How REDD+ projects undermine peasant farming and real solutions to climate change

Table of contents

Introduction

Background

What is REDD+?

Patterns that make REDD+ a danger to peasant farming

1: REDD+ blames peasant farming practices for deforestation and emissions

2. Carbon companies, conservation NGOs, consultants and industrialised countries profit from REDD+, not peasants

3. REDD+ undermines food sovereignty

4. REDD+ undermines community control over territories

Box: How changes in laws inspired by carbon markets are threatening agrarian reform

5. REDD+ facilitates the expansion of corporate agriculture

Box: The link between ‘climate-smart agriculture’ and REDD+

Conclusions

Box: Food sovereignty: 5 steps to cool the planet and feed its people

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Annex. Table: Key public-corporate – conservation NGO initiatives promoting REDD+

Introduction

Peasants do an incredible job of providing most of the world’s food on just a quarter of the world’s agricultural lands. But ask any of these small scale farmers about climate change and they will tell you how it is making farming more difficult. It is getting harder for them to predict the weather, while storms, floods and droughts are becoming more frequent and extreme.

Scientists and politicians have begun to acknowledge the threat that climate change poses to global food security and some have come around to the reality that industrial agriculture is a major contributor to climate change. Agriculture is increasingly being discussed at high level forums on climate change, and governments and international agencies are coming forward with different programmes that they claim will help farmers to adapt to climate change and mitigate agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.

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