Green Cartels, Brown Costs, explained
In April 2026 Nigeria's FCCPC published draft guidance that, like the UK's CMA, counts the benefits of climate agreements between competitors for "Nigerian consumers as a whole", not only for buyers in the affected market. This explainer follows the brief's argument that the wider class assumes the people paying the green premium are the people receiving the benefit, an assumption that fails in African markets for essentials such as fertiliser and cooking fuel.
In this explainer
- 1
EU guidelines require the benefits of a restrictive sustainability agreement to reach consumers in the affected market, or one substantially overlapping with it; the CMA counts benefits to all UK consumers, for climate change agreements only.
- 2
The FCCPC's April 2026 exposure draft takes the UK position at paragraph 16. Its safeguards test whether a benefit is real, but none asks who receives it.
- 3
Paragraph 20 floats a block exemption for standardisation agreements with no market-share limb, although the draft sets out the EU's 20% threshold at paragraph 15(a).
- 4
The brief argues a green premium on fertiliser could raise net emissions by pushing smallholders to clear land, and smallholders buying for a trade fall outside the FCCPA's definition of consumer.
- 5
The brief proposes four amendments, starting with an incidence condition, and argues they are a drafting exercise now but much harder once a continental authority has copied the model.
Sources
- FCCPC, Explanatory Guidelines (Exposure Draft, April 2026)
- CMA, Green Agreements Guidance (12 October 2023)
- European Commission, Horizontal Guidelines [2023] OJ C259/1
- ACM, analysis of the 'Chicken of Tomorrow' sustainability arrangements (2015)
- Competition Commission of South Africa, 'The Unravelling of a Fertiliser Cartel as Sasol Settles' (June 2009)
- Full reference list: 44 sources in the brief