AIM for Climate (AIM4C) is a deliberate ploy to reframe industrial agriculture and big tech as climate change heroes rather than the climate change villains that they actually are, write ETC Group in a press announcement.
According to the group, the launch of the new "AIM for Climate" initiative by President Joe Biden and the United Arab Emirates, supported by the UK Government and others,[1] at the World Leaders Summit innovation event,[2] is deliberately intended to reframe agribusiness and tech corporations as part of the solution to climate change, thereby propping up industrial agriculture. ETC Group said, "It comes as ag giants such as Bayer, John Deere and Cargill are reinventing themselves as ‘ag-tech’. Big data companies like Microsoft and Amazon’s AWS are also moving rapidly into the digital agriculture frame."[3]
ETC Group continued, "The ‘Net Zero’ trap, which is today challenged by over 700 civil society organisations in Glasgow and around the world,[4] is the icing on the cake for a new pitch being made by Big Ag and Big Tech. By presenting AIM4C as a new and 'game-changing solution' to climate change and the future of food, they aim to win carbon credits, even for what looks set to be an energy-hungry and seemingly farmer-free form of food production, enabling it to also continue using fossil fuels.[5] The path laid out by AIM4C will distract and delay real climate action, pushing investment in entirely the wrong direction."
ETC Group’s coordinator, Neth Daño, said, “Biden’s ‘gift’ to COP26, AIM4C, is really part of designing future agriculture without farmers. While small farmers, fishers, pastoralists and urban growers feed the majority of the world’s population at the same time as cooling the planet, AIM4C’s website doesn’t even mention farmers at all.”[6]
ETC Group stated, "AIM4C could also be a poisoned arrow for food policy – shot in entirely the wrong direction – towards increased energy use and strengthening the very industrial food chain that is harming the climate. If successful, AIM4C could take out the smallholder and peasant farmers who really feed and cool the world through agroecological farming."
Jim Thomas, ETC Group’s Research Director, said, “With AIM4C, Joe Biden, the UAE, the UK and others are putting a target on farmers’ backs with a view to replacing them with robots, data, gene-edited seeds and boosted tech profits for the Silicon Valley set."
ETC Group said we should "support and uphold peasant and smallholder agroecology around the world, which is a real and equitable means of promoting food sovereignty and climate justice for all".
Source: ETC Group https://etcgroup.org/content/poisoned-arrow-food-and-climate-policy
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