Who Is Spearheading The Global War On Agriculture And Nutrition?

Elite billionaire organizations and foundations, government agencies, and activist pressure groups are funding and coordinating a global war on modern agriculture, nutrition, and Earth’s poorest, hungriest people. [emphasis, links added]

Instead of helping more families get nutritious food, better healthcare, and higher living standards, they’re doing the opposite, harming biodiversity in the process.

The World Economic Forum wants to reimagine, reinvent, and transform the global food system to eliminate greenhouse gases from food production.

Central to its plan are alternatives to animal protein: mealworm potato chips, bug burgers instead of beef patties, and meatloaves and sausages made from lake flies, for instance. Fixing the WEF’s toxic workplace is a low priority.

A UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO) report advises that turning “edible insects” into “tasty” food products can create thriving local businesses and even promote the “inclusion of women.”

Created to alleviate global poverty, the World Bank has decided the “man-made climate crisis” is a far greater threat to impoverished families than contaminated water, malaria, and other killer diseases, hunger, or even two billion people still burning wood and dung because they don’t have reliable, affordable electricity.

It has unilaterally decreed that 45% of its funds – an extra $9 billion in FY2024 – will be shifted to helping the poor “better withstand the devastation of climate change.”

(The Bank has also decided that even more of its taxpayer funding – $300 million instead of “only” $70 million – should be gifted to the Palestinian Authority, which pays terrorists to murder Israelis.)

Of course, most of the better and lesser-known environmental pressure groups are also deeply involved in food, agriculture, and energy policy campaigns: Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, Pesticide Action Network, Center for Food Safety, La Via Campesina (The Peasant Way), Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, and countless others.

Like the rest of the “agroecology” movement, they deride and malign modern agriculture as a scourge inflicted by greedy mega-corporations. They oppose fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides, and biotechnology.

They praise “food sovereignty” and the “right to choose.” But their policies reflect top-down tyranny and bullying, with little room for poor farmers to embrace modern agricultural technologies and practices.

In addition to WEF, the FAO and World Bank support these hard-green organizations and have the ideological, organizational, and financial backing of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), EU agencies, and a host of progressive and far-left American, European, and other foundations.

The US-based AgroEcology Fund was created by the Christensen Fund, New Fields Foundation, and Swift Foundation.

Its funding and programs are overseen by the New Venture Fund, which helps “charitable” and “educational” organizations direct funds to programs that align with what many characterize as neocolonialist and eco-imperialist goals.

Other major players include the Schmidt Family Foundation, Packard Foundation, Ford Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and Ben and Jerry Foundation.

This is serious money – hundreds of millions of dollars per year in food, agriculture, and climate change funding.

It completely overshadows the piddling $9,000 that Kenyan farmer Jusper Machogu raised via donations to his “climate realism” website – much of it given to neighbors, so they could drill water wells, buy tanks of propane or get connected to the local grid.

And yet Mr. Machogu incurred the wrath of the BBC’s “Climate Disinformation Officer.” (Yes, the Beeb does hold such a position.)

The CDO attacked him for “tweeting false and misleading claims” about climate change and saying Africa should develop its oil, gas, and coal reserves – instead of relying entirely on intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar.

Even worse, the farmer had the temerity to accept donations from non-Africans, including “individuals with links to the fossil fuel industry and groups known for promoting climate change denial.”

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors is another major donor to agroecology outfits. It’s part of the legacy of guilt-ridden oil money from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. corporate trust.

This inheritance includes nearly 1,000 climate-related institutions, foundations, and activist organizations.

As Canada’s Frontier Centre put it, “Every time you hear a ‘climate change’ scare story, [the person writing it] was PAID. He is a Rockefeller stooge. He may not know it, but his profession has been entirely corrupted.”

Far worse, I would add, the writer and his (or her) organization are complicit in perpetuating global poverty, energy deprivation, hunger, disease, and death – because the fearmongering drives destructive energy- and food-production policies.

Alone or collectively, these policy corrupters must not be underestimated in this war to preserve and expand modern energy, agriculture, and global nutrition.

Thankfully, there is increasing pushback. Many families simply do not want to be trapped in poverty, disease, mud-and-thatch huts, an absence of educational opportunities for their children, and a future of backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk labor in little subsistence-farming fields.

That’s especially so when films, news stories, and cell phones present American and European farming equipment and practices – and the crop yields, wealth, health, homes, leisure time, and opportunities that accompany those modern agricultural systems.

Poor farmers also see China, India, Indonesia, and other countries rapidly industrializing and modernizing by using oil, gas, and coal.

They see rumblings of change in many countries that are intent on charting their courses, with fossil fuels as the energy foundation for that growth. They’re rejecting the eco-colonialism and eco-imperialism that wealthy Westerners seek to impose on them.

They are getting the message that humanity has faced climate fluctuations and extreme weather events throughout history … survived them, dealt with them, adapted to them, and prospered.

That there is no real-world evidence that man-made greenhouse gas emissions – especially the trivial amounts generated by agriculture – have replaced the powerful natural forces that caused past climate changes.

They increasingly realize that organic and subsistence farming requires vastly more land – which would otherwise be wildlife habitats – than modern mechanized farming, to get the same yields. Plowing those habitats would decimate plant and animal diversity.

That locking up fossil fuels, and relying instead on biofuels and plant-based feedstocks for thousands of essential products, would require even more acreage.

So would mining for massive amounts of metals and minerals to manufacture wind, solar, and battery technologies.

Most importantly, they understand that humanity today has far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies, and resources than any past generations.

To suggest that we cannot adapt to climate changes, or survive and recover from extreme weather events, is simply absurd.

To suggest that farmers should revert to … or remain stuck in … ancient farming practices and technologies — to save the world from computer-generated man-made climate disasters — is eco-imperialism at its most lethal.

South Africa’s electricity minister recently said his country will not be “turned into a guinea pig for a worldwide Green New Deal.”

Hopefully, all developing countries will soon apply that same attitude to anarchists who would use the world’s poor as guinea pigs in global agricultural and nutrition experiments.

Top photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Paul Driessen is a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death, and other books and articles on energy, environment, climate, and human rights issues.