From Land Grabbers to Carbon Cowboys: New Scramble for Community Lands Takes Off

In a recent interview with the New York Times, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates was asked if there were types of projects that he would not invest in to offset his greenhouse gas emissions. “I don’t plant trees,” he replied, adding that planting trees to deal with the climate crisis was complete nonsense. “I mean, are we the science people, or are we the idiots? Which one do we want to be?”[1]

Microsoft, the company he built his fortune on and, according to insiders, still actively advises, sees it differently.

In June 2024, the tech giant bought 8 million carbon credits from the Timberland Investment Group (TIG), a fund owned by the Brazilian agribusiness lender BTG Pactual.[2] TIG is raising US$1 billion to buy and convert pasture lands to large-scale eucalyptus plantations across the Southern Cone of Latin America.[3] As these trees grow, they draw carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their roots, trunks and branches. TIG will estimate the amount of carbon removed and then sell it as carbon credits to Microsoft and other corporations.

Each carbon credit that Microsoft buys from TIG is supposed to offset one tonne of the emissions Microsoft generates burning fossil fuels. This is one of the main ways that Microsoft and many other companies are planning on getting to “net zero” emissions, while still burning fossil fuels.

Microsoft’s deal with TIG, reportedly the largest “carbon dioxide removal credit transaction” in history, is just one of many investments Microsoft is making in tree plantations as a way to offset its emissions.[4]

The Dutch agribusiness lender Rabobank is another source of carbon credits for the tech company. It too is acquiring land in Brazil for tree plantations, in this instance with a local agribusiness family with a track record of illegal deforestation and fraud.[5] But most of the carbon credits Rabobank sells to Microsoft are from its programme to plant trees on the lands of small coffee and cacao growers in Latin America, Africa and Asia. This programme, called Acorn, uses satellites and a Microsoft digital platform to measure the number and size of shade trees that small farmers plant on their farms and then calculate the carbon they’ve removed from the atmosphere. It then sells the carbon to Microsoft as “carbon credits” for about US$38 a piece, taking a 20% cut for itself and its local partner, and paying farmers what’s left of the proceeds.[6]

A big problem with Rabobank’s scheme, identified in an investigation of its project with cacao farmers in Côte d’Ivoire, is that it is vastly overestimating the carbon removed — in this case by 600%![7] What’s more, the Côte d’Ivoire government says Rabobank is likely double dipping as its project overlaps with a World Bank-funded scheme that has already generated and sold carbon credits from trees planted on small cacao farms in the same area.

All of this “nonsense”, as Gates calls it, has not stopped an increasing number of corporations, governments and billionaires — not to mention a new industry of climate consultants and carbon brokers — from promoting the idea that emissions from fossil fuels can and should be offset by planting trees or other crops that sequester carbon.

Such projects have a chequered history that goes back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, but they really only took off after the 2016 Paris Climate Agreement, when governments endorsed the notion of offsets and carbon markets as an effective means to get corporations to cut their emissions.[8] Today, most offset projects are in the so-called “voluntary market”, where private companies from the global North manage the certification and sale of carbon credits to corporations that want to show they are taking action to deal with climate change. The projects, largely in the global South, can be for anything from the distribution of clean cook stoves in Malawi to the preservation of rainforests in Indonesia. The premise is that the project either prevents emissions that would have occurred without it, or that it leads to the removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Cook stoves and rainforest preservation are examples of emissions avoidance. Planting trees, on the other hand, is the most popular form of removal.

In a 2024 study, the World Rainforest Movement (WRM) says that the number of tree planting projects for carbon credits has tripled over the past three years.[9] WRM says the surge is partly driven by the large number of high-profile scandals in emissions avoidance schemes, known as “REDD+”.[10] Numerous projects to preserve forests have been withdrawn or suspended from carbon markets after investigations showed they were based on implausible stories about the threat of deforestation or that they caused human rights violations and other harms to local communities. As a result, WRM says corporations are turning their attention to tree planting as a source of “high-integrity” carbon credits. This is now spawning a mad rush to secure lands where trees can be planted.

The Carbon Farmland Grab

Activists and scientists have been warning for years that schemes to offset carbon emissions by planting trees or other crops would lead to a surge in land grabbing, especially in the global South.[11] These warnings are now proving true.

GRAIN combed through the various registries of carbon offset projects to try and get a better sense of this new land grab and how it is unfolding. We identified 279 large-scale tree and crop planting projects for carbon credits that corporations have initiated since 2016 in the global South. They cover over 9.1 million hectares of land — an area roughly the size of Portugal. (See Box 1: What’s included and what’s not included in the land deal dataset)

The deals (view the dataset here) add up to a massive new form of land grabbing that will only increase conflicts and pressures over land that are still simmering from the last global land grab spree that erupted in 2007-8 in the wake of global food and financial crises. They also signify that new sources of money are now flowing into the coffers of companies specialised in taking lands from communities in the South to enrich and serve corporations, mainly in the North.

GRAIN and UChicago Data Science Institute (click here for better resolution)

Box 1: What’s included and what’s not included in the land deal dataset

What’s in?

Our data covers projects from all the major voluntary offset project registries. These are: American Carbon Registry (ACR), Climate Action Reserve (CAR), Gold Standard (GS), Verra (VCS), BioCarbono (BC), Cercarbono (CV) and Plan Vivo (PV). It also includes cases on the website farmlandgrab.org that are not yet found in the registries.

The projects in our dataset are limited to projects that:

– involve the large-scale planting of crops and/or tree species on a combined area of land over 100 ha for the purpose of producing carbon credits;

– are driven by companies from outside the communities;

– were initiated since 2016 and up to 31 March 2024 (roughly post-Paris Agreement); and

– are located in the global South.

The projects involve either 1) the creation of large-scale plantations or 2) contract production with small farmers. But all the projects bind the use of the land to the terms of the project for 20 years or more.

What’s not in?

REDD+ projects, which aim to avoid deforestation, are not included. Some types of projects that produce carbon credits through tree planting or agriculture on large areas of land are not included either. These are:

– projects to manage pasture lands, which affect the access to lands and traditional practices of pastoralists;

– projects to restore or create mangroves, where large areas of coastline are taken over for the planting of mangrove trees; and,

– projects which generate carbon credits by enrolling farmers to implement agricultural practices that are said to build up carbon in the soils, often called “carbon farming”.

These projects are extremely important and can have equally severe impacts on communities, including land grabbing, but they are not covered here to keep the dataset manageable.[12] Our data also does not cover projects located in the global North, such as in New Zealand, Scotland and Australia, where national schemes that endorse tree planting for carbon offsets have led to a displacement in food production and undermined farmers’ access to land.[13]

To date, 52 countries in the global South have been targeted by these projects. Half the projects are in just four countries: China, India, Brazil and Colombia, which are developing their own industries of carbon project developers. But projects in these countries account for less than a third of the total land area involved. The most affected region, in terms of land area, is Africa, with projects covering over 5.2 million hectares.[14]

Many of the projects involve land deals to set up giant eucalyptus, acacia or bamboo plantations. Typically, these are pasture lands or savannahs that were used until now by local communities for grazing livestock or growing food.

.An even larger number of projects are implemented on small farms. Typically, in these cases, farmers must show proof that they have title over the lands and are asked to sign contracts in which they commit to plant and maintain a number of trees on a portion of their land. According to these contracts, farmers transfer the rights to the carbon in the trees and in the soil to the project proponents. While these deals do not displace farmers from their lands, they are a form of contract production. Farmers are effectively ceding control over a portion of their lands to an outside company for decades. They can no longer do what they want on the land. The projects can also encourage, and in some cases directly facilitate, a shift from collective forms of land management to privatised, individual property. (See Box 2: Carbon colonialism)

The money that investors plan to capture from these deals is immense. The projects we pulled from the Verra and Gold Standard registries alone will generate 2.5 billion carbon credits (1 credit = 1 tonne of CO2 removed) over their lifetime. With an average price of about US$10 per credit, that adds up to a potential bounty of US$25 billion.[15]

Here Come the “Idiots”

While these projects are exclusively set up in rural areas with extremely low emissions per capita, it is quite the opposite when it comes to the companies orchestrating the projects. With the exception of what’s happening in India and China, most carbon projects are led by foreign companies in rich countries with atrocious emissions records — such as the Netherlands, the US, Singapore, Switzerland, the UK, France, Germany and the UAE.[16] There is a clear colonial dynamic at work, with companies and big NGOs from the North once again using the lands of communities in the global South for their own agendas and their own benefit.

.A good number of actors driving this new wave of land grabs are in fact repeat offenders from the global farmland grab that took off a decade and a half ago. This is especially the case in Africa. (See Box 3: Africa’s land grabbers are back in business) There are also several companies from the forestry sector with histories of land grabbing and conflicts with local communities. Much of the vast eucalyptus plantations of Brazilian paper giant Suzano, for example, which is involved in three large-scale carbon plantation projects, have been grabbed from Brazil’s indigenous and traditional peoples.[17] And a non-negligible number of project developers have records of illegal dealings and financial scandal. They include:

Ricardo Stoppe Jr, Brazil’s “carbon king”, who was arrested in June 2024 for running an illegal carbon credit sale and land grabbing scheme;[18]
Martin Vorderwulbecke, a German businessman with a neem tree carbon project in Paraguay, who is accused of defrauding Slovenia’s national airline of millions of dollars;[19]
Alexis Ludwig Leroy, a French/Swiss carbon trader developing tree planting projects in Côte d’Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is reportedly under investigation for money laundering and financial connections to Colombia’s “queen of cocaine”;[20]
Vittorio Medioli, an Italian/Brazilian businessman and politician with a carbon tree plantation in Brazil, who was convicted in Brazilian courts for currency evasion and sued for cartel and gang formation in the transport sector;[21] and,
Sheikh Ahmed Dalmook al Maktoum, a member of the UAE royal family seeking tens of millions of hectares in Africa for carbon offset projects, who is accused of overcharging Ghana on the supply of Russian-made Covid vaccines and who was advised on his African carbon deals by an Italian businessman convicted for a bankruptcy fraud that sank one of Italy’s largest telecommunications companies.[22]

The money being hustled by these carbon cowboys comes mainly from the world’s most polluting corporations, who are interested in buying carbon credits to greenwash their emissions.

[…]

Via https://www.globalresearch.ca/land-grabbers-carbon-cowboys/5868860