Carbon farming and its significance

Industrialisation and global supply chains has transformed agriculture from “life source and a public common” into a global business opportunity.
It has now become a surgical economic activity leading to the new epoch of ‘corporate-environmental food monopolies’.
However it is a proven fact that industrial agriculture gets less food out of the ground, with fewer nutrients, less efficiently, more expensively, and with greater environmental devastation than small and organic farming.
It has resulted in differentiated access to nutritious food, reducing the biodiversity of our diet, injudicious ecological practices like monocropping and systematic erosion of soil and mounting cost of technology, chemicals — exiling the farmers out of their fair share of the progress and most importantly, deepening the climate change crisis.
In such a scenario, Carbon farming promises a bold new agricultural business model.

Carbon Farming

Carbon farming is a name for a variety of agricultural methods aimed at sequestering atmospheric carbon into the soil and in crop roots, wood and leaves with an aim to increase the rate of carbon sequestration into soil and plant material, creating a net loss of carbon from the atmosphere.
Advantages of Carbon Farming:
- It can incentivise our farmers to shift from improving yields to functioning ecosystems and sequestering carbon that can be sold or traded in carbon markets.
- It not only improves the health of soil but can also result in improved quality, organic and chemical-free food.
- It boosts secondary income from carbon credits for the marginalized farmers.

Statistics regarding Carbon Markets and GHG emission

The total value of the global carbon markets grew by 20 per cent in 2020.
The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) permits grew by 164 per cent to a record €760 billion ($851 billion) in 2021.
Studies show that soil removes about 25 percent of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions each year.
According to the Third Biennial Update Report submitted by the Union government in early 2021 to the UNFCCC, the agriculture sector contributes 14 per cent of the total GHG emissions.
Amongst these, greenhouse gas emissions from rice cultivation during 2018-19 accounted for 72,329 million tonnes “CO2 equivalent”,

Carbon Farming in India

In India, Meghalaya is currently working on a blueprint of a ‘carbon farming’ Act to create a prototype of sustainable agriculture model for the entire North-East region.
An extensive and pioneering carbon farming Act — with a robust transition plan can effectively demonstrate the idea of creating a carbon sink on working land and farm our way out of climate crisis, improve nutrition, reduce the punishing inequalities within farming communities, alter the land use pattern and provide the much-needed solution to fix our broken food systems.