[Terrapreta] Pay Farmers for Environmental Services

[lou gold]

  /agriculture/article/25103/print
Paying Farmers to Protect the Planet is Future: U.N.
/agriculture/article/25103/print

ROME (Reuters) - Paying farmers to protect the environment -- rather than
just for their produce -- will be an important way to ensure a rapidly
increasing demand for food does not destroy the planet, a U.N. agency said
on Thursday.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said paying for
"environmental services" is set to be an important way to link two of
humanity's greatest challenges: beating poverty and safeguarding the
environment.

"(Farming) has the potential to degrade the Earth's land, water, atmosphere
and biological resources -- or to enhance them -- depending on the decisions
made by the more than 2 billion people whose livelihoods depend directly on
crops, livestock, fisheries or forests," said FAO Director-General Jacques
Diouf.

"Ensuring appropriate incentives for these people is essential," he said in
his foreword to the agency's annual report "The State of Food and
Agriculture" which focused on environmental payments.

The FAO points out that many governments already subsidize farming, but
rarely do so to protect the environment.

"Current incentives tend to favor the production of food, fiber, and
increasingly, biofuels, but they typically undervalue other beneficial
services that farmers can provide," it said.

The report concentrates on three particular "services": the storage of
carbon dioxide in plants and soil which can help slow global warming; water
provision from flood prevention and water filtration through roots and soil;
and nature conservation.

One of the first such payment schemes was the Conservation Reserve Program,
a 1985 program to pay U.S. farmers to retire crop land from farming for
10-15 years. The report says hundreds of schemes now exist in rich and poor
countries, mostly in the forest management sector.

As deforestation is estimated to produce at least 18 percent of global
greenhouse gas emissions, a potentially huge growth area would be in paying
poorer countries not to chop down their forests.

That option is now allowed only to a limited extent by the Kyoto Protocol,
but countries meeting in Indonesia in December to discuss global climate
change initiatives for after 2012 will consider whether it should be
expanded.

Environmental payments to farmers do not have to be linked to them stopping
farming, but can be an incentive to make it less damaging, such as
encouraging "shade-grown" coffee rather than intensive production where
forest canopies are destroyed.

The report stresses the drawbacks as well as potential benefits of
environmental payment schemes, for example the risk that they may reduce
food output for hungry populations.

"The impact of a PES (payment for environmental services) approach on the
poor is highly dependent on who holds the rights to use resources," the
report says -- noting the risk that such schemes might benefit relatively
wealthy landowners more often than the extremely poor who own nothing.

(Reporting by Robin Pomeroy, editing by Philippa Fletcher)
   page is /agriculture/article/25103/print

Terms of Use <http://www.enn.com/static/terms_of_use> | Privacy Policy
<http://www.enn.com/static/privacy_policy>

2007. Copyright Environmental News Network
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/terrapreta_bioenergylists.org/attachments/20071117/4bdc5a57/attachment.html