RI’s Response to The Ecologist’s “The Regenerative Ranching Racket”
Brendan Montague,
Editor of The Ecologist, at brendan@theecologist.org
Re: The regenerative ranching racket by Spencer Roberts, June 14, 2021
Dear Brendan,
The credibility of the Ecologist is being seriously questioned when it engages in deliberate fraud and makes false claims in order to try to discredit the fastest growing agricultural movement in the world.
Your journalist conducted outright fraud and lied when registering a false farm on our Farm Map and openly admits this. He further deliberately misrepresented the purpose of our Farm Map.
The Farm Map is a free service that connects thousands of farmers around the world to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. It is a self-regulating service not a certification system. Customers can let us know if farms are making false claims and we can remove them from the map. This service is particularly important in the developing world where farmers are the lowest socioeconomic group, in part, due to not being paid fairly for what they produce.
The same journalist that openly lies and commits fraud, then goes on to try and discredit various leaders of the global regeneration movement. We have the verified published data to show that these farmers and their various systems sequester more CO2 out of the atmosphere than they emit. Unlike industrial farming which, depending on the methodologies used, accounts for up to 50% of global emissions, regenerative agriculture has solid published science to show that it sequesters more CO2 than it emits. We can change agriculture from being a major problem to becoming a major solution for the climate crisis.
32 countries, many regions, UNFAO, IFAD, GEF, CGIAR and hundreds of NGOs support changing farming from being a major CO2 emitter to becoming a major mitigator of CO2 by storing it in soil as soil organic matter. They have signed on to the 4 for 1000 initiative that was launched by the French Government at the Paris Climate Change meeting Dec. 2015. The UNFCCC recognizes this initiative as part of the Lima – Paris accord in the Paris agreement.
Industrial agriculture in its various forms has the most significant effect on land use on the planet. It is responsible for most of the environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, forest destruction, toxic chemicals in our food and environment and a significant contributor, up to 50%, to the climate crisis. The degenerative forms of agriculture are an existential threat to us and most other species on our planet. We have to regenerate agriculture for social, environmental, economic and cultural reasons and that is exactly what we in the global regenerative movement are doing.
Yours Faithfully,
André Leu, International Director, June 19, 2021