Carbon credits: African cotton farmers could soon be paid twice

Cotton remains a strategic cash crop for several African economies - Benin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Chad - where millions of smallholders depend on this export sector exposed to the vagaries of global market prices. In this context, the idea of financially rewarding the carbon stored in agricultural soils is gaining traction, driven by the boom in voluntary carbon markets. According to the Bird Story Agency, as reported by AllAfrica, a system tested in Uzbekistan could enable farmers to earn a dual income: from selling cotton fiber, and from the carbon sequestered in their soil. However, the very brief source dispatch specifies neither the name of the program nor the implementing stakeholders (institution, NGO, private company), nor the amounts or volumes of credits involved, nor the technical modalities for carbon certification. For African producers, such a mechanism would represent a welcome diversification of often precarious rural incomes. Yet its transposition from Uzbekistan - whose cotton sector is largely state-controlled - to African contexts dominated by smallholder farms raises unresolved questions: who would finance certification, how to reliably measure soil carbon, and at what price these credits would be valued on voluntary markets known for their volatility and controversies surrounding their true additionality.