Again from Issues & Insights, which is becoming one of my favorite daily reads, we have The Elites’ War on Food. Excerpts, with my comments, follow:
A few months back, stories of “suspicious” fires at food-production plants raged across the media. The narrative said the sites were being sabotaged to disrupt the food supply. And it was most likely wrong. But that doesn’t mean there is no effort on the part of Western elites to put the peasants on a strict diet.
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?”
It’s going to make the cost of food skyrocket, you say? It already is! And forget the “family farmer” comment; it’s going to make the costs of big corporate farming operations skyrocket, too, and those big operations are responsible for an ever-increasing share of our modern food production.
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.
All of these are features, not bugs; it’s impossible to see them any other way. I would normally rather attribute such actions as these to stupidity or incompetence rather than malevolence, but these policies are too widespread, too well coordinated, too similar across national boundaries for them to be the result of morons.
Several proponents of these wrecking-ball policies have noted outright that the goal is to remove capitalism as an economic system from the developed world, and they sure seem to be heading in that direction; but the end results of these policies, global famine, would seem to fit the Green agenda in other ways as well.
But here’s where I think the Greens lose their way: The end result of this kind of thinking won’t end the way they think it will, with the survivors being a bunch of urban lotus-eaters enjoying their vegan lunches with some nice imported tea. The folks who get through this will be the rural folks who can have a truck garden in their yard and can go out and shoot a deer (or moose) when they need protein.
And those folks – myself among them – are generally pretty fond of free markets. You know – capitalism.
