More deliberate destruction: food shortages

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The editorial at Issues & Insights pretty much answers its own questions:

. . . Most by now have seen reports that Dutch officials are closing as many as 3,000 farms in the Netherlands, the world’s second-largest exporter of agricultural products by value even though it’s only slightly larger than Maryland, to comply with crackpot European Union carbon dioxide emissions rules. It’s possible that eventually more than 11,000 farms will be shut down, and 17,600 forced to sharply cut their livestock numbers.

On our side of the Atlantic, the malefactors are also busy. Just the News is reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is quietly quadrupling the regulatory cost of carbon emissions in a new war on fossil fuels, which is, of course, also a war on the food supply.

“If you think about the fact that they would impose this damage factor, let’s say on farmers, because it applies to fertilizer,” Louisiana Solicitor General Liz Murill said on the John Solomon Reports podcast. “Fertilizer emits nitrous oxide. So fertilizer is a big contributor. If every family farmer now is going to have to pay more to obtain fertilizer to fertilize crops that feed us, well, what’s that going to do to the price of food?”

Are these mere coincidences, entirely unrelated, isolated events?

Could be. But …

• U.S. farmers are convinced that “government meddling threatens their livelihoods and the nation’s food security.”
• “Unrealistic green-energy policies in Europe – and the Biden administration’s hostility to U.S. energy production – are worsening energy shortages,” writes James Meigs in City Journal “With energy prices soaring, food production and distribution will suffer.”
• Global skunks are promoting bugs as an alternative to the foods we enjoy, which is an implicit way of saying “you can eat insects, as unpalatable as they are, or you can go hungry – it’s almost time to choose.”
• The White House has added agricultural land to the federal Conservation Reserve Program, encouraging farmers to leave their land fallow. It’s part, says essayist John Mac Ghlionn, writing in the Washington Times, “of a broader, government-wide push to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Interestingly, the Biden administration’s goal is very similar to the Dutch government’s goal.”
• Canadian boy Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has proposed rules that will “decimate Canadian farming.” 
• “Even as food shortages intensify, governments, including the Biden administration, are cracking down harder on agricultural production,” the Epoch Times reports. “While the attacks on agriculture and related industries look different in different nations, many experts say it’s a coordinated global policy being promoted by the U.N., the World Economic Forum (WEF), the European Union, and other international forces determined to transform civilization.”
• “The Biden administration has engaged in an omni-directional assault on our food production system,” says the Heartland Institute.

As it turns out, all this is happening at the same time “the number of people affected by hunger has more than doubled in the past three years”, according to the United Nations, as “almost a million people are living in famine conditions, with starvation and death a daily reality.”

. . .

If only the WEF [World Economic Forum] were some fringe group that had no influence. But it’s not – it’s a well-funded syndicate with an axis of powerful followers.

Read the full editorial here. 

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Bill Gates: The Great Reset and The Great Refusal

 

Colin Todhunter specializes in development, food and agriculture and is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. He takes a deep dive into the world of agriculture that Bill Gates envisions for us “eaters.” It is a monstrous vision.  Here’s a small extract via Off-Guardian (h/t AmericaFirstReport):

. . . The biggest owner of private farmland in the US – Bill Gates – has a vision for farming: a chemical-dependent, corporate-dependent, one-world agriculture (Ag One initiative) to facilitate the global supply chains of conglomerates. This initiative is side-lining indigenous knowledge and practices in favour of corporate knowledge and a further colonisation of global agriculture.

Gates’s corporatisation of smallholder agriculture is packaged in philanthropic terms – ‘helping’ farmers in places like Africa and India. It has not worked out well so far if we turn to the Gates-backed Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established in 2006.

The first major evaluation of AGRA’s efforts to expand high-input agriculture in Africa found that – after 15 years – it had failed. . . .

With lab-based synthetic meat being promoted and attracting huge interest from investors, Gates and the agritech sector also envisage a largely ‘climate-friendly’ animal-free agriculture, which they claim will result in freeing up vast tracts of farmland (we can only speculate for what).

It remains to be seen just how energy-efficient, environment-friendly and health-friendly synthetic meat labs are once scaled up to industrial levels. . . .

And don't forget the bugs!  In the conclusion:

The neoliberal programme that took root in the 1980s has now reached a debt-bloated, inflationary impasse. In response, capitalism has embarked on a ‘great reset’ with transformative technology very much to the fore in the guise of a ‘4th Industrial Revolution’, promising a brave new tomorrow for all.

However, there are deep-seated concerns about how this technology could be used to monitor and control entire populations, especially as we are witnessing a brutal economic restructuring and increasing clampdowns on personal liberties. If neoliberalism promoted individualism, the ‘new normal’ demands strict compliance – individual freedom is said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.

. . .

The controlling nature of technology pervades all aspects of life today. But whether it involves farmers protests in Europe and India, the advancement of a political agroecology, truckers taking to the streets in Canada or ordinary people protesting against a rapidly advancing authoritarianism in Western societies, many people across the world know something is seriously amiss.

. . . we are seeing a ‘great refusal’ – people saying ‘no’ to multiple forms of repression and domination – tentacles of an economic system in crisis.

Read the full report at Off-Guardian here (it’s long). 

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