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COP26: The deal of the century for organic farming

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COP 26 was, in my humble opinion, a resounding success.  2021 will go down in history alongside dates like 1066 and 1776 as years when the fate of the world was dramatically changed.

In 2008 I went with Dan Morrell (who traded the first ever carbon offset back in 1989) to the COP14 in Poznan, Poland.  Our mission was to ensure that soil sequestration of carbon was on the negotiating document that went to the next climate summit: COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009.   We succeeded! It was high fives all around. When locking up carbon in soil is rewarded in the race to net zero, farmers have another ‘crop’ that they can sell.  Instead of farming being 1/3 of our annual emissions it can (if it goes organic) stop its own emissions and capture enough carbon to easily outweigh emissions from energy, industry and transportation.  The Copenhagen COP13 was a failure and it wasn’t until the Paris COP 21 in 2015 that the importance of agriculture in saving us from climate disaster was recognised.  Article 6 of the Paris agreement set out the case for using forestry and farming to save the planet. The ‘4 per 1000’ part of that agreement declared that if farmers could increase soil carbon by 4 parts per 1000 that would be enough to offset ALL our other greenhouse gas emissions.  Organic farmers can do better: La Vialla, a 1500-hectare farm in Italy, has been measured by the University of Siena for more than 10 years.  They lock up 7 parts per 1000 on their farm of cereals, vines, pastures and woodland.  Organic farming is the answer to climate change.

People blame capitalism for the mess we’re in.  That’s not fair.  It is socialist policies like biofuel subsidies and subsidised chemical inputs that are a big part of the problem.  Our government subsidises the burning of trees (pelletised and imported from Arkansas and Latvia) at Drax power station in Yorkshire to the tune of £2.1 million a day and then we rant at Brazil for clearing forest in the Amazon.   We endure increased levels of lung disease from burning wood, too - wood smoke is dirtier than coal. The EU Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation requires member states to burn 10% of all motor fuel from renewable sources such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil for biodiesel. Then people moan at the food industry for using palm oil (which replaces deadly hydrogenated fat).  Petrol is blended with ethanol from barley, wheat and sugar beet.  What a colossal waste of land while we lament the plight of the millions who go to bed hungry.  This is socialistic government policy, engineered by agribusiness lobbyists to subsidise industrial farming.  The deluded comparison of ‘renewable’ with ‘sustainable’ is used to cover up this deceit.  If ‘renewable’ fuel was really good for the environment then we’d be investing in whaling. Whale oil is renewable and it doesn’t compete with farmland for food production. But this is the thinking that you get when politicians pretend to be businessmen.

So can capitalism do it any better? There are more than 10 billion hectares of farmland, forest and pasture globally.  If it was all farmed to maximise carbon capture it could sequester at least 7 tonnes per hectare overall, for a total of 70 billion tonnes a year.  That would very quickly reverse the annual increase in greenhouse gas levels, currently running at 20 billion tonnes a year.

What’s in it for capitalism?  Well, somebody has to buy and sell the carbon crop. 70 billion tonnes a year at $50 per tonne is $ 3.5 trillion.  That’s the kind of money that gets Goldman Sachs and Cargill and hedge funds and other wheeler-dealers out of bed each morning.

Getting to net zero will make a lot of other people money: organic farmers, sustainable foresters, regenerative grazers.  In fact, when industrial farmers and intensive dairy and beef farmers have to pay for their emissions, there isn’t likely to be a farmer on the planet who won’t go organic. Organic food will be cheaper than high-carbon industrial food.

The whole carbon offset market has been beset by cases of fraud, cashing in carbon credits more than once and some dodgy calculations of carbon capture.  The Soil Association, the Sustainable Soils Alliance and similar bodies around the world are now agreeing strict protocols to validate carbon capture to ensure that investors and traders are getting what they’ve paid for.

COP 26 has achieved a major result.  With global agreement that ‘net zero’ is a universal target, there is hope for reversing climate change.  Thank you, Great Britain, for pulling off the deal of the century 

 

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Today’s Observer - granddaughter Saba’s writing described as “sensual, witty, audacious, belligerent dangerous brilliance.”
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