Big Ag Opens Another Vein of Public Funding

[Celerity]

Money from the Climate-Smart Commodities program, designed to reduce agriculture emissions, is going disproportionately to multinationals.

https://prospect.org/environment/2023-09-01-big-ag-opens-another-vein-of-public-funding/



At the COP27 climate summit this past year in Egypt, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack addressed his role in President Biden’s plan to cut U.S. greenhouse emissions in half by 2030. While urging for international cooperation, Vilsack lauded the department’s “unprecedented” green investments to reduce agriculture’s substantial carbon footprint. He singled out a signature new program initiated under his tenure: the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities.

Launched in 2022, the program was set up to provide grants and other funding for sustainable farming practices that keep carbon in the soil, prevent deforestation, and other measures. The price tag, just over $3 billion, was unusually high for a “pilot program,” surpassing the annual budgets of other long-standing conservation programs that, at least theoretically, were supposed to support many of the same farming practices. “Our goal is to … make sure that small and underserved producers reap the benefits of these market opportunities,” Vilsack said at COP27.

But nearly a year later, the top grants have instead been awarded to large corporate interests, including Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and other organizations underwritten by Big Ag. The program is under renewed scrutiny from watchdog groups, which claim the department has provided limited public information about the selection process for applications, the contracts being negotiated with grant recipients, and the criteria for what exactly constitutes “climate smart.” “We don’t need USDA facilitating a pay-to-pollute carbon scheme that only goes to benefit big operations,” said Rebecca Wolf, senior policy director at Food & Water Watch.

In the absence of transparency, outside groups have come to view the program as a greenwashing operation to market “climate smart” products without actually cutting emissions. They also allege that the program is a way to use public funds to launch private carbon trading markets, a kind of cap-and-trade system except without the cap or evidence that offsets alone can substantially reduce emissions. It’s an example of how USDA, according to its critics, has lagged behind its fellow agencies in meeting the climate challenge, instead falling back on unambitious policy ideas.

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[2naSalit]

1. We also need...

A REAL sec. of Agriculture instead of the Sec of Ag Industries like we have now.

[leftstreet]

2. +1