An ETC Group podcast mini-series

Growing Carbon is Not Like Growing Watermelons

In this podcast mini-series, Who Will Control the Food System, ETC Group uncovers who is pulling the strings of industrial agriculture. We dissect the latest corporate strategies and take inspiration from the peoples and movements fighting back.

In this fourth episode, Zahra Moloo talks to Camila Moreno, an independent researcher who works with social movements in Brazil and across Latin America on the social and environmental dimensions of biotechnology and agribusiness expansion.

Camila presents Brazil as a huge agribusiness hub, well established as the centre of the “United Republic of Soybeans”, an expression she borrows from a Syngenta ad that references the whole southern cone of the Americas.

In this podcast, she explains how the “war against climate change” is being manipulated by the financial sector and agribusiness to impose digitalization on Brazilian farms, big and small alike, at an even faster pace than in the US. Carbon is at the centre of this “new climate economy”, and it is digitization that is supposedly enabling invisible, intangible carbon to be measured and thereby transformed into a commodity that can be bought and traded.

Far from the spotlight, we can see that carbon farming comes with many pitfalls and risks which need to be considered, including the involuntary integration of family farms into the Industrial Food Chain, the loss of farmers’ autonomy, new surveillance mechanisms and new reasons for land grabbing.

To listen: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PZkRodnkMK4YcKABkS6lr