Farmer’s protest in The Hague, Netherlands, Oct., 1 2019. The sign reads in Dutch: “Use your common sense, keep the farmers in our land.”

By John Klar

The stunning political win of the Farmer-Citizen Movement in recent provincial elections in the Netherlands was a populist backlash against ambitious environmental initiatives to eliminate thousands of law-abiding, multi-generational farmers to reduce nitrogen and other alleged pollutants. A similar clamor of farmers in Belgium recently blocked the streets of Brussels with 2,700 tractors. Environmental policies that measure nitrogen and carbon but ignore future food supplies are reckless.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has heightened its focus on food production in recent years, claiming it wishes to “shape the future of food” and that “the global food crisis must be solved alongside the climate crisis.” Moneyed interests have long jockeyed for greater world power and control, whether through organizations such as the WEF or corporate conglomerates seeking to dominate specific markets. The list of multinational corporations signed on with the WEF is impressive and includes the major food-producing companies of the world. There’s a lot of profit in food, and even more power. Eclipsing elected governments to save humanity from climate change meshes comfortably with globalist intentions to save the world from hunger — and together, they promise complete domination.

In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger reportedly advocated making the provision of food relief conditional on nations’ implementation of birth-control policies. If Kissinger, now a sitting member of the WEF, was willing to blackmail whole societies with food five decades ago, he likely hasn’t changed his Machiavellian tune. There’s little difference between coercion to use birth control (to save the planet from overpopulation) and climate-change despotism to eliminate greenhouse gasses (to save the planet from the current population).

The timing of this push to reduce food production is ominous. The war in Ukraine has already disrupted world grain and other food supplies. India, China, and Russia reduced exports of fertilizers needed to maintain agricultural productivity. Small farms have been steadily declining in Belgium for decades, as throughout most of Europe, favoring large-scale industrial food producers and processors. Dutch farmers are the most efficient and productive in Europe — where would that food be replaced from?

United States at Risk

The United States is vulnerable to disruptions with its globally entwined food production, processing, and distribution. The wealthiest nation in the world is potentially one of the most vulnerable to famine. For many decades, food in America has been quite inexpensive by historic measures, dropping to an average 9 percent of household budgets.

Because food has been cheap, Americans have devalued it. Farmers are sneered at instead of respected. Once-verdant agricultural lands have been reforested, paved, or “developed” for parking lots and urbanized living, or chopped into geometric patterns of suburban lots where vegetable gardens have mostly disappeared, replaced by lawns contaminated with annual applications of synthetic fertilizers, weed killers, and pesticides. That idyllic suburban order conceals a dangerous disconnect.

Profit-Seeking Corporations

Farmers are not the only victims of this folly. Drive-thru dining has corrupted a traditional communal kitchen-table celebration into an uncouth overindulgence in unhealthy foods. Americans are increasingly obese, diabetic, sterile, and cancer-ridden. Vast swaths of the public suffer from heart disease or high blood pressure — largely due to cheap, processed, unhealthy food.

Corporate America has long favored profit over customer health. Cigarette companies were fully aware by the 1950s that their products caused cancer, according to a study in the journal Tobacco Control, yet butts still hang from American lips — a top plastic pollutant and more nicotine-potent and toxic than ever. Do American consumers believe their food supplies are more sacrosanct to profiteers than human lungs?

Thomas Jefferson reputedly claimed, “If people let the government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.”

Could it be that governments would conspire to favor economic gain above human health? Might Bill Gates’ acquisition of vast tracts of farmland, and patents of vaccines and artificial meat fabricated in fancy factories, be driven by the same desire for material gain that fueled his creation of Microsoft? Gates’ extensive investments in renewable energy parallel the WEF’s twin priorities of climate and food: altruism or savvy investment strategy?

Food Supply Shortages

Environmental policies feigning rescue from climate change will shut down farmers, ensuring higher food prices and growing shortages. This increases vulnerabilities to global disruptions that already threaten us. Severing Taiwan’s microchip trade from the West would quickly shut down tractor-trailer trucks as well as farm tractors. A strong Russia-China alliance could quickly trigger famines of biblical literalism.

The U.S. infrastructure of highways upon which food delivery depends is vulnerable to sustained interruption — by social unrest, economic collapse, and dependence on technology. Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) is essential for the tractor-trailer trucks that distribute Americans’ foods. America imports most of its DEF from China. Runaway inflation compounded by ever greater government spending will exponentially affect the price of most foods and could trigger a vicious cycle of hyperinflation and currency collapse. Where will people find food?

Vermont boasted some 27,000 dairy farms in 1927, 11,000 in the 1950s, and now it shamefully claims fewer than 600. The human population of the Green Mountains expanded with the installation of highways that often severed family farms; the native populations of chickens, pigs, and cows have been decimated. Most states have even less agricultural infrastructure than Vermont: America has abandoned its small farms. More people, less local food.

If consumers think grocery store shelves were barren during Covid-19, they have not imagined the zombieland created by sustained interruptions of food supplies. Imagine flash mobs convening on empty buildings, seeking not Louis Vuitton but Lorna Doone or Dinty Moore. Survivors of the Great Depression tell tales of olden-times want, but their voices are weak and long-ignored by the modern assumption that there will ever be plenty.

WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab, Kissinger, and Gates may have a plan. Americans planted “victory gardens” in response to both world wars. Conflict over the control and taxation of food seeded American rebellion from Great Britain. In turn, that American Revolutionary rebellion was supplied with vital food from a flourishing farming culture and economy, so that their souls would not live under tyranny.

Many Americans clamor for their government to compel fellow citizens to receive mRNA vaccines. Experimental anti-obesity and hormone-blocking drugs for children abound. How quickly the government could be in control of all food. Then Americans would see the logic behind farmer-patriot Jefferson’s warning of totalitarianism “if people let the government decide what foods they eat.”

The specter of global corporations shutting down small farms for alleged pollution is the epitome of Orwellian domination. In their quest to slay the climate-change dragon, global profiteers will scythe down humanity, destroying local agricultures like a global version of Sherman’s March to the Sea.

Small-scale, local farms dispersed through the countryside are the best antidote to globalism. Buy local.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield. This commentary originally appeared at The Federalist.