Farming Carbon

Small farmers across the developing world already have a crop of great value to the world — and that's before they've grown anything. Locked up in the soils they cultivate and the trees they fell is a vast and valuable stock of a resource essential to the survival of the world as we know it. If they could only tap in on the growing market for this "commodity," they could be doing a lot better than they have been growing soybeans and alfalfa.

They could become carbon farmers. The $10.7 million Carbon Benefits Project, launched in May by the U.N. Environment Programme, aims to find out how much carbon is locked up in the soils and trees of small farms in China, western Kenya, Niger and Nigeria. If the project can use these sites to work up a cost effective, accessible and accurate method for measuring and monitoring carbon stocks, it may open the door a lot wider for small-farmer participation in this lucrative market.

The Copenhagen climate meeting in December may green light a global scheme for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), which will give value to existing carbon stocks, thereby rewarding countries that maintain their carbon by protecting forests. If countries stand to benefit by encouraging sustainable land-use patterns and forest preservation, they are likely to offer farmers incentives to "farm" carbon by, for example, maintaining standing forests on their land instead of cutting them down to grow crops. Everyone benefits, perhaps the farmers most of all.