Offsetting the global supply chain and energy matrix

The takeover, commodification and privatization of nature by financial markets are known as the “financialization of nature.”105 According to Gerald Epstein “Financialisation means the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies.”106 Larry Lohmann explains financialization107 as “super-commodification.” “The drivers of the financialization of carbon and biodiversity assets [including REDD] are essentially the same as the drivers of financialization of any income-generating activity. The difference is that elsewhere it is fully- edged commodities or well-established “fictitious commodities” such as land and labor that are being financialized, whereas carbon and biodiversity commodities have been created during the current era of financialization.”

In the case of REDD, financialization includes the financial speculation on the hypothetical future behavior of stock generated from trading air.

“In general, it takes commodities that have been created through commensuration procedures and puts them through a further round of commensuration, putting them in the same pot with other commodities according to rates of return established in finance. They are further privatized, alienated, individuated, made abstract, revalued, displaced or liquefied in ways that allow them to earn quick rents more easily or serve as collateral for other things. From being entities whose value is realized when they face each other as commodities, they become entities whose value is realized when they confront each other as claims to the future value which supposedly will be produced in future activity and realized in future exchange.”108

However, REDD goes beyond the financialization of air, forests and land and water and permits to pollute. As the New York Declaration on Forests announces, now REDD is moving towards “phasing out deforestation” and offsetting the entire global commodities supply chain. 109 REDD is not just a financialized commodity in and of itself but a financialized commodity ON TOP of the process of producing all commodities. Furthermore, REDD not only allows for the financialization of offsets, but also for the financialization of the extraction, infrastructure and production of the energy from fossil fuels – the entire energy matrix – as well as the production of the components and manufacture of global commodities and chains, including third party suppliers. With REDD, financialization goes berserk. But unfortunately this is not just some carbon trader’s fantasy; this is emerging international climate policy which is headed towards worldwide implementation. So the question is: How much of Africa does the UN, the US, Wall Street, Big Oil et al hope to grab?

Economic Subjugation and Impoverishment

Capital accumulation, financialization and financial speculation based on nature necessarily bring more economic subjugation. Our colleagues from Timberwatch are characteristically lucid in this regard: “If REDD-style schemes are allowed to be imposed on African forestland, fields and grasslands, it could mean the economic subjugation of the entire continent…REDD and CDM schemes will probably be no more than a form of re-colonisation, and the final drive to commodify the remaining spaces of Africa left in indigenous hands after the first round of formal colonialism.”110

REDD will not benefit the poor and will result in greater impoverishment and misery. Even the REDD Policy Brief prepared by the Poverty Environment Partnership (PEP), whose member agencies include UNEP, UNDP and IUCN, is blunt in this regard. “REDD systems could present new risks for the poor” and “the poor may ultimately end up worse off.” According to PEP, REDD could also result in “the concentration of power by elites.”111

Kathleen McAfee agrees that REDD will be disastrous for the poor:

Commodification and transnational trading of ecosystem services is the most ambitious iteration yet of the strategy of ‘selling nature to save it’. The World Bank and UN agencies contend that global carbon markets can slow climate change while generating resources for development. Consonant with ‘inclusionary’ versions of neoliberal development policy, advocates assert that international payment for ecosystem services (PES) projects, financed by carbon-offset sales and biodiversity banking, can benefit the poor. However, the World Bank also warns that a focus on poverty reduction can undermine efficiency in conservation spending. The experience of ten years of PES illustrates how, in practice, market-efficiency criteria clash directly with poverty-reduction priorities. Nevertheless, the premises of market-based PES are being extrapolated as a model for global REDD programmes financed by carbon-offset trading…[T]he contradiction between development and conservation observed in PES is inevitable in projects framed by the asocial logic of neoclassical economics.112

REDD also compounds the colonialism of foreign debt. REDD-type Debt for Nature Swaps may be negotiated in Africa as has already occurred in Latin America and Asia.”[A] community forest could be included in debt-for-nature swaps as part of the payment of the foreign debt of the state. In this regard, the United States recently announced that it would subtract US$21 million from the foreign debt of Brazil in exchange for initiatives to protect the forests of the Atlantic Mata in Brazil. Such forest protection could result in REDD-type projects in Brazil.”113 The following summary on a REDD-type “debt-to-aid” deal between the United States and the Philippines is worth reviewing since similar deals will probably be brokered in Africa. The summary also shows how such territorial expropriation for REDD is framed as the United States’ generous “help,” forest “conservation” and, of course, saving the climate.

Much remains to be done to have a complete panorama of REDD in Africa and the state of play is constantly changing. REDD’s scope has expanded from forests and plantations to include genetically modified (GMO) trees, soils and agriculture. With names like Climate Smart Agriculture, Landscape REDD, Blue Carbon, and Wet Carbon, REDD now covers almost all land and water ecosystems – almost all of Mother Earth’s skin, according to the NO REDD+! in RIO+20 – A Declaration to Decolonize the Earth and the Sky of the Global Alliance against REDD.115 “Ultimately, REDD may try to include and expropriate the entire surface of the Earth including most of the forests, soils, fields, grasslands, deserts, wetlands, mangroves, marine algae and oceans to use them as sponges for industrialized countries’ pollution. REDD is also the pillar of the Green Economy. Executive Secretary to the UNFCCC, Christiana Figueres, told delegates gathered at Forest Day on 4 December 2011, that “The governments of the world are writing a global business plan for the planet, […] and REDD is its spiritual core.” 116 REDD turns the sources of life on Earth into carbon garbage dumps.117 It turns the planet’s wombs into tombs. But we are not going to let this happen! Fortunately, resistance is afoot.