2021-06-13 _F2A5189aaa
Washington is poised to destroy our food system further under the guise of “climate-smart farming” [aka "according to what food oligarchs' want]
Biden is allowing Corporate Ag destroy our food system further:
“USDA: Reject Ag Offset Schemes
Dear Secretary Vilsack:
We have deep concerns with proposals to expand the use of climate-smart farming practices. While it is important to address the climate crisis, we have significant concerns with USDA’s proposed approach to the climate crisis, which amounts to little more than a carbon offset scam. By creating a carbon bank through the Commodity Credit Corporation and driving new markets for ad-hoc production practices and agricultural waste, USDA will undermine efforts to ensure sustainable farming practices and healthy affordable food for consumers. Worse yet, these programs will prop up large industrial agriculture operations and factory farming, which harm public health and Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and white rural communities, and move us toward a system of carbon offsets that will delay the urgent need to transition off of fossil fuels.
We need real solutions to our unsustainable corporate agricultural systems.
Rather than funding individual practices in a vacuum, incentives should promote widespread shifts to organic, regenerative, and agroecological farming systems. For example, simply encouraging farmers to practice no-till agriculture, which is dependent upon fossil-fuel derived herbicides like glyphosate, will not meaningfully reduce emissions or build healthy, resilient soil. Furthermore, USDA should pursue practices that phase out factory farming, which is a major source of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, along with a major source of harmful air and water pollution.
Agricultural offsets are an ineffective policy for addressing the climate crisis.
The contemplated carbon offset schemes allow utilities, fossil fuel companies and other polluters to continue releasing greenhouse gases, instead of actually reducing and eliminating their emissions. In addition, these schemes threaten to actually increase emissions, because fossil fuel based carbon extracted from where it has been sequestered underground for millions of years, safely trapped, cannot be “offset” by temporary actions in agriculture.
Methods for measuring soil carbon sequestration remain underdeveloped, inconsistent, and influenced by specific climates and geographies.1 Considering the inherent uncertainties measuring these practices, framing offsets as “permanent” and “quantifiable,” perpetuates a myth that agriculture can sequester fossil carbon quickly and indefinitely.
Carbon offset programs will drive further consolidation of our food system
Market-based carbon credit programs give additional leverage to already powerful corporations, including agribusinesses, that have long squeezed farm income and drained rural economies.2 Companies may continue to capture the majority of profits and valuable on-farm data at the expense of farmers.
Carbon credit programs will likely be most feasible for larger operations, potentially leaving out smaller farms and farmers of color — including Black and Indigenous farmers and Tribal Nations — who are already underserved by USDA programs and Commodity Credit Corporation payments. Furthermore, benefits of carbon payments would not extend to organic and other operations that have already invested in regenerative and/or agroecological practices.
Carbon credit programs and factory farm gas pollute environmental justice Communities
Factory Farms are cashing in on offset scams by selling carbon credits into existing offset programs for factory farm gas, or methane they produce in manure digesters. Big Oil & Gas markets this methane as “Renewable Natural Gas,” touting it as a low or no carbon solution to the climate crisis. But burning factory farm gas and fossil fuels does not reflect the clean energy economy that America, especially rural and communities of color, need to stabilize our climate. Constructing pipelines through rural communities, expanding industrial dairy and hog operations, and increasing air and water pollution leads us further away from the future our communities deserve. This approach wrongly supposes that methane emissions from factory farms are a foregone conclusion, as well as ignoring the litany of co-pollutants from factory farms that are poisoning the air and water of nearby Black, Latino, Indigenous, Asian and white rural communities.
Offset programs are also increasing pollution in other sectors that purchase offsets as a way to justify continuing emissions. US states with carbon credit programs saw emissions of CO2 and PM 2.5 increase in environmental justice communities, while emissions went down in more affluent communities.3 This is because industrial polluters and power plants are disproportionately located in environmental justice communities,
1 U.S. Global Change Research Program. “Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report.” 2018 at 249 to 252.
2 Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). “Why carbon markets won’t work for agriculture.” January 2020
at 2.
3 FWW. “Cap and Trade Hurts Environmental Justice.” December 2019 at 2.
simply allowing them to trade credits without taking steps to reduce and eliminate
emissions.
4 Building Back Better in agriculture builds healthier food systems and rural Communities
USDA has necessary tools to build soil health, protect water quality, and avoid greenhouse gas emissions while boosting farm income. Instead of continuing the legacy of pollution through carbon markets and factory farm gas, we encourage policies that eliminate pollution at the source and support local food economies, better living wages for farmers and farmworkers, and pathways for sustainable practices of food and energy production.
USDA needs to transition away from factory farming and Big Ag by implementing conservation programs, and supporting farms in adopting regenerative practices that enhance soil health, protect biodiversity, and help make our food system more resilient to the climate crisis -- all without the use of counter-productive carbon pricing systems including offsets and banking. Black, Indigenous, Tribal, and family farmers and ranchers need structural reforms that ensure fair markets and prices, and infrastructure that supports transitions to and sustainable continuance of regenerative farming. Ecologically regenerative farming should be incentivized in addition to, and not instead of, carbon reductions in the energy and transportation sectors.
Sincerely,
Original Signatories
[ see pdf ]
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Instead of giving Corporate Agr more power & destructive capacity with Smart Agr, Govt needs to strike down (at all levels of govt) all zoning and all land use restrictions on small scale agriculture, including residential
but they'd prefer we starve over crossing corporate and factory agiculture
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“climate-smart farming” is being co-opted by Corporate Agr
Biden has privatized policy making and funding into the hands of those agricultural oligarchs the policies and funding applies to – regulatory takeover achieved by Big Ag!
Again, privatization of government assistance to fight big agricultures contribution to climate collapse is flawed:
“Climate-incentivizing policies a contention point in farm bill”
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Wednesday March 22, 2023 on WORT FM 89.9
Wednesday 8 O'Clock Buzz
Mar 22, 2023 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM Talk
With Jan Miyasaki
“Interview Jim Walsh, Policy Director, Food and Water Watch: "60+ groups form Alliance against Faulty Offsets, dirty energy”
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“60+ Groups Form Alliance Against Faulty Offsets, Dirty Energy in Farm Bill
March 16, 2023
Carbon markets, offsets, factory farm gas threaten climate action under the guise of “climate smart agriculture””
“Today, leading food, farming, Indigenous, faith and climate advocacy groups announced the public launch of the Alliance Against Farm Bill Offsets. The Alliance, convened by Food & Water Watch, was formed in response to a growing trend of promoting flawed climate policies under the guise of “climate smart agriculture.” In the last six months alone, while most policies are in gridlock, Congress has passed at least three pieces of legislation that promote carbon offsets and dirty energy, propping up corporate Ag interests and factory farming.
The Alliance is backed by over 60 organizations including Climate Critical, Family Farm Defenders, Friends of the Earth, Indigenous Environmental Network, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, National Family Farm Coalition, and 350 Seattle.
Top Alliance Farm Bill priorities include:
No carbon markets: Opposition to any Farm Bill additions that would further the development of voluntary or compliance-based carbon markets, including programs, regulations, initiatives, funding, or otherwise. These markets have a decades-long history of failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while allowing polluters to keep polluting and harming low-wealth and Indigenous, Black and Brown communities.
No carbon offsets: Prohibition of offsets of any kind, including but not limited to soil offsets, forest offsets, and methane offsets, which are incompatible with sustainable agriculture and may drive further consolidation of farms and agribusinesses.
No dirty energy: Stop public funding for factory farm gas digesters, fossil fuel based fertilizers, and other dirty energy projects that are perpetuating bioenergy with carbon capture scams. These perpetuate air and water pollution, massive pipelines and harm to rural economies.
Real investments in sustainable agriculture: Invest in and improve existing conservation programs to help transition farmers to more ecologically-based agricultural practices and systems that incorporate Traditional Indigenous Knowledge, support the health of rural and urban communities, and end massive consolidation in our food system.
The alliance will work to educate Congress about these priorities through Congressional briefings, meetings with offices and mobilization of communities in support of a Farm Bill without offsets and dirty energy.
“Flawed policies promoted under the guise of ‘climate smart agriculture’ threaten to entrench the polluting status quo, and worsen the climate crisis” said Food & Water Watch Policy Director Jim Walsh. “The wishful thinking behind carbon markets and offsets is fanciful at best. Real climate action in the Farm Bill means breaking up factory farms, decoupling conservation programs from the private sector to directly serve the public good, and putting a stop to the Big Ag monopolies trampling our climate for private gain.”
“Farmers and ranchers are already doing a lot of heavy lifting to cool the planet through existing agroecological practices and rotational grazing – and they should get direct support for this hard work through existing Farm Bill efforts such as the Conservation Reserve Program,” noted John E. Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders. “Forcing farmers to sign up with dubious corporate intermediaries to obtain carbon offset credits is just another false solution to the climate crisis that should be opposed in the 2023 Farm Bill debate.”
“Carbon offsets are a poison pill for the planet, farmers, and communities. Agricultural carbon markets will conceal polluters’ real environmental impact; will increase farmland speculation and consolidation; and will continue poisoning fenceline communities,” stressed Antonio Tovar, senior policy associate at the National Family Farm Coalition. “Carbon markets ignore the environmental benefits that a system based on agroecology, economic parity, and social equity creates.”
“Carbon trading and offset programs have targeted forest-dependent Indigenous Peoples for decades and now the carbon trading companies will begin to target farmers, ranchers, and communities from coastal and marine ecosystems,” said Tom BK Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN). “Research shows that carbon offsets are a scam that do nothing to reduce pollution or support Indigenous Tribal Nations and communities. Rather, they allow the fossil fuel industries and other private sector actors to use Tribal forest, natural resources and soils for carbon offsets so polluters can pollute more and make billions of dollars privatizing nature. Indigenous Tribes, farmers, ranchers and communities must be warned that the carbon cowboys are coming.”
“Carbon offset markets are fatally flawed. The scientific consensus does not support them. They are riddled with fraud. The economics don’t work for anyone, least of all farmers and landowners. The urgency of the climate crisis demands that we put this failed experiment aside, and focus on what we know can benefit farmers and the planet. The next Farm Bill must shift public spending away from more polluting farming systems and toward more climate-resilient systems based on agroecology and regenerative agriculture,” said Ben Lilliston, Director of Climate Strategies at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
“This Farm Bill represents the greatest opportunity in a generation to position American agriculture as a solution to the climate crisis,” said Jason Davidson, Senior Food and Agriculture Campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “But we cannot do this through carbon markets and offsets underpinned by decades of failure, or through more handouts that further entrench Big Ag’s stranglehold on our food system. We need Congress to pursue strategies that support farmers in building a truly regenerative, resilient and equitable food system.”
Read the full Alliance policy platform here. https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Alliance-Against-Farm-Bill-Offsets_-Principles.pdf
Contact: Phoebe Galt, Food & Water Watch, 207-400-1275, pgalt@fwwatch.org”
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