Biotech Firm Plans To Fund GM Rice Crops With Carbon Credits
The Guardian reported this week that Arcadia Biosciences will soon begin offering Chinese companies rewards for planting genetically modified crops. Arcadia plans to sell companies carbon credits, which can then be resold from cash, in exchange for plant GM crops. Read more about it below…
C.S. Prakash
Biotech Firm Plans To Fund GM Rice Crops With Carbon Credits
The London Times
January 08, 2007
Money paid by green consumers to offset their flights and by companies that go carbon-neutral will be used to fund the planting of genetically modified (GM) crops under plans drawn up by a US biotechnology company.
Arcadia Biosciences is working with the Chinese government to reward farmers in China that grow the firm's genetically modified (GM) rice, with carbon credits that they can sell for cash.
The credits would be sold on the global carbon trading market set up under the Kyoto protocol, the international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which is used by governments, companies and individuals to offset their pollution. Arcadia plans to expand the Chinese scheme to more crops in other countries, including Britain.
Arcadia says its GM rice requires less nitrogen fertiliser, and so farmers that grow it will lower their emissions of nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Swapping global rice supply to the GM version, the company says, would save the equivalent of 50m tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, and generate 750m in carbon credits for farmers.
Eric Rey, the president and chief executive of the California-based Arcadia, told the Guardian: "A technology that allows farmers to participate in carbon credit markets will give agriculture a clear incentive to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. It's a way for farmers, and us, to make money, while doing something positive to help the environment."
World agriculture accounts for 17% of industrial greenhouse gas emissions, more than the transport sector. Rey aims to have the Chinese scheme running by 2012, in time to take advantage of new carbon markets expected to be created by a successor treaty to Kyoto. The first steps towards such a treaty were taken at the UN climate meeting in Bali last month.
