Landscape REDD includes fields, farms, forests and Climate Smart Agriculture. Climate Smart Agriculture generates carbon credits from fossil fuel-dependent agro-business, “climate ready crops,” GMOs, agrofuels, sugar and soybean plantations and other destructive agricultural practices.

According to Doreen Stabinsky, a professor of global environmental politics, “‘Climate Smart Agriculture’ is a feeble attempt to green the image of industrial agriculture – a difficult task given that fertilizer production and use and industrial beef production emit huge quantities of greenhouse gases. Over 100 civil society and farmers organizations from around the world are loudly rejecting a new US initiative, the Global Alliance on Climate-smart Agriculture.”63

According to La Via Campesina, the world’s largest peasant movement, “soil carbon markets could also open the door to offsets for genetically modified crops and large-scale land grabs for biochar.” Biochar is charcoal used as a soil amendment. Like most charcoal, it is made from biomass via pyrolysis. It is promoted by some as an approach to carbon sequestration. However, vast monocultures of fast-growing tree plantations would be needed to provide the necessary raw material if biochar carbon sequestration were to be implemented on a large scale. Peter Reed, an energy lecturer in New Zealand, coined the word biochar in 2005. He reckons that an area of 1.4 billion hectares should be enough. That’s a little more than the total area of arable land in the world! Africa is already suffering from a land grab epidemic – the race to control soils for carbon trading and sequestration could only make this worse.

In May 2009, the Congo Basin Forest Fund announced the first and so far only REDD-related grant for the use of biochar, i.e. fine-grained charcoal added to agricultural soils. The €338,000 grant went towards a project in the Democratic Republic of Congo called “Phasing out Slash-and-Burn farming with Bio-char”. The project was initiated by a Belgian-based ‘social profit organisation’ called Biochar Fund, together with a local partner organisation, ADAPEL. According to the Congo Basin Forest Fund’s (CBFF) website, the project will “replace slash-and-burn farming” because biochar ‘maintains soil fertility and constitutes a stable and easily measurable carbon sink. Bio- char thus enriches the soil and makes it more productive, which lessens the pressure to encroach on forest land. Using crop residues to produce bio-char also generates renewable energy in a low-cost manner, and this reduces local dependency on firewood.’ None of those claims have been borne out by scientific field trials…The CBFF biochar grant was not only a ‘first’ as far as biochar funding is concerned – it is also the only CBFF grant to support a technology or practice claimed to sequester carbon in soils. Carbon credits for soil carbon sequestration are one of the aims pursued by the World Bank in Durban and beyond.

“The voluntary soil carbon market will be another space for financial speculation, and while farmers receive pennies, speculators will make ridiculous profits. This is just another way for polluting industries and countries to evade real reductions in emissions. If we as farmers sign a soil carbon agreement, we lose autonomy and control over our farming systems. It is inseparable from the neoliberal ideology of converting absolutely everything (land, air, biodiversity, culture, genes, carbon, etc.) into capital, which in turn can be placed in some kind of speculative market.”64

A new form of colonialism

The No REDD in Africa Network has, since its creation, declared categorically that “REDD is not just a false solution to climate change but is emerging as a new form of colonialism, economic subjugation, impoverishment and land grabs so massive that they may constitute a Continent Grab.”65 Many social movements, academics and analysts agree.

In the “NO REDD+! in RIO+20 – A Declaration to Decolonize the Earth and the Sky,” the Global Alliance against REDD+ did not mince words:

“After more than 500 years of resistance, we, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, peasant farmers, fisherfolk and civil society are not fooled by the so-called Green Economy and REDD+ because we know colonialism when we see it. Regardless of its cynical disguises and shameful lies, colonialism always results in the rape and pillaging of Mother Earth, and the slavery, death, destruction and genocide of her peoples.”66

Kathleen McAfee, author of “The Contradictory Logic of Global Ecosystem Services Markets,” concurs that market-based conservation efforts will repeat the historic pattern of colonialist pillaging by extracting wealth from the rural Global South and concentrating it in Northern financial hubs. “Application in international conservation policy of the market model, in which profit incentives depend upon differential opportunity costs, will entail a net upward redistribution of wealth from poorer to wealthier classes and from rural regions to distant centers of capital accumulation, mainly in the global Insights about capital accumulation from nature and carbon sequestration in Africa can be garnered from Sarah Bracking’s, “How do Investors Value Environmental Harm/Care? Private Equity Funds, Development Finance Institutions and the Partial Financialization of Nature-based Industries?”

“Private equity funds, mostly domiciled in secrecy jurisdictions, are dominant investors in the resource-based economies of Africa. Some of the investments that these funds make have been speculative and based on perceived high- value ‘futures’ in biodiversity, bio-fuels and land, carbon capture or strategic minerals. However, private equity funds are also heavily invested in mining, energy and infrastructure, which also generate wealth from the non-human world; ‘old’ markets alongside the ‘new’ markets for discovered nature-based commodities…[T]hese calculative devices assist in legitimizing private equity funds as institutional leaders in pre-existing power structures which exploit natural resources in Africa for the benefit of money-holders. These propositions roughly correspond to the technical, empirical and theoretical dimensions of a socio-technical arrangement applying to nature-based accumulation, which, overall, performs a political process of financialization.”68