The Scale of Disaster
Bulletin articles
**This article is based on a conversation between Winnie Overbeek, the international coordinator of the World Rainforest Movement, and GRAIN on September 2014, which was published by GRAIN at “Planet palm oil”. The information has been updated for this article.
As the UN climate negotiations in December approach, there's only one major intergovernmental initiative on climate and agriculture, and it is controlled by the world's largest fertiliser companies. The Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture, launched in 2014 at the UN Summit on Climate Change in New York, is the result of several years of efforts by the fertiliser lobby to block meaningful action on agriculture and climate change.
Certification has been described as the brightest of bright shining lies of the sustainability movement. And in recent years, certification roundtables have teamed up with another bright shining lie: REDD+
"Nobody eats eucalyptus." With this statement farmers expressed their outrage when the company Aracruz Celulose expanded its monoculture eucalyptus plantations several years ago on arable land in Espirito Santo, Brazil. While the objective was to produce and export more pulp, Aracruz and other companies publicly promote their practices as "smart.” They claimed they only plant trees on "degraded" or "abandoned" land, for example. And now with the climate crisis, the FAO suggests adopting "climate-smart forestry" practices. The question that arises: Can we really consider current company
The climate talks in Paris in December this year are viewed as a last chance for the world’s governments to commit to binding targets that might halt our march towards climate chaos. But in the countdown to Paris, many of these same governments have signed or are pushing a raft of ambitious trade and investment deals that would pre-empt measures needed to deal with climate change.
