COP28 - Soil Carbon sequestration, Food productivity and Climate Economics

I want to start by quoting a Joni Mitchell song called ‘Woodstock’ which goes:

We are stardust

We are golden

We are billion year old carbon

And we got to get ourselves

back to the garden

Carbon is in almost all of the food we eat.
Carbon is in all plants

1 in every 8 atoms in our bodies is carbon

Getting ourselves ‘back to the garden’ means making sure that carbon is our ally, not our enemy

It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere

Now it is less than 1/10 of one percent

We are converting carbon from 12-15% in healthy organic soils to as little as ½%. 

Atmosphere 95% Carbon dioxide. Now:  .04%

Cyanobacteria were the earliest lifeform that could convert carbon dioxide into carbohydrate, paving the way for microbial life and ultimately, all plants and animals.  Today the total biomass of microbes is over 90 billion tonnes, about the same amount as in plants all animals are 2 billion tonnes C and humans are less than 1/10 of a billion  tonnes of carbon.  It was, as carbon dioxide, once 95% of our atmosphere.

““In my book a pioneer is a man who turned the grass upside down, strung barbed wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land and called it progress””

— Charles M. Russell – ‘the cowboy artist’

We humans, once we started farming, emitted a lot of carbon from the soil, where it does good, to the atmosphere, where it stops our planet reflecting sunlight, trapping it and thus causing global warming

“‘We didn’t know what we were doing because we didn’t know what we were undoing’ ”

— Wendell Berry

Farmers in the US sent billions of tonnes of soil carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  Nobody knew this was happening, but soil fertility eventually ran out.

I was born in Nebraska…near that red X on the map above.  There were over 250 tonnes of soil carbon per hectare when my great grandfather ploughed virgin prairie back in 1885.  By the time I was born, about 60 years later, that 250 tonnes was down to 20 tonnes of carbon per hectare.  The other 90% had disappeared into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.  The  fertility of the soil suffered, but chemical fertilisers came along just in time to keep things going.  The nitrous oxide from those fertilisers made things worse, though, as nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas that has a refractive index 300 times stronger than carbon dioxide.  So nitrogen fertiliser increases the trapping of heat on the planet, too.

A lot of that soil carbon was lost because farming destroyed the soil structure and when it rained heavily in 1927 huge amounts of soil washed down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, wiping out many black farmers who had small farms after slavery ended. 

Mississippi Floods 1927

Most emigrated to Chicago or Detroit.  Many blues songs described this wipeout, including ‘Muddy Waters’ – not the singer, but a song about losing a farm to that tide of mud.

Dust Bowl 1935

A few years later the fractured soils of the Midwest gave way again and started to blow away.

An Englishman, Richard St Barbe Baker, one of the founders of the Soil Association, was asked to set up a tree planting programme that created a line of 220 million trees from the Canadian border to Mexico that stopped further soil loss.

Of course fossil fuels are part of the problem, but agriculture, up till 1980, was responsible for half of all the carbon dioxide increase since 1850.  Fossil fuels passed farming around 1950 and then increased by 5 times. Farming emissions more than doubled, largely thanks to chemicals. Now it’s a total of 37 billion tonnes a year.   

50% of total CO2 increase 1850-1980 is from farming. 100% of total CO2 reduction can come from farming

From 1850-1980:                 Today

Total CO2 from Farming:        160 billion tonnes             10 billion tonnes

Total CO2 from Fossil Fuels:  165 billion tonnes             27 billion tonnes

If we change the way we farm and even keep burning fossil fuels, we could reduce greenhouse gas levels by at least 20 billion tonnes a year and be back to a stable climate in a decade or so.

Mycorrhizae

Mycorrhizae take the carbon that plants make in their leaves as carbohydrate (sugar) and use it to grow the underground population of microbial biomass, the soil microbiome

Mycorrhizae Networking

They form a network that is the soil equivalent of the internet – if a plant needs something the mycorrhizae feed more sugar to the microbes that can help.

Actinomycetes and streptomyces - Nature’s antibiotics

Actinomycetes                                          

Streptomyces

They feed poisonous bacteria that make chemicals that kill plant diseases (and are the source of our medical antibiotics)

Mycorrhizae feed Trichoderma fungi, whose threadlike hyphae strangle root-eating nematodes. It’s hard to imagine fungi killing worms in the soil, but they can.

All these materials are made of carbon and ultimately decompose and become the carbon in the soil from whence they came. Chemical fertilisers reduce mycorrhizae and therefore soil carbon

ANNUAL GLOBAL NITROGEN FIXATION

                              Mtonnes N2 per year

INDUSTRIAL

Industrial (Haber-Bosch)         ~50

Combustion                               ~20

                           TOTAL           ~80

NATURAL

Agricultural land                       ~90

Forest & non-agricultural land   ~50

Lightning                               ~10

                           TOTAL       ~150

Total Industrial and Natural:       230 M tonnes

WE ARE LOSING…

39 FOOTBALL FIELDS A MINUTE (Volkert Engelsman - IFOAM)

12 MILLION HECTARES OF LAND DEGRADED EVERY YEAR

12 million hectares of land degraded every year -      1.8% of available land lost to farming

WE ONLY HAVE 1.5 BILLION HECTARES THAT EQUATES TO ONLY HAVING 125 YEARS OF FARMLAND LEFT.  

This madness has to stop. EVEN IF IT JUST TO GUARANTEE FOOD FOR OUR GRANDCHILDREN, NOT TO MENTION REDUCING ATMOSPHERIC CARBON DIOXIDE

Stop subsidies

Put human health first

Green Revolution had unintended consequences

Genetic Engineering a problem, not a solution

Little time left

Protect our agricultural capital (soil)

Support small farmers and diverse ecosystems

Study and learn from traditional farming

Reward farmers who prevent climate change

The path to sanity was marked out 15 years ago by the 400 scientists on the  International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, the IAASTD.   Its conclusion was that we need to reward farmers who prevent climate change

Eight years ago at COP21 in Paris every nation in the world signed up to an agreement that included Article 6 which said we should reward farmers who prevent climate change

Agriculture must be included in reducing Greenhouse Gas levels.  Sultan Al Jaber, who organised this conference, has said that agriculture will be high on the agenda in COP28 in Abu Dhabi this November and this is why we’re here.

CARBON FARMING EFFICIENCY

Industrial Farm – 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce

               1 calorie of food

Organic Farm – 6 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce         

             1 calorie of food

Farmer with a hoe – 1 calorie of human energy to produce

             20 calories of food

Farmer with a hoe:    120 times more energy-efficient than an organic farmer

                                    240 times more energy-efficient than an industrial farmer

An industrial farm uses 12 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food.

Organic is better, it uses 6 calories of fossil fuels and it increases soil carbon.

In terms of energy efficiency the organic farmer  uses at least half as much energy as an industrial farmer and increases soil carbon into the bargain.

There’s money in it too, trading carbon credits.

When the boys in the City of London and on Wall Street get it, there is hope.  There is money to be made in carbon and they don’t want to miss out

Rodale Institute 30 year trial results

1. Organic uses 45% less energy

2. Average yields match conventional (soybeans/corn)

3. C sequestration 1 MT/ha (3.7 T CO2/ha) per annum

Organic farming sequesters at least 4  tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year.  La Vialla a biodynamic farm in Italy, sequesters 10 tonnes per hectare per year, validated annually by the University of Siena for the last 15 years.

““We could sequester the equivalent of the anthropogenic carbon
gas produced by humanity today. Storing carbon in the soil is
organic matter in the soil, organic matter is fertilizing the soil.”
”

— French Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll

  BY LAW: CO2 price to be € 56/tonne  in 2020 and €100/tonne in 2030. Today’s price  €106 /tonne  now

In response to Le Foll after COP21 in Paris the French Government agreed a target carbon price of €56 per tonne by 2020 and €100 per tonne by 2030.  They were too conservative.  The carbon price today is €80 per tonne

The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will impose a carbon fee on imports into the EU that reflects this € 80 per tonne price.  That will encourage anyone who exports to the EU to reduce carbon and increase sequestration

1997 - ‘Organic’ ‘Wholegrain’ ‘No GMOs’ One year after they were introduced

‘Carbon Neutral’ Future Forests became The Carbon Neutral Company

The world’s first ever carbon neutral food product was Whole Earth Organic Wholegrain Corn Flakes 1996.  We planted trees to offset our carbon footprint, but it turned out we didn’t have to plant many because the organic farmers who grew the organic corn were increasing soil carbon as organic matter every year.  That’s when the penny dropped for me about organic farming and carbon sequestration

What about Wheat and Barley?

Home Grown Cereals Authority

Most emissions come from fertiliser and fertiliser induced field emissions, i.e soil breakdown.  Growing organically can increase soil carbon and reduce emissions. 

Farming carbon means that an organic farmer can sell at the same price as the non-organic farmer and make more money. If farmers have the same income, then organic wheat would be cheaper and an organic loaf of bread would be cheaper than one with glyphosate herbicide residues, now known to cause a multiplicity of human diseases.  Who’s going to insist on paying more for a loaf of bread that is less healthy?

(Ignores antibiotics cost to human health)

With beef the methane emissions every time a cow burps or farts are a big problem, but less when they are on pasture and regenerative grazing.

Vegans and Vegetarians have lower emissions, which could be reversed if they were 100% organic – which many are.

NET ENERGY LOSS:

CORN ETHANOL    -50%

PALM OIL BIODIESEL -8%

There is never any justification for burning food.  1 person dies every 7 minutes of hunger and we burn half of America’s corn crop as ethanol in gasoline and make ethanol from wheat and barley and biodiesel from rapeseed and palm oil.  We scream at food companies for using palm oil instead of heart-destroying hydrogenated fat while they burn subsidised palm oil in their transportation vehicles. Carbon pricing would stop all of that nonsense dead.  Corn ethanol has a higher carbon footprint than fossil fuel gasoline but it’s ‘renewable’ but so what?

Farmers vs Architects

            Vancouver “Woodscraper” - Wooden buildings will be cheaper than concrete and steel

With carbon pricing it will be cheaper to build with wood than with steel or concrete.  Wood that goes into a building sequesters carbon for centuries.  I live in an oak frame house that was built 260 years ago and the carbon in it ain’t going anywhere. A 70 storey ‘woodscraper’ in Osaka Japan sequesters a huge volume of carbon and, as a bonus, is more resilient to earthquakes.

BIOCHAR

What is it?

Charcoal made to be used as a soil improver

What does it do?

•Increases microbiological populations

•High surface area adsorbs mineral nutrients

•Reduces plant disease

•Reduces fertiliser use

•Help soils retain moisture

•Improves soil structure

•Reduces soil greenhouse gas emissions N2O

•Long term carbon sequestration

Sawmill by-products and farm waste like rice husks and corn stalks can be made into biochar.  This is agricultural charcoal and is almost pure carbon. When it’s in soil it helps with drainage, soil aeration, keeps moisture in the soil and supports a resilient and vibrant soil microbiome and minimises loss of soil nutrients. 

Biochar’s tiny pores are where the soil microbiome flourishes undisturbed by nematodes and protozoa and get on with creating perfect conditions for healthy plants grown under organic methods and represent a permanent addition of carbon to the soil that would otherwise be in the atmosphere.  It has been used extensively on the Urban Farm at Expo City and is being applied in other Gulf countries to restore degraded and desertified soils to full fertility.  There is a biochar session on the 10th which I recommend you attend,

Who’s feeding the world?

70% of world’s food grown on farms smaller than 5 hectares - NO SUBSIDIES

30% of the world’s food grown on industrial farms - $350 Billion yearly SUBSIDIES

The subsidies farmers receive are mostly to increase emissions from soil degradation, nitrous oxide emissions, methane emissions and to convert good food into biofuels.  Carbon pricing can totally replace subsidies, restore fertility to our soils, improve the nutritional value of our food, fight hunger and save our lovely planet from global warming

Thank you

Craig Sams

Chairman Carbon Gold Ltd

Director, Soil Association Certification

Expo City Farm Workshop space December 3rd & 4th 2023

Paying the price for carbon dioxide

Would you pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Putting a price on carbon makes people pay for carbon dioxide that they add to the atmosphere (ouch!) and rewards behaviour that reduces atmospheric carbon dioxide (yes, please).

So why not just make people who emit carbon pay for that carbon dioxide and give the same amount of money, the ‘carbon price’, to people who take it out of the atmosphere?

A lot of people make money out of carbon emissions. Oil companies are the main subjects of hatred, but it is the rest of us who actually burn the fossil fuels that keep our homes warm, our cars on the road and planes in the air. The biggest beneficiary is the Government, which gets 53p per litre of petrol, plus another 10p of VAT. It’s like the situation with cigarettes: the Government knew for decades that fags were killing people but the tax per packet was a vitally important source of income, so it was challenging for the powers-that-be to crack down on smoking. Even palm oil, most of which gets mixed with diesel fuel, gets taxed at 53p per litre, but the food industry takes the flak when it’s in a biscuit. Palm oil has replaced hydrogenated fat, which is why heart disease rates are falling.

Organic versus non-organic

Organic farmers increase soil carbon every year: they compost green waste and crop residues; they add manure to the soils instead of chemical fertilizer; they do crop rotations that naturally boost soil nitrogen; they encourage a resilient soil microbiome that also increases soil carbon; they let the land go fallow so natural fertility is rebuilt, which means more soil carbon. An organic farm can capture and store about seven tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare per year.

Non-organic farmers use chemical fertilizers that wipe out the soil micobiome and cause nitrous oxide pollution that is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Intensive animal rearing of cattle and pigs leads to higher methane emissions, another potent greenhouse gas. Herbicides and pesticides are made from fossil fuels and end up as more global warming. Farming is responsible for one third of our annual increase in greenhouse gas levels. Organic farming could cancel out that increase and bring greenhouse gas levels down by a similar amount and we could stop stressing about climate change.

Powerful stuff

So how can we encourage organic farming? How do you encourage anything? Money. Powerful stuff. Farmers love it.

The EU carbon price is just over £90 per tonne of CO2. An organic farmer can capture at least seven tonnes. If they got paid for it, that would be an extra income of £630 per hectare.

A non-organic farmer emits at least two tonnes of CO2 per hectare per year from fertilizer and soil organic matter breakdown. If they had to pay for that (a tax on fertilizers and pesticides) it would cost them at least £180 per hectare.

Every crop is different, but let’s take a look at barley. Let’s say that a barley farmer - whether organic or not - wants to make £1630 per hectare.

An organic farmer gets four tonnes of barley per hectare and can sell it at £250 per tonne; that’s £1000 per hectare. With a CO2 payment of £700 per hectare that adds up to £1700 per hectare gross income. Bingo!

A non-organic farmer gets a higher yield (thanks to chemicals) of six tonnes per hectare. At £250 per tonne that generates £1500 per hectare gross income. But the farmer must pay for two tonnes of CO2 emissions - £180 - so that brings it down to £1320. So to make as much as the organic farmer, the non-organic farmer would have to charge £305 per tonne for barley, an extra £55 per tonne. What brewer will pay a £55 a tonne premium for non-organic barley?

Much barley ends up in beer. If you’re down the pub and a pint of organic bitter is £3.30 and a pint of non-organic is £3.90 would you be prepared to pay more in order to have glyphosate residues in your pint?

Social prescribing comes of age

Social prescribing represents a steep learning curve for many doctors says Craig Sams, but it’s rocketing up the agenda

The setting: a GP surgery. Receptionist: “The doctor will see you now.” Doctor: “Hi, how are you getting on with your low-carb diet? Are you getting the regular exercise we agreed? Can we de-prescribe the Metformin? Let’s do a few tests to see whether you’re ready to come off the drugs. By the way, how are you getting on with your cookery classes? Let’s see if we can finally wave type 2 diabetes goodbye.”

Bad news for the pharmaceutical industry but ‘social prescribing’ is on a roll and there will be a lot more of it in the future. Professor Tony Avery, the NHS National Clinical Prescribing director has said the aim is to bring about a ‘culture change’. He sees social prescribing as transforming modern healthcare, saving money and improving people’s lives. Not only that, but adverse reactions to medication are estimated to cost NHS England over £2 billion a year (not to mention the impact on people’s lives and health). The number of disability claimants doubled from 2021 to 2022. 8.3 million Britons are now on antidepressants.

The College of Medicine’s Beyond Pills Campaign is pushing hard to stop the overprescribing of medicines. The college says that 1.1 billion medicines are prescribed unnecessarily. Its chair Michael Dixon (medical advisor to King Charles), has said ‘Medicine…is no longer affordable or sustainable. A new medical mindset is needed which goes to the heart of true healthcare.”

Back in the 1930s an experiment in social prescribing called the Peckham Experiment engaged with 950 local families to get them on the track to health. They had a gym, a swimming pool, cookery classes, a vegetable garden and workshops about health. Members would have a medical health check once a year and were monitored on a regular basis. The kids did better at school, marriages were more stable and women were empowered (knitting groups helped with this). Social and community activities were organised by the members and helped reduce isolation, loneliness and alienation, illness levels fell dramatically. William Beveridge who drafted the plan for the NHS, was impressed and envisaged similar health centres up and down the country. When the Government put his plan to the British Medical Association in 1948 they were not impressed and the Government was forced to back down and agree that all ‘health services’ would solely be via the GP’s surgery. The Peckham Experiment closed down two years later.

But social prescribing is finally rocketing up the agenda. There are now 15 Pain Cafes in Cornwall helping people manage pain without painkillers, relying instead on exercise and psychological support. Dependency on antidepressants has been shown to cause more harm than good (as anyone who watches Happy Valley already knows). Time to kick the diazepam.

Increasing awareness of the benefits of phytonutrients (the kind of stuff the health food industry has been emphasising for decades) is filtering through to the medical industry and impacting on social prescribing. It was the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus who famously said 500 years ago: “Prevention is better than cure.” With life expectancy rates going backwards, increasing rates of alcohol and drug-related deaths and hospitalisations, along with record levels of obesity, social prescribing is happening just in time. Will people be taking their prescriptions into the health food store? Or will the pharmacies try to capture this newly lucrative business?

The Bromley by Bow Centre in East London is pioneering the ‘new’ approach to health and wellbeing, and it is a model that is being emulated in more and more places.

Yes, the first reaction is ‘I told you so’ - but the fact is that these people are serious. At least so far.

How long will it be before doctors prescribe yoga and pilates classes or give out free prescriptions for herbal medicines and supplements? Will you get free cookery classes on the NHS?

There’s still a long way to go, but at least the direction of travel has finally changed. The Government has just allocated £50 million to support 42 Integrated Care Boards across the country to help doctors to ‘de-prescribe’ their patients and get them on the path to wellness without drugs. There will need to be proper support for the medical profession - they know it makes sense but it’s a steep learning curve for many doctors. They didn’t teach this kind of stuff at medical school.

Food and agriculture centre stage at COP28

Craig Sams journeys from the wealthy ancient Kingdom of Saba to modern-day Dubai as the UAE prepares to host the COP28 climate conference

About 1,500 years ago the descendants of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon lived very well indeed. Their kingdom of Saba was insanely rich because they were the suppliers of frankincense and of spices from the Orient. Caravans of camels plodded northwards to the Mediterranean markets with incense that perfumed churches and synagogues all over Europe and spices that enhanced European cuisine. The camel caravans would stock up with food and water before their journey and the Sabaeans had plenty of that too, they had built a huge dam that captured the water of the monsoon rains and used it all summer long to irrigate the fertile plains around the capital city of Marib. At that time it was the wonder of the ancient world. The Sabaeans and their neighbours all worshipped the sun, a ‘god’ that rose into the heavens every morning.

Solomon convinced Sheba to become Jewish and abandon sun worship and she persuaded her sun-worshipping neighbours to be Jewish too. Then the Sabaeans ditched Judaism and converted to Christianity. Other sun worshippers stuck with being Jewish and the different tribes fell out over whose invisible god was the real invisible god. While they squabbled, nobody performed routine maintenance on the Marib Dam. It collapsed, and suddenly agriculture was impossible. Different tribes headed off in different directions - some to Syria, some to the Gulf. The ones who went to Syria, called Ghassanids, did rather well growing wheat and working with Rome to protect its eastern borders. The ones who went to the Gulf resorted to herding sheep and goats and moving from oasis to oasis. In the 1840s, as part of their aim to conquer Egypt and Suez, the British armed Druze who massacred 10,000 Ghassanid Christians and the survivors fled to northern Lebanon and then many to America (including my grandparents). The Sabaean tribes herding sheep in the Gulf allied with the British and then discovered rich stocks of oil and gas. They built new cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi on the profits and did rather well. Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi used some of that money to rebuild the Marib Dam that had sustained his ancestors and it now irrigates the soils of the area. He also built the Abrahamic Family House where a mosque, a church and a synagogue are all in one grand building, bringing the argumentative religions of the Bible and the Koran under one friendly roof (Israeli tourism to the UAE has boomed in the last two years).

Dubai is hosting COP28 this November, the climate conference that is making halting progress towards getting the world’s climate under control. Dr Al-Jaber, the UAE minister for industry, has stated that food and agriculture will take centre stage in COP28’s carbon reduction programmes. Why not? The Earth’s soils are ten billion hectares. Each hectare, if managed with carbon in mind, can capture and retain about seven tonnes of CO2 every year, whether it’s farmland, pasture or forest. That’s 70 billion tonnes - twice the annual increase in CO2 emissions. Duh!

All we have to do is charge the way we farm, the way we graze animals and the way we manage forests. In other words, go organic, graze ‘regeneratively’ and manage woodland sustainably.

Dubai gets things done. Solar power converts sea water into drinking water. Buildings have car-charging points and low-energy construction to minimise their carbon footprint. Just this year they are spending $40 billion to get to net zero well before 2050. Their Sabaean ancestors goofed big time and had an environmental disaster that ruined their wealthy original homeland. They don’t want to make the same dumb mistakes again.

When we infected the Amazonian tribes with our diseases most of them died and the Amazon rain forest grew up. At the same time, the Plague killed off vast numbers of farmers in Europe and Asia, the trees moved in and sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere. We had the Little Ice Age as a result of those blasted trees taking over. Then we discovered steam engines and coal and oil and that saved us from freezing to death. We are humans. We have the brains and the power. The UAE and Dubai can get us on track at COP28. They learned their lesson the hard way 1,500 years ago. Now they can help us get back into balance.

COP26: The deal of the century for organic farming

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 

Oestrogens, xenoestrogens and the future of humanity

Wildly Deliciously Organic

“Hey Craig - we’re going to Belize to make a movie about the Crystal Skull of the Maya.  Want to come?”  My cousin Anthony Conforti was a film maker and I couldn’t refuse.  It was 1987. We filmed the Maya doing the Deer Dance and a local farmer took me to see a cocoa grove.  I was blown away, I had never seen cocoa trees, with yellow and red pods growing out of the stems of the trees.  That evening I wrote in my diary a plan for a chocolate spread called Whole Earth ‘Maya Maya’ – a Nutella-like concoction of peanuts, cohune oil and date juice.  It didn’t happen, but the dream wouldn’t go away. 

A few years later André Deberdt, a French organic consultant in Togo offered me organic peanuts.  They were delicious but failed our aflatoxin test. I called him up with the bad news.  “They grow organic cacao, too’ he commented.  I had read that 70% chocolate had a tiny glycemic index: 21 compared to 60 of brown rice, so we got a sample made.  It was mind blowing.  My girl friend Jo Fairley fell in love with it and came up with the name ‘Green’ for organic and ‘Black’ for being the darkest chocolate on the market.  We launched 30 years ago, in 1991.  It was the first chocolate that talked openly about its provenance – farmers in Togo who were regenerating their farmland by going organic.  It was a hit. 

In 1993 I got in touch with some friends in Belize and found that the cacao farmers were in big trouble:  they had borrowed money to plant cacao trees on assurances from the US Peace Corps and Hershey that they would be getting $1.75 lb a few years later.  By the time they were cropping, the price was $0.55.  Farmers abandoned the cacao but now had bank debt.  Sainsbury’s said they’d stock our idea of ‘Maya Gold’ if we would give them a 6 month exclusive.  So I offered the Maya farmers $1.25 and a 5 year rolling contract and put $20,000 prepayment in their bank to keep  their bank manager on side. The Fairtrade Foundation suggested it could be a product to launch their Mark and flew out to Belize to validate what we were doing and said ‘It’s all we are looking for…and more.’

So in March 1994 the Fairtrade Mark was launched to the world on Green & Black’s Maya Gold chocolate.  All the supporters of Fairtrade now had something to sink their teeth into, both literally and campaigning-wise.  Tesco, Safeway and Waitrose were all asking for it and Sainsbury’s nobly let us off the exclusive deal in the shared interest of seeing Fairtrade take off.   Within a year the Fairtrade Mark was on coffee, tea, bananas, and sugar and became a must stock category for natural food stores and supermarkets.

Green & Black’s grew and grew. We made milk chocolate and cocoa and hot chocolate, working with the finest artisan chocolate makers in the world. (I’ve never made a bar of chocolate myself)

In 1999 we sold some shares to a group of people led by William Kendall, who wanted to invest.   With a humungous marketing budget we grew the brand in a way that had never been possible before.

By 2005 we had gone from £1.5 million turnover to £26 million turnover.  Cadbury’s bought the business.  Then they got gobbled up by Kraft.  In November 2012 Tim Cofer, the CEO of Kraft, called me up to say that tomorrow he was announcing in Abidjan a $400 million plan called Cocoa Life that would build on what we had done in Belize with Fairtrade.  They appointed women to run the programme in Ghana and Ivory Coast and it has been hugely successful, with farmers queuing up to be part of it.  Now it is going to the Dominican Republic, where most of the organic cacao is grown.  Green & Black’s has just enjoyed a massive advertising push, with a stunning video that simply says “Wildly, Deliciously, Organic.”  The entire organic market benefits when a brand like Green & Black’s or Yeo Valley establishes the organic version in a product category as a leader.

Jo and I still work with the team at Green & Black’s, having a moan when we think they are going off piste and patting them on the backs when they get it right.  We’ve had nothing to moan about for quite a while, in fact we are very proud of how well our erstwhile baby is growing

A glimpse of the future?

Back in 2002 I wrote the Little Food Book, which was published by Alastair Sawday. It was a succinct coverage of the key issues about food, health and society. It still stands up well today. I also wrote an (unpublished) forecast of what the world would be like by 2012 as a result of the world catching up with the insights in my book. It makes interesting reading as we are still getting there, but the horizon seems a bit closer than it was.

You can get a secondhand copy for under £3 (including delivery) here.

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Dateline New York 2012 - The United Nations World Food and Health Organisation (WFHO) has published its State of the World Report.

Key data: The world’s population has, as predicted, reached a plateau at 10 billion.  Life expectancy in all the world’s nations continues to rise, with a global average of 80 years. Levels of heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes are all in steep decline, ensuring that the quality of life for the aged is greatly improved.  Infant and childhood mortality has plummeted to the lowest levels in recorded history.  The ongoing programme of converting hospitals into luxury apartments continues, with 7000 hospitals converted to other uses in the year 2011.  The number of the world’s citizens employed in agriculture continues to increase, along with the proportion who are part-time agriculturalists.   Farm sizes continue to reduce.  Grain reserves now stand at 400 days. Starvation has gone the way of smallpox – totally eradicated.  Land retirement continues as meat consumption worldwide falls to an average 6 kgs per person per year.  GNP per person continues to rise as the reduction of military capacity continues, transferring investment into money-saving, planet-saving technologies.  Emigration from Europe and North America continues to infuse Africa, Asia and Latin America with the capital and skills from returning immigrants, reinvesting in their places of origin. The world’s economy continues to thrive since the Global Trade Justice Agreement of 2005 that led to the abolition of all US, EU and Japanese agricultural subsidies and protectionism following the Cairns Group Ultimatum of 2004.  McDonald’s recently announced that its sales of organic vegeburgers now outstrip beefburger sales by 6 to one, with wholewheat buns now representing more than half of all buns sold.  Monsanto, whose genomics seed division has continued to come up with naturally bred landrace seed varieties tailored to the precise soil and climate requirements of the world’s regions, announced record profits.  A company spokesperson announced: “The diversification and empowerment of small farmers that followed the Trade Justice Agreement has provided us with rich rewards.  Our Small Farmers Seed Saving Programme has enriched our genomic data base while rewarding farmers who select ideal traits from their crops.”

Fantasy?  Not a bit of it.  Nothing in the above optimistic scenario should stretch the credulity of anyone who’s read this little book.   We are not faced with immutable forces that lead us to starvation, obesity, disease and environmental degradation.  We have the technologies - in agriculture, preventive medicine, food processing and energy production – to realise the above scenario. 

We suffer a distorted system where powerful forces coerce and cajole governments to work against the public interests.  Nobody really gains much from it.  None of us ever really asked for the system we got – it has been sold as delivering the greatest goods, but in practice it demands ever-increasing subsidy and brings, as a product of its systems, obesity, new more virulent bacterial diseases, increasing dependence on chemical fungicides, insecticides and herbicides as well as a cocktail of antibiotics, genetically engineered hormones, drugs and adulterants in our food and environment.

We need a new kind of accounting that counts all the costs.  Cheaper hamburgers and sugary foods may make a few pennies more profit for the shareholders in a chemical, pharmaceutical or fast food company, but who’s counting the cost in heart disease and diabetes?  Nowhere on the national account are the negative costs counted - the heartache of the bereaved, loss of earning power, amputation, blindness and agonising pain aren’t calculated on the debit side of the ledger.  If they were, we’d be in a very different situation with food.

Is cheap food worth the ill-health that is its concomitant?  Is it worth the environmental destruction?  The excessive use of fossil fuels?  The risk of global warming and increasingly violent weather and flooding?  Do we really want our children to enter puberty in hormonal turmoil, brought on by consumption of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in unpredictable interactions with the hormone imbalances inherent in obesity? 

Is it fair to the children?  They didn’t ask to be hooked on junk foods and additives before they were old enough to learn about nutrition.  The inevitable result in the longer run will be evolutionary degeneration.  Surely this wasn’t part of the deal?  I don’t remember seeing ads that said: “Eat junk food and your grandchildren and great grandchildren may well be at risk of a wide range of degenerative and congenital conditions that are a direct consequence of your ill-informed food choices.”

But it’s happened,  Inexorable, focused pressure on governments around the world has brought us to a situation where the richest 20% of the world’s population suffer chronic obesity disease and the poorest 20% starve.  The middle 60% aren’t doing that well, either, with the exception of a  rapidly-growing minority who engage in ‘joined up thinking’ about food, diet and farming.  If you do the sums properly, i.e. from the perspective of a nation or society, eating unsubsidised organically grown wholesome food free of artificial additives and in a proportion that favours grains, pulses and vegetables over meat and dairy products and sugar is the answer.