Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Green grabs and biochar: revaluing African soils and farming in the new carbon economy
AU - Leach, Melissa
AU - Fairhead, James
AU - Fraser, James
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins - for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health - not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is 'chopped out' of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human-nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.
AB - Biochar currently attracts technological and market optimism, promising multiple wins - for climate change, food security, bioenergy and health - not least for African farmers. This paper examines the political-economic and discursive processes constructing biochar as a novel green commodity, creating new alliances amongst scientists, businesses, venture capital firms and non-governmental organisations. Carbon market logics are not only threatening large-scale land grabs for biochar feedstocks but also other forms of resource, labour and ecological appropriation through driving research and development and shaping small-scale pilot projects. In these, soil carbon is 'chopped out' of its ecosystem and social contexts and revalued as exchangeable pieces of carbon nature. Farmers are hailed as green actors and market winners, provided they discipline their practices according to these new technical and market logics. These discourses contrast strongly with the farmers' existing conceptual and practical repertoires; a case study from Liberia illustrates how farmers already manipulate soil carbon in creating locally valued anthropogenic dark earths, but within diverse farming repertoires, ontologies of human-nature interrelationship and historical and political ecologies.
KW - biochar
KW - CLIMATE-CHANGE
KW - Africa
KW - LAND
KW - green grabbing
KW - carbon market
KW - farming
KW - KNOWLEDGE
U2 - 10.1080/03066150.2012.658042
DO - 10.1080/03066150.2012.658042
M3 - Journal article
VL - 39
SP - 285
EP - 307
JO - The Journal of Peasant Studies
JF - The Journal of Peasant Studies
SN - 0306-6150
IS - 2
ER -