Agribusiness and Climate Change
The industrial food system only exists today because of the support it gets from governments which march in lockstep with corporate lobbyists. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
The following article from GRAIN lays out some of the problems with the global Ag industry and its role in contributing to climate change and environmental destruction. As they note, Big Ag companies “are desperate to portray themselves as part of the solution to the climate crisis. But there is no way to reconcile what’s needed to heal our planet with their unflinching commitment to growth…The top 20 meat and dairy companies emit more greenhouse gases than Germany, Europe’s biggest climate polluter.” That last bit really gives a sense of the scale of this problem!
Here’s the opening paragraphs of their article. A link to the full story is below.
This week’s UN Climate Action Summit will be tricky for agribusiness CEOs. With forest fires raging in the Amazon, a damning new report about the food system by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and millions of young people out in streets clamouring to shut down fossil fuels and factory farming, it will be hard for the world’s largest food and agribusiness companies to get away with another round of voluntary pledges to reduce their gigantic emissions.
At the last UN summit on climate, held five years ago in New York, agribusiness dazzled everyone with two initiatives on deforestation and agriculture, both of which are now in shambles.
Their initiative on deforestation, a New York Declaration on Forests, championed by the world’s largest buyer of palm oil, Unilever, was supposed to put a major dent in tropical deforestation. Instead, rates of tree cover loss have soared, the Amazon is in flames, and those trying to defend forests from agribusiness companies are being killed in record numbers. Now we are learning that the Brazilian Cerrado, a biodiversity hot spot on par with the Amazon and one of the main frontiers for agribusiness expansion, is also burning at a record rate. Agribusiness is responsible, but so are the big global financial firms that having been buying up vast swaths of Cerrado lands and converting them to mega-farms, such as the Swedish national pension fund, Blackstone and the Harvard University endowment.
The top 20 meat and dairy companies emit more greenhouse gases than Germany, Europe’s biggest climate polluter.
The other initiative at the last summit, a Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture, was the handiwork of Yara, the world’s top nitrogen fertiliser producer and one of the planet’s worst emitters of greenhouse gases. It was the fertiliser industry’s PR response to the growing movement for a real climate solution based on fertiliser-free agroecological farming. The trick worked, for a while. Global production of nitrogen fertiliser rose steadily over the next few years. But the most recent IPCC report pointed to nitrogen fertilisers as one of the most dangerous and underestimated contributors to the climate crisis, and new research is showing that the industry has vastly underestimated its own emissions.
You can read the rest of the story at Common Dreams.
