Table of Contents
John Klar
A recent report produced by the World Bank leaves no doubt that what has unfolded against farmers in Holland, Belgium, and France is a precursor to globalist plans of food control and all food production (and diet choices) for humanity in the name of rescuing the planet from cows and destructive agriculture. Woven into the new plan are the usual false claims about farming, which should serve as a warning about the true intentions of this world-dominating proposal.
The ironic title of the report is “Recipe for a Livable Planet,” a prescription for complete food control, profits for corporate “stakeholders,” unfettered wealth redistribution, and the further degradation of traditional small-scale farming. The premise is that “the food system must be fixed because it is making the planet ill and is a big slice of the climate change pie.” This is a dubious claim, as cows and livestock are maligned as huge contributors to climate change threats when, in fact, they are the cornerstone of soil health and carbon sequestration.
Low-hanging Climate Fruit?
The report employs flawed logic to argue that food supplies must be the chief climate target for humanity:
“Until now, efforts to reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions have focused elsewhere – on sectors like energy, transport, and manufacturing, where scaling up a few key technologies has made an important difference in reducing emissions. However, these low-hanging fruits have mostly been harvested, and emissions levels are still far from where they need to be to avert climate catastrophe.”
That “low-hanging fruit” of renewables is far from being “mostly harvested” – grid capacity is inadequate, and the failing EV and solar panel markets reflect not only economic shortcomings but also the failure of these technologies to deliver as promised. The new report gushes about the hidden externalized costs of agriculture while ignoring the tremendous externalized pollution costs of the so-called “renewables” industry, from mining, coal plants to smelt aluminum and produce solar panels, and disposal impacts.
What of the low-hanging fruit of recreational energy consumption? Why are global entities advocating for total food control in the name of saving the planet, while completely ignoring flatscreen TVs, lawnmowers, downhill skiing, golf courses, and recreational jet travel? Such uses are unjustifiable if the world is about to end yet remain unaddressed while food and cows are targeted. Some 800 million gallons of refined gasoline are burned in US lawnmowers each year, with no pollution control technologies in use. That esoteric consumption of fossil fuels goes unaddressed by the World Bank report while food-producing cows are demonized for their flatulence.
Globalist Food Control Blueprint
Naturally, climate change is once again cited as the dominating factor:
“This report, Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System, is the first comprehensive global strategic framework for mitigating the agrifood system’s contributions to climate change. It identifies solutions that cost-effectively limit agrifood GHG emissions to net zero while maintaining global food security, building climate resilience, and ensuring a just transition for vulnerable groups.”
Pollution, like food production, begins at the local scale. Grand globalist designs push humanity toward state-managed control mechanisms and away from local, independent, small-scale production. Indeed, the report’s scheme to address the evils of industrial food systems is to conjure an even larger omnipotent global food production and processing system, through those very same corporate wrongdoers. The document notes:
“[T]he agrifood system transformation will likely create new types of employment, and it is important for governments to facilitate this transition from farm work to higher-quality nonfarm jobs through skills training (Rotz et al 2019) and mobility assistance (Fuglie et al 2020). Likewise, the informal jobs sector can buffer the agrifood sector from job losses and food insecurity and assist with short-term job placement.”
Industrial Consolidation, Not Liberation
This is a continuation of the migration of rural populations into cities, out of farm employment, and into mostly fantasy technology jobs. Yet more people raising local food using sustainable methods is the solution to agricultural pollution: Further consolidation of food production threatens food security, human health, and the ecosystem. Wendell Berry chronicled the devastating losses to the American economy and culture in the farm-to-city exodus in his seminal work The Unsettling of America. The proposals in “Recipe for a Livable Planet” are even more unsettling.
The report claims that restorative justice will be served, people will eat more healthily, and the planet will be spared the destructive impacts of raising food. How? Through the usual boondoggles of greater corporate/government power, reduced livestock herds, higher food prices for meats, subsidies for fake meats, and innovative technologies:
“Nascent, innovative mitigation technologies could greatly contribute to emissions reductions and improved productivity in the agrifood system (Alston et al 2011). These technologies include using chemical methane inhibitors, feed additives from red seaweed, crop roots to sequester carbon, indoor farming methods, precision machinery, plant-based meats, lab-grown protein, and other protein sources.”
These technologies will hardly transform agriculture, and they highlight the biggest lie of all: that cows are planet-destroying climate culprits that must be corralled into carbon compliance. Cows grazed naturally sequester far more carbon than they emit, rebuild soils, improve water retention, feed the soil microbiome, and replace harmful synthetic fertilizers. The World Bank’s “recipe” is for a few companies to make feed additives for cows, grow food indoors (unsustainable and energy-dependent), build more machines, and make fake proteins without assessing the externalized costs of the ambitious techno-rescues. Humans will eat more plants grown with synthetic fertilizers and be happy.
The solution to the world’s food problems is to permit farmers to farm and jettison technocrats from the food supply. There is no need to eat less meat, just to produce it as nature intended. Properly managed pastures sequester more greenhouse gases than reforestation can ever achieve, so the push to convert farmland to forests is counter-productive. Local farmers stewarding intergenerationally managed, sustainable farms are the cure to industrial domination by multinational corporate conglomerates.
The World Bank’s prescription proposes to dose the patient with more of the same poisons that created this crisis. It is a recipe for disaster.
