For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Environment and Climate Resource Center page.

Editor’s Note:
On Monday The Independent published an article titled “Britain has only 100 harvests left in its farm soil as scientists warn of growing ‘agricultural crisis'”. We are all too aware of why Britain’s (and other nations’) soils are becoming so depleted (if not, please see here and here, for example), and with the Western world standing on the precipice in regards to its food supply, it is insane for us to repeat the same mistakes on healthy soils elsewhere. And yet, that is exactly what we’re doing – financed by ‘investments’ and ‘offset mechanisms’ that empower the rich to extract and destroy ever more efficiently, behind the veil of distance. The colour-by-numbers kind of agriculture that has depleted soils and health in the North, is being aggressively, forcefully and rapidly applied to precious living soils in Africa, and elsewhere – and in too many cases also turning the poor residents of those lands into serfs at the same time. The sensible – and humane – thing to do, is to make a rapid transition to the kind of agriculture we continually write about . Grow your own food people, and support your local growers, and you will not be contributing to this inhumane, biologically impossible madness.

Plight of Kenya’s indigenous Sengwer shows carbon offsets are empowering corporate recolonisation of the South.

Originally published July 3, 2014


Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 500 million acres of land in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean was acquired or negotiated under deals brokered on behalf of foreign governments or transnational corporations.

Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for export to richer, developed countries – with the consequence that small-holder farmers are displaced from their land and lose their livelihood while local communities go hungry.

The concentration of ownership of the world’s farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is rapidly accelerating, driven by resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US land rights organisation Grain:

The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing.

Less known factors, however, include ‘conservation’ and ‘carbon offsetting.’

In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government’s Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.