From land grabbers to carbon cowboys

A new report by GRAIN looks at land grabbing for carbon projects.

Credit: Polyp.org.uk

A new report by GRAIN looks at land grabbing in the global South for carbon projects. The report identifies 279 large-scale tree and crop planting projects that have been set up to generate carbon credits since 2016. The projects cover a total area of 9.1 million hectares — approximately the area of Portugal.

The report is titled “From land grabbers to carbon cowboys” and includes a dataset of the projects. The dataset excludes REDD projects as well as projects in the global North such as New Zealand, Scotland, and Australia.

Half of the projects are in four countries: China, India, Brazil, and Colombia. But most of the land area is in Africa, with projects there covering more than 5.2 million hectares.

With the exception of China and India, most of the companies running these projects are from rich countries, such as the Netherlands, USA, Singapore, Switzerland, UK, France, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates.

GRAIN writes that,

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.

GRAIN notes that “while nine million hectares is already too much, things could get much worse” with the Paris Agreement Crediting Mechanism (Article 6.4) still being negotiated under the UN system.

This international carbon trading mechanism would allow governments and corporations to offset greenhouse gas emissions with carbon projects in other countries.

Needless to say these other countries will be mainly in the global South.

A new UN carbon trading mechanism could result in higher prices for carbon credits and therefore increased pressure for land grabs for carbon projects.

GRAIN’s report includes several examples of these land grabs for carbon plantations.

Microsoft

Timberland Investment Group recently agreed to sell 8 million carbon credits to Microsoft over the next 19 years. Timberland Investment Group is one of the world’s largest forestry management companies with more than 1.2 million hectares under management. It is a subsidiary of the Brazilian investment bank BTG Pactual.

The carbon credits will come from Timberland Investment Group’s US$1 billion “reforestation and restoration strategy in Latin America”.

The project aims to protect and restore 135,000 hectares of “natural forests in deforested landscapes”. It will also establish 135,000 hectares of monoculture industrial tree plantations.

Timberland Investment Group claims that the deal with Microsoft is the largest “carbon dioxide removal credit transaction” ever.

Offsetting allows Microsoft to give the impression of doing something about the climate crisis, whilst increasing its emissions and continuing to do deals with the fossil fuel industry.

In 2020, Microsoft announced that it would carbon negative by 2030. Three years later, Microsoft’s emissions had increased by 30%.

Conservation International is impact adviser for the project. Both Microsoft and BTG Pactual are listed on Conservation International’s website as “Corporate Engagements”.

Conservation International’s CEO M. Sanjayan reveals that he has no interest in putting any pressure whatsoever on Microsoft to reduce its emissions. In a statement about the deal between Timberland Investment Group and Microsoft, Sanjayan says that,

“This commitment from Microsoft is proof positive that we don’t have to compromise our future for our balance sheets. We can restore degraded tropical forests and remove carbon at scale; we can mobilize private capital; and we can protect nature without abandoning economic production — enhancing our biodiversity, livelihoods, and climate all at once.”

On 18 September 2024, Timberland Investment Group announced a similar deal with Meta. And Sanjayan was on hand to greenwash Meta’s ever-increasing emissions:

“With this investment, Meta is sending a message to the rest of the private sector: a sustainable future need not be austere; it can be abundant. . . .

“The success of this initiative is evidence that economic production and environmental protection can be mutually reinforcing, rather than mutually exclusive.” 

Rabobank

Rabobank is also selling carbon credits to Microsoft. Rabobank is buying land in Brazil for tree plantations. Rabobank’s partner is the Botuverá Group, a transport and agribusiness company. Botuverá Group manages 47,000 hectares of cattle ranches, and soy and maize plantations in Brazil. The company is owned by the Bissoni family, which has been fined and accused of illegal deforestation, fraud, conflict of interest, and poor fire management on several occasions.

Most of the carbon credits that Rabobank sells to Microsoft come from its Project Acorn which generates carbon credits by encouraging cocoa farmers to plant trees on their land.

In July 2024, Follow the Money published an investigation that reveals that Rabobank could be hugely overestimating the number of carbon credits generated by its project in Côte d’Ivoire. Rabobank cannot prove that the project is additional. The project is accused of double counting because the government had already sold credits from part of Rabobank’s project area to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.

Africa’s land grabbers are back in business

In 2008, GRAIN published a report about the global land grab triggered by the food and financial crises. Africa was particularly affected, with hundreds of communities evicted from their lands to make way for industrial agriculture.

GRAIN’s report alerted the world to the scale of the problem, and GRAIN continues to document land grabs on its farmlandgrab.org website.

In 2016, GRAIN published another report about land grabbing which found that the problem had worsened. Some of the most egregious land grabs had been shelved or scaled down, but new large-scale, long-term land deals appeared. Communities were still struggling to regain their lands.

Some of the same people (and their close relatives) involved in previous land grabs are now attempting to establish carbon plantations.

GRAIN’s new report highlights six examples:

Gagan Gupta: As President of agribusiness giant Olam International, this Singaporean businessman oversaw the company’s 300,000 ha land deal in Gabon in 2011 to build Africa’s largest oil palm plantation. The operation has been mired in conflicts with communities ever since. Now Gupta is running a UAE-based tree plantation company, Sequoia Plantation, which is in the process of securing 200,000 ha in Togo, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo for large-scale tree plantations with carbon offset components, despite protests from affected communities.

Kevin Godlington: This UK businessman orchestrated several failed large-scale land deals in Sierra Leone. One was an oil palm plantation in the District of Port Loko that cleared forest and displaced people from their lands before it went bankrupt. Undeterred, Godlington is now going after the same lands with a new venture listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange that claims to have lease rights to 57,000 ha to plant trees for carbon credits, some of which have already been bought by British Petroleum. As with the first round of land deals, no matter how things pan out, Godlington has already pocketed millions of dollars from the scheme.

Carter Coleman: This UK businessman built the infamous Kilombero Plantation Limited rice farm on 5,818 ha of contested community lands in the heart of Tanzania’s Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor. Despite heavy backing from foreign development banks and investors, it went bankrupt in 2019. Coleman is now back with a new company called Udzungwa Corridor Limited that will generate carbon credits by planting “rare tropical hardwoods” on a 7,500 ha stretch of land leased from local farmers along the Kilombero Nature Reserve.

Andrea Tozzi: This Italian businessman, CEO of his family's company Tozzi Green, acquired 11,000 ha of land in the Ambatolahy commune in the Ihorombe region of Madagascar in 2012 and 2018 to grow the biofuel crop jatropha. That project failed, and the company switched to growing maize for animal feed and essential oil crops. All the while the communities have been fighting to get their lands back, which they say they need to graze their cattle and grow food for their families. Tozzi is now trying to save his project by replacing the maize with plantations of acacia and eucalyptus for carbon credits — which communities are still firmly resisting.

Karl Kirchmayer: This Austrian businessman, who spent years buying up 147,000 ha of farmlands in Eastern Europe, now has an African land grab venture, ASC Impact. It is partnering with a Senior Advisor to the President of Uganda and a Dubai businessman close to the royal family to sell 60 million tons of carbon credits to UAE companies from mangrove and tree plantation projects, mainly in Africa. ASC Impact is currently negotiating for 27,000 ha in Ethiopia, 25,000 in Angola and 270,000 in the Republic of the Congo!

Frank Timis: This Romanian-Swiss businessman is the founder and majority shareholder of African Agriculture Holdings Inc, a US company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, that took over 25,000 ha of lands from a failed Italian company that local communities in Senegal have been fighting to get back for over a decade. His company is also responsible for the largest land deal in our database — a ridiculous pair of 49-year leases covering 2.2 million ha in Niger, where the company will produce carbon credits by planting pine trees.

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