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One way for capitalists to increase their profit margin and create new forms of rent is to add aggregate value to their products. Gourmet REDD adds layers of additional values to carbon credits and makes them more profitable and marketable because of their fancy, exotic allure to consumers in industrialized countries.
For example, REDD credits from Mozambican oceans and mangroves could be combined with biodiversity offsets and the protection of butterflies, endemic starfish and community marine resource management, including the protection of whale sharks. The key reference material for understanding Gourmet REDD is in the report, Cashing in on Creation: Gourmet REDD privatizes, packages, patents, sells and corrupts all that is Sacred. 72
The Gourmet REDD Recipe looks like this:
REDD
+ Payment for Environmental Services + Biodiversity Offsets + Water Offsets + “Sustainable Development” + Traditional Cultures = Compounded Commodification or Privatization of Air, Life Culture
Gourmet REDD is a combination of REDD and other kinds of offsets. To sugar-coat REDD and greenwash pollution with ploys like Climate Change Chocolate,73 there are norms, standards, third-party verifiers, certification systems,74 “small-scale, cute and cuddly carbon projects,” and “the gourmet niche of the carbon market.”75 Another way to dress up carbon trading76 and make even more money is to combine REDD with exotic forms of supposed compensation for environmental destruction. In these early years of the 21st century, everything is being turned into an environmental service or “offset”. Selling Life to the highest bidder is all the rage.
Cooking up Gourmet REDD in Lake Niassa National Reserve? – WWF, Coca-Cola and USAID
The 4.2 million hectare Lake Niassa National Reserve looks like an excellent example of mega Gourmet REDD with an entire ecosystem in the making. Participants in this project include USAID, the Coca-Cola Company and WWF as well as the Ministries of Tourism, Fisheries, Environment and Defense of Mozambique and the Niassa Provincial Government. Community “rangers” are “cooperating with the Navy to enforce existing laws surrounding illegal fishing, timber cutting, illegal migration, mining and piracy.”77 This makes it sounds like they are getting ready to “police” the Gourmet REDD project.
WWF, whose green mask was recently ripped off in the report, Panda Leaks: The Dark Side of WWF,78 has already conducted “pre-feasibility work for biochar in the proposed Lake Niassa reserve and is exploring the potential for forest carbon in other sites.”79 Biochar requires large quantities of timber from plantations which is then burned and buried as this is supposed to sequester carbon, a claim that has been heavily criticized and de-bunked by various environmental groups. (REDD biochar has also been piloted in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon80 with support from the Congo Basin Forest Fund.81 )
Coca-Cola may be participating in the Lake Niassa REDD proposal given its inte- rest in controlling and privatizing sources of fresh water, as it has done in India.82 In fact, Coca-Cola’s bottled water business could eventually eclipse the success of its teeth-rotting soft drink given the spiraling world water crisis, the global momentum of water privatization, and access to water as a subtext of armed con ict and war.
Coca-Cola is clearly aware that Lake Niassa is the second largest lake in Africa and a key hydric resource for Malawi and Mozambique. The availability of water including the annual rainfall is also a part of Mozambique’s attractiveness as a host for REDD pilot projects for Africa,. Without a doubt, land grabs and water grabs go hand in hand, and Lake Niassa may be a perfect example of just that.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is Mozambique’s largest bilateral donor. USAID supports the Gorongosa National Park and the creation of Lake Niassa Reserve. Through the Northern Mozambique Tourism Project, USAID supports nature-based tourism. USAID has expressed interest in developing innovative carbon projects and public-private partnerships.”83
According to Carbon Plus Capital – Biocarbon Finance,84 “The Ministry of Coordination of Environmental Affairs (MICOA) of the Government of Mozambique is responsible for the development of a national REDD-plus strategy. As part of this strategy, MICOA is working with Carbon-Plus Capital on a pioneering conservation financing mechanism based on aligning the interests of conservation, sustainable development and climate change mitigation with those of private capital. Focused on the country’s unique 4.2 million hectare Niassa National Reserve, the project is being developed as a model of forestry-based carbon management to inform and inspire the evolution of an effective REDD-plus system globally.”85
