By Lina Sagaral Reyes
Special Correspondent
Conclusion
BECAUSE of its carbon sinks in Mindanao, the Del Monte Pacific Limited (DMPL) claims that its subsidiary, Del Monte Philippines Inc. (DMPI), is carbon-negative, meaning it sequesters more carbon than it emits.
In its Sustainability Reports in fiscal years 2018 and 2019, DMPI says it has planted 16,700 and 30,000 trees, in 2017 and 2018, respectively. It estimates that around 230,000 trees have been grown within the past decade in support of the government’s National Greening Program, including those trees planted by the Del Monte Employees Agrarian Reform Cooperative, from whom DMPI leases 8,000 hectares of plantation land.
Most of these trees, the report said, are endemic species from nurseries maintained by the indigenous Higaonon. The trees are located in “plantation camps, company grounds, facilities, and river easements while bamboo is planted along field boundaries and non-arable land.’’
According to Raulito Rodil, DMPL senior manager for Sustainability, DMPI employees have grown those trees in at least 230 hectares, 21 hectares of which are in the Mt. Kitanglad Natural Park in Bukidnon. Of these, about 2,700 trees were planted in Misamis Oriental.
DMPI claims that as early as 2008, its own monitoring showed that it is carbon-negative, with planted trees as its main carbon-offsetting feature.
Carbon offsetting is an organization’s reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases made to compensate for emissions made elsewhere. It is expressed in tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
DMPI, in its 2019 Sustainability Report released in August this year, highlighted that its carbon footprint is ‘’net 567,00 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent.’’ When pressed further for details, Rodil explained that ‘’using an app, (it was determined) DMPI emitted in 2018, about 220,957,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane, hydro-fluorocarbons, perfluoro-carbons, and sulfur hexafluoride emissions, among others.’’
Its reforestation and tree plantations absorbed around 791, 230 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
In the meantime, three researchers approached independently for this story to comment on DMPI’s claims, have expressed skepticism.
Joni Jupesta, who has a doctorate in management science and technology from Tohoku University in Japan pointed out that while agricultural plantations using intensive farming as DMPI are absorbers of carbon dioxide, it is also the greatest source of nitrous oxide, another greenhouse gas, through the generous use of nitrogen as fertilizers to increase crop yield.
According to a 2009 study by scientists at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, nitrous oxide is considered 298 times more potent in damaging the atmosphere and causing global warming than carbon dioxide and methane. The scientists have called it the most harmful ozone-depleting gas of the 21st century. The expansion of agri-industrial lands and the use of synthetic fertilizers have been identified as the main drivers for its large quantities of emissions.
Further, Jupesta, a lead author of the 2021 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also asked whether DMPI included all factors into the computation, like emissions from land-use change as clearing land and deep furrowing, production facilities, machinery, and fertilizers.
“All must be factored in. The company must publish this carbon accounting transparently to prove its claims,’’ Jupesta urged.
Jupesta continued, “The norm is that (a company like DMPI) is a net positive (of) greenhouse gases. Otherwise, such a claim is (based on) pseudoscience.’’
Rocky Marius de Ramos, an engineer at Ateneo de Davao University School of Engineering and Architecture who has done the life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies on pineapples, mangroves and oil palm, on the other hand, dared DMPI to subject its pineapples to an independent LCA.
The LCA accounts for the environmental impacts of a product like a pineapple, from farm to shelf, from cultivation to processing, including its carbon footprint.
Like Jupesta, de Ramos urges DMPI to focus on an LCA of its pineapples.
“The thing is, when a carbon accounting app is used, everything is based on assumption,’’ he opined.
LCA is more fact-intensive, according to Jupesta and De Ramos, and allows for the identification of specific climate mitigating measures along the production line.
Meanwhile, Laurence Delina, a climate-change mitigation policy expert based at Hongkong University of Science and Technology, suggests, “they (DMPI) should look at the life cycle of their products – account for the emissions of each part and find ways to cut emissions in all those parts.’’
An LCA conducted by environmental engineer Wesley Ingwersen on fresh pineapple in Costa Rica, the world’s largest pineapple grower determined that Costa Rican fresh pineapple has a carbon footprint of 0.079 kilogram of carbon dioxide per one-cup serving of 165 grams. The Ingwersen’s study was published in the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2012.
On the other hand, according to an LCA on fresh pineapples in the southern Philippines by De Ramos and Evelyn Taboada published in Nature, Environment and Pollution Technology in 2018, showed that carbon footprint is much lower at 0.037kg CO2 per serving. The same study showed that processed pineapples in Southern Mindanao has a carbon footprint of 0.072 kg CO2 per serving.
Both studies show that 40-68 percent of carbon emissions happened on the farm, mostly due to nitrogen fertilizers and partly due to the use of fuel.
Meanwhile, Jupesta and de Ramos further suggested that DMPI allow a third-party to verify and validate its carbon footprint just as it got certifications for its food safety and agricultural practices from global certification firms to make these claims more credible.
Certifications would make also a company more transparent to the public. “If it (DMPI) subjects itself to carbon accounting certification, it is compelled to make public its emissions and sequestration,’’ said Jupesta.
Meanwhile, no other major company in the Philippines had claimed a carbon-negative footprint aside from DMPI. Other publicly-listed companies like SM Group of Companies and Ayala Corporation, however, declared goals to become carbon neutral by 2022.
In 2018, however, geothermal energy producer Energy Development Corporation (EDC) made it to the Carbon Clean 200 of Bloomberg New Energy Finance for its carbon-neutral status. The EDC has a verified claim that it had planted 6.2 million seedlings of trees covering 8,964 hectares of denuded land in Quezon province and thus sequestered 793,563 metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent.
Meanwhile, back in his four-hectare fruit-tree farm and human-made forest in barangay Sta. Cruz, Claveria, Patindol contemplates on Del Monte’s reforestation and tree plantations for carbon offsetting on one hand, and on the other hand, the local impacts of carving out farms from steep cleared slopes.
“I am not against development but it has to be the development that benefits both the local people and its environment. It might not have been fully grown forests they cleared but still the making of a forest yet. Del Monte plants trees elsewhere even as it clears reforested lands here, it is all right by them.’’ he said. ‘’But not for us.’’
(This story was produced as part of the ‘Exploring Corporate Impact’ Programme, a joint project of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation funded by the GRI. More information at https://www.globalreporting/information/sustainability-reporting/Pages/default.aspx. The content is the sole responsibility of the author.)
