low-emissions technologies by 2017, a doubling of current expected expenditure, climate change adviser Ross Garnaut says.  Prof Garnaut argues there's a case for "exceptionally large fiscal support for firms that invest in research, development and commercialisation of new low-emissions technologies" over the next decade. He says pricing carbon will drive innovation but "on its own it will not increase it by enough". reports thewest in Australia

Putting a price on carbon emissions will have limited environmental benefits and will not drive the level of technical innovation required to tackle climate change.That was the message for delegates at the close of the Tyndall Centre's inaugural conference on financing green technology earlier this week as Dr Jonathan "Jack" Frost of Johnson Matthey Fuel Cells argued that, regardless of more recent difficulties with emission trading schemes, carbon pricing initiatives had a history of failing to deliver environmental benefits.writes Businessgreen.

A recent report about the EU carbon trading scheme confirms that the scheme is not sufficient to drive innovations.

But what of complimentary instruments such as performance or regulatory standards and carbon finance mechanisms which aim to create economic incentives? These instruments, while they have been shown to be effective at producing favorable environmental outcomes, do not necessarily drive innovation in the marketplace. For example, as in the prior cases of sulphur dioxide emissions and leaded gasoline, emitters were simply able to invest in “off-the-shelf” technologies to deal with the externalities. It is important to remember that regulatory certainty around these environmental pollutants did not result in new innovation because the technological alternatives were already in existence. Furthermore, the cost of removing sulfur or lead as an environmental practice was virtually invisible to consumers; a move that seems unlikely in the case of CO2 and manmade greenhouse gas. For greenhouse gas emissions, which can conceptually be treated as an environmental pollutant, the required off-the-shelf alternatives (for existing infrastructure) arguably do not yet exist or are not yet cost competitive ! Case in point: it is not yet possible to retrofit a coal burning power plant with a carbon capture and storage unit. writes carboninsights.

Putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions will not be enough to drive the innovation needed to clean up dirty energy systems, according to Bruegel, a think tank based in Brussels, and Harvard economists.Reinhilde Veugelers, a senior research fellow at Bruegel, warned on Monday that a “private green innovation machine has not yet taken off” and that private companies still were not making environmental innovations their core goal.Ms. Veugelers cited figures from the World Intellectual Property Organization showing that just 2.2 percent of all patent applications between 2000 and 2006 were for environmental applications. She said the global electricity sector “was almost absent” in terms of green innovation. Reported The New York Times in 2009.