Food and Climate Panel and Opposing the Financialization of Nature and Greenwashing

Thanks to NOFA-NH and Seacoast Permaculture for hosting the recent Food and Climate Panel including many Rural Vermont Board members and our Legislative Director Caroline Gordon!  As we see the encroachment of investor backed, market based efforts which sell themselves as addressing climate change and contributing to the economic viability of farms and rural communities - we must recognize and confront these efforts as false solutions, and push for solutions which are driven by communities themselves and which directly affect the reduction of fossil fuel emissions and other environmental pollutants from the principle polluters, and which affect the broader structural changes related to economic, social, and political equity we need for our communities and farms to be healthy and just. 

Phrases, concepts, and programs such as “off-sets”, “net zero”, “natural asset companies” (NACs) or “natural asset trusts”, corporate farmland acquisition subsidiaries marketed as “socially responsible investments” (such as TIAA’s subsidiary Nuveen which the State of VT invested $100 million of VT pensioners’ money into) do not require the reduction of emissions or pollutants, do not require the equitable participation or treatment of local communities in relationship to their lands / waters / natural resources and human rights, and rather than bring accountability to the primary creators and perpetrators of global climate change and inequity, they create further opportunities for them to create new asset classes, further profit economically, and extend further disproportionate influence and control over the lives and resources of communities around the world. This slide presented by the Regenerative Food Network at the 2022 Farm to Plate Gathering explicitly belies the primary motivations and intentions of investors to assign monetary values to “nature’s economy” - an investment opportunity many times the size of the existing economy: 

These are concepts and programs with frightening real world consequences for communities locally and globally.  Equitable tax policies, anti-trust enforcement, essential social welfare policies (healthcare, childcare, eldercare, housing, etc.), improved and cooperative programs for farmers, repairative policies for communities who have been disproportionately and historically harmed and discriminated against, price parity reforms, land reforms and many other efforts which are directed by and center the needs of people and the environment and which reclaim the agency and wealth of the public sector and the local and global commons are what Rural Vermont, our national allies at the National Family Farm Coalition, and our international allies at La Via Campesina understand to be meaningful and appropriate approaches to addressing climate change and a just transition.