SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS

The global farmland grab goes green

Published

5 years ago

May 17, 2021

Back in March of this year, Bill Gates was fielding questions on the online platform Reddit, promoting his new book on the climate crisis. Gates had just recently been revealed to be the largest farmland owner in the US, and one of the Reddit participants asked him why he was buying so much agricultural land. Gates replied: “My investment group chose to do this. It is not connected to climate.”

The first part of his answer is typical billionaire-speak. The world’s richest tend to place their money with family offices whose managers are tasked to make as much profit as possible. If they get called out for funding pipelines and factory farms, then the billionaires can feign ignorance and say their “investment group” chose to do it. It’s a similar dynamic with pension funds, where workers entrust their retirement savings to schemes that invest in all kinds of projects that undermine the well-being of working people around the planet.

Today there are 7,000 family offices that collectively manage US$5.9 trillion in assets, while pension funds in just 22 countries control a staggering US$52.5 trillion in assets. An increasing number of these family offices and pension funds are, like Gates’ group, choosing to buy up farmland. This can be done directly, as Gates’s group has done buying farms in the US, or indirectly via private equity funds, as those managing Gates’ trust fund have done to acquire a stake in farms in East Africa and oil palm plantations in the Congo.

Contrary to what Gates’ stated in the second part of his answer to the Reddit participant, this growing interest in farmland is deeply connected with climate. On a straightforward level, food and farming account for up to 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, and the model of industrial agriculture practiced and promoted by Bill Gates’ funded agencies is largely to blame.

But there’s another connection: these days the companies that are in the business of selling farmland to billionaires and pension funds are peddling it as a green, sustainable and socially responsible investment. They are even marketing farmland investing for its potential to generate carbon offsets. And the propaganda is working. Farmland is an increasingly appealing proposition for pension fund managers and billionaires who are under pressure to show some action on the climate crisis– and to hold off regulators that might force them to do more.

“There are some big macro-level trends around why existing institutional investors are becoming interested in land again, or looking to expand their portfolios if they already invest in land,” said Emily Norton, head of rural research at the property agency Savills, to the Financial Times. “There was a post-recessionary flight to safe assets [after the 2008 financial crisis], but the bigger trend is probably factors related to climate mitigation . . . increasingly, climate-positive trends are driving institutions and family offices to say: ‘Yes, that’s the reason we want to be in that asset class’.”

As an example, this year the pension fund of the Dutch postal company PostNL put €200 million into a new farmland fund, bluntly called the SDG Farmland Fund (SDG refers to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations).

“We found farmland interesting as it overlaps with sustainable themes such as climate change, food safety and food security,” said René van der Kieft, president of Pensioenfonds PostNL. “The investment fits with the SDG ‘Climate Action’, but also with ‘Life Below Water, ‘Zero Hunger, ‘Clean Water and ‘Sanitation and ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’. It provides us with an ideal opportunity to combine many SDGs.”

The Dutch pension fund, like most other institutional investors, is, for the time being, focussing on acquiring farmland in the “business secure” geographies of North America, Europe, Oceania and South America. But that could change. Indeed, private equity funds are already channeling important volumes of pension fund money into companies that operate farms in Africa and Asia, often with backing from development banks.

US pension fund manager TIAA, a co-founder of the UN’s Principles for Responsible Farmland Investing, has probably done more than any other company to market farmland investing as “green”. Today, TIAA manages a portfolio of nearly one million hectares of farmland around the world, worth about US$8 billion, on behalf of numerous pension funds in Asia, North America and Europe. But it has come under scrutiny, in particular for its land deals in Brazil’s Cerrado region, which have been shown to be linked to land grabs, deforestation and environmental destruction. Several US university unions and faculty associations with pensions managed by TIAA have recently passed or put forward resolutions condemning TIAA for its farmland acquisitions.

TIAA’s responded by going further and further with its green branding. In April 2020, TIAA’s agricultural subsidiary, Westchester, joined about a dozen other major farmland investors in launching Leading Harvest, “the first scalable, industry-wide standard paving the way for universal sustainable farmland management”. This standard is so far only available in the US but, as noted by TIAA, “it may be adapted for use outside of the United States in the future.”

The goal here is to define a global standard for sustainability that is suited to the large-scale, industrialised farming operations that TIAA and other farmland players are buying up and building but that is also good enough to appease most potential investors and downstream buyers of their harvests.

“There was a lot of effort in making sure that this standard meets the needs of the investor as well as of the farmer and the landowner,” says Steve Bruere, president of Peoples Company, another US-based farmland management company that co-founded Leading Harvest.

The big farmland players are also pushing farmland and corporate farmland ownership as a way for corporations to achieve net zero carbon emission targets, and are investing heavily to quantify the emissions that can be reduced or carbon that can be captured in the soil by tweaking their industrial agricultural practices.

“Many [companies] have been coming out with targets to be carbon neutral by a certain date, and one tool to help with that is to invest in timberland and farmland,” says Martin Davies, chief executive of TIAA’s Westchester Group. His company just hired a new head of sustainability to “support Westchester’s response to rising investor demand for carbon neutral portfolios, providing scalable, natural solutions to counter climate change through farmland investments.”

All of this is closely tied to developments in the digitalising of agriculture. The digital land records and massive quantities of data that big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are vacuuming up from farmers’ fields make it easier for the farmland companies to scour the planet for profitable farmland deals. They can also use satellite technologies and drones to monitor their farms from a distance, ensuring that those operating their farms are complying with their standards and directives.

Taken together, the advances in digital agriculture and the opportunities for carbon credits and greenwashing have the potential to make transnational, financialised farming operations more profitable, and certainly more appealing to investors.

The world’s farmland, as the farmland fund managers like to repeat, is finite. So, as corporations inhabit more of it, the less there is for small farmers, indigenous peoples and rural communities. Already these people are surviving on a dwindling fraction of the world’s farmlands, and still producing most of the world’s food. In 2014 we estimated that small farms occupied less than a quarter of the world’s farmlands.

The corporate farmland grabbers want people to think that this does not matter.

“I don’t think there’s anything especially notable about who buys farmland, if an institutional buyer buys it or a wealthy individual buys it or a neighboring farmer buys it … It’s still going to be used the same way in the following year and the returns to that asset are not influenced much at all by who happens to own it at a point in time,” says Bruce Sherrick, the director of TIAA Center for Farmland Research and board member of Leading Harvest.

But it absolutely does matter whether farmlands are in the hands of a corporation or a community of small farmers or pastoralists. Small farms have greater biodiversity and tree cover. They feed their communities with healthy foods. They generate and distribute wealth locally and fairly and build dynamic communities. They can and often do practice agroecology without fossil fuels or chemical inputs. And, as a new global study published in Nature concludes, they even produce significantly higher yields than big corporate farms. Small farms do not, however, offer much opportunity for pension fund managers and billionaire family offices to extract profits.

And that is the crux of the problem. Those who presently control the world’s financial flows are not capable of supporting the food producers and food systems that can deal with the climate crisis or the many other crises afflicting food and agriculture. Our challenge is to get both farmland and money out of their hands, as fast as we can.

Original source: GRAIN

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SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS

‘Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour’

Published

4 months ago

December 22, 2025

witnessradio.org

A farm worker ploughs fields overlooking Grangemouth petrochemical and refining plant in Scotland. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

UN GEO report says ending this harm key to global transformation required ‘before collapse becomes inevitable’.

The unsustainable production of food and fossil fuels causes $5bn (£3.8bn) of environmental damage per hour, according to a major UN report.

Ending this harm was a key part of the global transformation of governance, economics and finance required “before collapse becomes inevitable”, the experts said.

The Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report, which is produced by 200 researchers for the UN Environment Programme, said the climate crisis, destruction of nature and pollution could no longer be seen as simply environmental crises.

“They are all undermining our economy, food security, water security, human health and they are also [national] security issues, leading to conflict in many parts of the world,” said Prof Robert Watson, the co-chair of the assessment.

All the environmental crises were worsening as the global population grows and required more food and energy, most of which was produced in ways that pollute the planet and destroy the natural world, the experts said. A sustainable world was possible, they said, but required political courage.

“This is an urgent call to transform our human systems now before collapse becomes inevitable,” said Prof Edgar Gutiérrez-Espeleta, another co-chair and the former environment minister in Costa Rica.

“The science is good. The solutions are known. What is required is the courage to act at the scale and speed that history demands,” he said, adding that the window for action was “rapidly narrowing”.

The experts acknowledged that the geopolitical situation today was difficult, with the US under Donald Trump, some other countries and corporate vested interests working to block or reverse environmental action. Watson, a former chair of leading international climate and biodiversity science groups, said: “The public have got to demand that they want a sustainable future for their children and their grandchildren. Most governments do try and respond.”

The GEO report is comprehensive – 1,100 pages this year – and is usually accompanied by a summary for policymakers, which is agreed by all the world’s countries. However, strong objections by countries including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey and Argentina to references to fossil fuels, plastics, reduced meat in diets and other issues meant no agreement was reached this time.

A statement made by the UK on behalf of 28 countries said: “We witnessed diversion attempts to question the scientific nature of this process. Our delegations fully respect every state’s right to safeguard their country’s national interests and rights, but science is not negotiable.”

The GEO report emphasised that the costs of action were much less than the costs of inaction in the long term, and estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth $20tn a year by 2070 and $100tn by 2100. “We need visionary countries and private sector [companies] to recognise they will make more profit by addressing these issues rather than ignoring them,” Watson said.

The report contained several “critical truths”, Gutiérrez-Espeleta said: environmental crises were political and security emergencies, threatening the social ties that held societies together. Today’s governments and economic systems were failing humanity and financial reform was the cornerstone of transformation, he said: “Environmental policy must become the backbone of national security, social justice, and economic strategy.”

One of the biggest issues was the $45tn a year in environmental damage caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas, and the pollution and destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture, the report said. The food system carried the largest costs, at $20tn, with transport at $13tn and fossil-fuel powered electricity at $12tn.

These costs – called externalities by economists – must be priced into energy and food to reflect their real price and shift consumers towards greener choices, Watson said: “So we need social safety nets. We need to make sure that the poorest in society are not harmed by an increase in costs.”

The report suggests measures such as a universal basic income, taxes on meat and subsidies for healthy, plant-based foods.

There were also about $1.5tn in environmentally harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, food and mining, the report said. These needed to be removed or repurposed, it added. Watson noted that wind and solar energy was cheaper in many places but held back by vested interests in fossil fuel.

The climate crisis may be even worse than thought, he said: “We are likely to be underestimating the magnitude of climate change”, with global heating probably at the high end of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Removing fossil fuel subsidies could cut emissions by a third, the report said.

This article was amended on 9 December 2025. An earlier version said that the GEO report estimated the benefits from climate action alone would be worth “$100bn” by 2100; this should have been $100tn.

Source: The Guardian

SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS

Britain, Netherlands withdraw $2.2 billion backing for Total-led Mozambique LNG

Published

4 months ago

December 17, 2025

witnessradio.org

LONDON, Dec 1 (Reuters) – Britain and the Netherlands are withdrawing a combined $2.2 billion in support for the TotalEnergies-led Mozambique LNG project, they said separately on Monday, after both hired firms to probe human rights concerns surrounding the development.

Britain’s government said it was rescinding its $1.15 billion backing for project after promising in 2020 a $300 million loan and insurance worth about $700 million for the $20 billion project via UK Export Finance.

The Dutch government also said on Monday Total had withdrawn a $1.1 billion export insurance request for the project.

Atradius Dutch State Business authorised $1.3 billion in export insurance via two policies, the larger of which has been rescinded at the company’s request, the Dutch finance ministry said on Monday.

TotalEnergies declined to comment. Mozambique’s government did not respond to a request for comment.

CONSTRUCTION HALTED IN 2021, BUT DUE TO RESTART

Mozambique LNG’s construction was halted in 2021 due to an Islamist insurgency. Total lifted force majeure on its development in November, but made restarting conditional on the Mozambican government’s approval of a new budget, which the president said he may dispute.

“In preparation to restart the project, UKEF was presented with a proposal to amend the financing terms it had agreed originally,” British business minister Peter Kyle said in a statement.

“My officials have evaluated the risks around the project, and it is the view of His Majesty’s Government that these risks have increased since 2020.” The interests of UK taxpayers “are best served by ending our participation in the project at this time,” he added.

Jihadist attacks have been back on the rise in Mozambique, with Total bringing in workers and equipment this year by air and sea for security reasons.

PROJECT CAN PROCEED WITHOUT UK, DUTCH FINANCING, TOTAL HAS SAID

In April TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanne told investors that project partners could move forward without UK and Dutch financing, using equity.

More than 70% of the project’s financing is secured, and about 90% of the future gas production is commercialized via contracts with buyers.

Kyle said UKEF would pay back the project for any premium paid. A UKEF spokesperson declined to name the amount.

The Dutch finance minister on Monday said TotalEnergies had asked to cancel part of its insurance via a letter dated November 24, just as an independent human rights review ordered by the ministry was being finalised.

“This means that the Netherlands will no longer be involved in financing the project,” the statement reads.

A $213 million policy insuring Dutch contractor Van Oord remains in place, a ministry spokesperson said.

TotalEnergies holds a 26.5% operating stake in Mozambique LNG. Japan’s Mitsui (8031.T), opens new tab owns 20% in the project and Mozambique state firm ENH 15%, alongside smaller stakeholders including India’s ONGS and Oil India.

CRITICISM FROM ENVIRONMENTAL, HUMAN RIGHTS GROUPS

Human rights nonprofit ECCHR last month filed a criminal complaint against TotalEnergies, alleging it was complicit in torture and enforced disappearances allegedly carried out by government soldiers in Mozambique.

In April, UKEF hired law firm Beyond Human Rights Compliance LLP to investigate risks around Mozambique LNG following initial media reports of the alleged torture, three people interviewed by the firm told Reuters.

TotalEnergies has said those claims lack evidence.

The Dutch government said on Monday the two firms it hired to investigate — Clingendael and Pangea Risk — found the torture allegations credible, though they could not ascertain Total’s knowledge or role, if any.

A London court in 2023 dismissed a court challenge by environmental group Friends of the Earth against the British government’s funding for the project.

Source: reuters.com

SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS

The secretive cabal of US polluters that is rewriting the EU’s human rights and climate law

Published

4 months ago

December 5, 2025

witnessradio.org

Leaked documents reveal how a secretive alliance of eleven large multinational enterprises has worked to tear down the EU’s flagship human rights and climate law, the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). The mostly US-based coalition, which calls itself the Competitiveness Roundtable, has targeted all EU institutions, governments in Europe’s capitals, as well as the Trump administration and other non-EU governments to serve its own interests. With European lawmakers soon moving ahead to completely dilute the CSDDD at the expense of human rights and the climate, this research exposes the fragility of Europe’s democracy.

Key findings

Leaked documents reveal how a secretive alliance of eleven companies, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Koch, Inc., has worked under the guise of a “Competitiveness Roundtable” to get the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) either scrapped or massively diluted.
The companies, most of which are headquartered in the US and operate in the fossil fuel sector, aimed to “divide and conquer in the Council”, sideline “stubborn” European Commission departments, and push the European People’s Party (EPP) in the European Parliament “to side with the right-wing parties as much as possible”.
Chevron and ExxonMobil were in charge of mobilising pressure against the CSDDD from non-EU countries. The Roundtable companies endeavoured to get the CSDDD high on the agenda of the US-EU trade negotiations and also worked on mobilising other countries against the CSDDD, in order to disguise the US influence.
Roundtable companies paid the TEHA Group – a think tank – to write a research report and organise an event on EU competitiveness, which echoed the Roundtable’s position and cast doubt on the European Commission’s assessment of the economic impact of the CSDDD.

While Europeans were told that their governments were negotiating a landmark law to hold corporations accountable for human rights abuses and climate damage, a secretive alliance of US fossil fuel giants was working behind the scenes to destroy it. Collaborating under the innocent-sounding name ‘Competitiveness Roundtable’, eleven multinational enterprises have worked closely to eviscerate several EU sustainability laws, including the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). This Competitiveness Roundtable may be unknown, but its members are a who’s-who of polluting, mainly US, multinationals, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Dow. The group seems to have run rings around all branches of the EU and the Trump administration to get what they want: scrapping, or at least hugely diluting, the CSDDD.

Leaked documents obtained by SOMO reveal how, under the pretext of the now-near-magical concept of ‘competitiveness’, these companies plotted to hijack democratically adopted EU laws and strip them of all meaningful provisions, including those on climate transition plans, civil liability, and the scope of supply chains. EU officials appear not to have known who they were up against. But the documents obtained by SOMO show a high level of organisation and strategising with a clear facilitator: Teneo, a US public relations and consultancy company.

The documents indicate that many of the companies involved wanted to stay hidden from view. After all, if it were widely known that a secretive group of mostly American fossil fuel companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Koch, Inc. was working as a coordinated organisation to dilute an EU climate and human rights law, that might raise questions and serious concern among the public and the policymakers they were targeting. Many of the companies in the Roundtable have never publicly spoken out against the CSDDD.

Big Oil’s ‘Competitiveness Roundtable’

The Competitiveness Roundtable is dominated by fossil fuel companies, including three Big Oil companies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies) and three other companies with activities in the oil and gas sector (Koch, Inc., Honeywell, and Baker Hughes). Other members are Nyrstar (minerals and metals, a subsidiary of Trafigura Group); Dow, Inc. (chemicals); Enterprise Mobility (car rentals); and JPMorgan Chase (finance).

Teneo, the Roundtable’s coordinator, has a track record(opens in new window) of working with fossil fuel companies, including Chevron, Shell, and Trafigura, and was hired by the government of Azerbaijan to handle public relations(opens in new window) when it hosted the COP29 climate conference.

In February 2025, the European Commission published the Omnibus I proposal(opens in new window), which aims to “simplify” several EU sustainability laws, including the CSDDD. The documents obtained by SOMO reveal that the Roundtable companies, which have been meeting weekly since at least March 2025, worked on deep interventions within each of the three EU institutions to get the Omnibus I package to align exactly with their views. The EU institutions are expected to reach a final agreement on Omnibus I by the end of 2025.

The documents reveal that the Roundtable companies’ activities in the Parliament are far more significant than what is visible in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window). Eight of the Roundtable’s lobbying meetings during the Strasbourg plenary sessions of May and June 2025, listed in the Transparency Register, show Teneo as the only attendee, thereby failing to disclose the names of other Roundtable companies that participated in these meetings. Another three meetings the Roundtable held were not found in the EU Transparency Register(opens in new window) at all.

“Divide and conquer” the Council

In the European Council, the Roundtable plotted to “divide and conquer” EU governments to get the climate article in the CSDDD deleted. In June 2025, during the final weeks of negotiations in the Council on the Omnibus I proposal, the Roundtable discussed lobbying EU government leaders to “intervene politically” to ensure its priorities were included in the Council’s negotiation mandate. Subsequently, German Chancellor Merz and French President Macron reportedly(opens in new window) personally intervened(opens in new window) in the Council’s political process, leading to a dramatic dilution(opens in new window) of the texts(opens in new window) negotiated in the months before the intervention. Several of the changes made to the texts strongly align with the Roundtable’s demands, including delaying and substantially weakening the climate obligations, scrapping EU civil liability provisions, and limiting the responsibility of companies to take responsibility for their supply chains (the ‘Tier 1’ restriction).

^{Competitiveness Roundtable meeting document, 11 July 2025.}

Additionally, the documents reveal that the Roundtable is still aiming to drum up a “blocking minority” to overturn the Council’s negotiation mandate during the trilogue negotiations, which started in November 2025. By “tak[ing] advantage of the ‘weak’ Council negotiating mandate” and disagreements between EU Member States on “contentious articles”, the Competitiveness Roundtable companies hope to force the Danish Council presidency to give up on including any form of climate obligations in the CSDDD – despite EU Member States’ agreement on this in the June 2025 Council mandate(opens in new window) .

To implement the divide-and-conquer strategy, the Roundtable assigned specific companies to “establish rapporteurships” with different EU governments. TotalEnergies would target the French, Belgian, and Danish governments, and ExxonMobil would target Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

^{Competitiveness Roundtable meeting document, 16 May 2025.}

^{Competitiveness Roundtable meeting document, 11 July 2025.}

Circumventing “stubborn” European Commission departments

The Roundtable also discussed working on “circumvent[ing]” two “stubborn” European Commission departments involved in the Omnibus political process, DG JUST and DG FISMA, which, in their view, were “unlikely to be willing to see our side of the story”. According to the documents, DG JUST opposed deleting the climate article and restricting the Directive’s scope to only very large enterprises. The Roundtable aimed to diminish the role of these departments by pressuring President Von der Leyen and Commissioners McGrath (DG JUST) and Albuquerque (DG FISMA) by “organising letters from Irish and German business groups” and using an event held by the European Roundtable for Industry to “target” Von der Leyen and McGrath.

Read full report: Somo.nl

Source: Somo