The Corporate Agenda Behind Carbon Farming

If you live in Africa and you’ve heard of or experienced a “carbon farming” project, it has likely involved a land grab for a large-scale tree plantation. Across much of the global South, an increasing number of companies are taking over large areas of land to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. This is the case in Niger, where the US-based company African Agriculture Inc recently acquired two 50-year leases over a total of two million hectares to plant pine trees for carbon credits. A similar experience is unfolding in the Republic of Congo, where French energy giant Total is planting 40,000 hectares of acacia trees for carbon credits, depriving local communities of their farmland for the next 20 years.

But in countries where industrial agriculture dominates, such as the US, Brazil or Australia, “carbon farming” is about tweaking entrenched practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits.