Growing carbon is not like growing watermelons: the seductive trap of carbon farming and digital tech

(To read the transcript go to: https://www.etcgroup.org/tags/podcast)

Tune into the next episode in our latest podcast mini-series, Who Will Control the Food System, where we uncover just who's pulling the strings of industrial agriculture, dissect the latest corporate strategies, and take inspiration from the peoples and movements fighting back.

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In this fourth episode, Zahra Moloo talks to Camila Moreno, an independent researcher who works with social movements in Brazil and across Latin America on the social and environmental dimensions of biotechnology and agribusiness expansion.

Camila presents Brazil as a huge agribusiness hub, well established as the centre of the “United Republic of Soybeans”, an expression she borrows from a Syngenta ad that references the whole southern cone of the Americas.

In this podcast, she explains how the “war against climate change” is being manipulated by the financial sector and agribusiness to impose digitalization on Brazilian farms, big and small alike, at an even faster pace than in the US. Carbon is at the centre of this “new climate economy”, and it is digitalisation that is supposedly enabling invisible, intangible carbon to be measured and thereby transformed into a commodity that can be bought and traded.

This has been coupled with strong new corporate narratives about ‘regenerative agriculture’ and environmental markets 'resetting' nature. These so-called 'environmental services' are now established on global markets: carbon credits, biodiversity credits, water credits can all be bought and sold...

This new trend is changing the very identity of farmers. Where they might have grown watermelon, some are now farming carbon. Farmers struggling to compete with giant corporate farms and supermarkets are being lured into carbon farming with the promise of a new stream of income combined with the chance of being part of a cool, ‘high tech’ economy, with sensors and apps. This is an image which is being heavily promoted by private companies, governments and even international institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Even popular TV soap operas in Brazil are promoting the seductive power of drones in rural areas.

But far from the spotlight, we can see that carbon farming comes with many pitfalls and risks which need to be considered, including the involuntary integration of family farms into the Industrial Food Chain, the loss of farmers’ autonomy, new surveillance mechanisms and new reasons for land grabbing.

Listen in as we explore these questions!

To find out more about the digitalization of food and agriculture you can also watch our animation “Big Brother is Coming to the Farm: the Digital Takeover of Food” (available here in Bahasa Indonesia, English, French, Italian, Spanish and Swahili – and with versions in Arabic, Bisaya, Filipino, Hindi and Portuguese on the way).

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ETC Group podcastsBy ETC GroupOct 18, 2021