by Anne MacLennan
Recent reports highlight the huge problem of perverse incentives with big corporations subsidised to persist in, and expand, destructive climate, environmental and social practices. At least £2 trillion a year (2.5% global GDP) is spent to support environmental harms through fossil fuels, intensive agriculture, over fishing, and plastics in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and other spending. Christiana Figueres, who led the Paris agreement negotiations, described environmentally harmful subsidies as an existential issue. “Two years on from the signing of the landmark biodiversity plan, we continue to finance our own extinction, putting people and our resilience at huge risk.”
Alarmingly, big Global North banks are supplying 20 times more finance to fossil fuel and agricultural developments in the Global South than their governments have forked out in climate finance to these climate-vulnerable countries. There is a co-dependency between the fossil fuel industry and intensive agriculture, the two largest contributors to climate change, driving deforestation, and aggressively marketed agrochemicals to expand factory farming while undermining billions of smallholder farmers and their agroecological farming systems which could otherwise feed the world while cooling the planet.
Globally the food industry produces 30% of all emissions, releasing greenhouse gases by clearing land to plant crops, or graze animals, applying chemical fertilisers and pesticides, plastic packaging and releasing methane from livestock and paddy (rice) fields.
Worldwide emissions from the 10 biggest food and drink companies (477m tonnes) was higher than global air travel emissions (426m) or total UK emissions in 2022.
Just think how these subsidies could be re-routed to support renewable energy, agroecology, even heat pumps and insulation to foster resilient communities and economies. To quote Christiana again, “If we keep abusing nature, it will collapse, taking us with it. We need a new mindset.”
It’s easy to feel helpless when confronted by the power of misguided corporations and governments, but we can each try to support nature-friendly agricultural practices especially local, and to minimise fossil fuel and plastic use. If enough people buck the trends, the powers will be reduced and potentially redirected.