Carbon Credit Plans

Green consumers paying to offset their carbon rich activities could see their credits being offered as incentives to rice farmers for growing genetically modified rice.  The biotechnology company Arcadia Biosciences is working with the Chinese government to reward farmers in China that grow the firm's genetically modified rice, with carbon credits that they can sell for cash.  The Chinese project is in Ningxia, a tiny mountainous province in the north of the country, where fertilizer use is among the highest in the country.  Arcadia's rice has not yet been planted there – the company must first get regulatory approval, as well as convince the government to allow farmers to sell the GM rice for food.

Carbon conscious consumers may not like the idea, or the irony, of funding an activity that is surrounded by controversy about the potential risk to environment and people.  But on the other hand is the argument that it would reduce emissions while producing high yield crops.  Arcadia’s profitable technology maintains high yields, while requiring 50 to 60 per cent less nitrogen fertilizer, significantly reducing emissions of nitrous oxide - a greenhouse gas some 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Rice is an attractive crop, being a staple that covers a lot of ground and is responsible for approximately 20 percent of global nitrogen fertilizer use, making it a good example in the nitrogen oxide reduction argument.  Arcadia says swapping global rice supply to the GM version would save the equivalent of 50 million tons of carbon dioxide each year, and generate over one billion dollars in carbon credits for farmers.  (newconsumer.com, 1/9/08).