The Adaptation Impacts of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Mitigation in Agriculture: Policy & Programming Implications.

The vicious circle of land degradation and chronic food insecurity in underdeveloped tropical countries has rarely been broken by the conventional channeling of foreign assistance down from active donors, and their host government counterparts, to less powerful, and, therefore, more passive local communities.  Economic (open market) and institutional (land tenure security) incentives encouraging soil and water conserving farmland improvement, however well studied and understood, have rarely been induced through the power asymmetries of this foreign aid structure. There is no reason to expect that increased infusions of resources and appropriate technology through these same charitable governance channels, such as are being proposed for the new climate change “adaptation” funds, will break this vicious cycle either.

But participation in Global GHG mitigation markets can empower these same small farms to pay their own land reclamation way, as it were, by competing as free agents selling emissions removal (carbon sequestration) and emissions reduction (REDD, REAL & fuel switching) offset credits.  Thus empowered, these small farmers will be in a better position to drive the sorts of local institutional change, such as freer markets and land tenure security, that can turn their local agriculture into a virtuous cycle of carbon intensification on, and into, the landscape and, therefore, into greater food security.

This dramatic convergence of interests between the subsistence farmer and the global demand for climate change mitigation can, if fostered, lead to significant improvements in agricultural land quality around the world.  Cases of where this fostering process has, and has not, worked are reviewed with a view towards better informed negotiations over, and implementation of, land-based GHG offset market assumptions, structures, procedures, and practices.