"When the missionaries came, we had the land and they had the Bible. They told us to close our eyes and pray. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land."
Attributed to Jomo Kenyatta
The title of this essay asks a question whose stakes are rising. Natural capital is central to carbon sequestration, energy generation, and the mining of critical minerals in jurisdictions historically populated by indigenous peoples who communally own their ancestral lands.
To price an ecosystem, you must first cut it into units - verified carbon units (VCUs) - but the cutting severs the parts from the whole. Yet for ecosystems, the parts make the whole. The market does not price the forest. It prices the abstraction imposed upon the forest, then enforces that abstraction back onto the territory. The important question is not whether to price what was never for sale, but why it is for sale in the first place.
Originally published by African Business.