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Meantime, the war on farming is real and it’s happening in most of Europe and the West...if not everywhere.
[Originally published in I-System TrendCompass] Over the last few years I'm noticing that the grocery stores where I buy my food are less and less supplied with certain foods, particularly organic meat and periodically milk and eggs. The difference is very obvious and my Carrefour supermarket even reduced the shelf space where these foods are displayed. Certain types of meat that used to be regularly available are no longer are (at all, ever), and I can only find them from specialty butcher shops which thankfully still exist in France (although they are noticeably fewer now than they used to be).
This is not an accident but, as the British farmer and activist Mark Byford (a.k.a. the Bowler Hat Farmer) lays out in this (highly recommended) interview, it is part of the global war on farming, comprising a barrage of administrative and regulatory measures designed to make farming unprofitable, incentivizing farmers not to produce food and encouraging them to sell their farms: it's war on carbon, war on nitrogen, war on bird flu and other viruses, war on Russian fertilizers, inheritance taxes, rewilding schemes, "get out of farming" payouts and burgeoning compliance rules and bureaucracies to oversee it all.
Raise weeds and grow rich!
For example, Byford explained that if you grow wheat in Britain, you can earn about £160 per acre. It's hard work and it involves considerable expense. At the same time, the government is promoting the so-called "set-aside" or rewilding schemes and will pay farmers £300-£400 per acre to let weeds grow on their land. For farmers, it's more income, less expense and less work. Another line of attack has been directed at milk production: farmers are locked into exclusive supply contracts with corporate buyers who often fail to collect the milk.
As a consequence, tens of thousands of liters a day are being simply dumped, causing farmers massive financial losses. Apparently, given the nature of their supply contracts, they have no way of recovering these losses. As a result, milk shortages appear at the same time as the farmers are forced to dump about half of their production. Egg shortage has been orchestrated under "bird flu" emergencies, justifying the culling of millions of birds.
72% less food
Food production is also being suffocated through regulatory measures. Active farmers are buried under the burgeoning regulatory requirements, forcing them to spend long hours filing endless forms to be compliant with burgeoning rules and regulations. Many of the new rules, including the "get out of farming payments scheme," effectively punish or discourage food production while incentivizing the farmers to sell their farms. Farmland is then often bought by global investment behemoths like BlackRock and Vanguard. The result is that livestock is gradually disappearing and food production is shrinking, which is by now obvious to see in our supermarkets. Now there are reports that the UK government is planning a mass culling of livestock towards the end of 2025.
According to Byford, similar measures are being pursued in Ireland, the EU as well as in India and many African countries with the effect that today there is 72% less food moving through global distribution chains than in the pre-pandemic period. Most probably, this is all caused by climate change or perhaps Russia, Russia, Russia, or China, China, China. However, there's also a strange coincidence that all these measures appear to have been planned.
It’s the “Absolute Zero” agenda
A major policy paper, titled "Absolute Zero," was published on 29 November 2019 as a collaboration between the leading British universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and the Imperial College of London. This was all funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and it laid out the strategy of reaching zero carbon emissions in accordance with the chillingly distopian UK Climate Change Act of 2008.
Monstrous.
The Absolute Zeros recommended that, "In addition to reducing our energy demand, delivering zero emissions with today's technologies requires the phasing out of flying, shipping, lamb and beef, blast furnace steel and cement." It's interesting that the UK has now shut down its last blast furnace making it the only G7 nation without a steel industry. Meanwhile, as far as the corporate media are concerned, this is a "China, China, China" story, and nobody's mentioning the "Absolute Zero" agenda.
Anyhow, back to farming: the agenda is that between 2020 and 2029, the consumption of beef and lamb must drop by 50% and by 2050 it must be "phased out." Also, all construction of new buildings must cease by 2050. "Absolute Zero" agenda (note, it was drafted well in advance of the Covid 19 pandemic), has full support and commitment of the British government, the same government that has incentivized billions of pounds to be invested in solar energy and is now planning to spray the skies to dim the sun.
Free world: changing some behaviors, prohibiting others
Of course, the genius behind Absolute Zero plans have anticipated resistance from proles and peasants of the nation, so they touched upon the behavioral measures that will be necessary:
"The changes in behaviour to achieve Absolute Zero are clearly substantial. In principle, these changes could be induced through changing prices and thus providing clear incentives for behaviour to change. The alternative is that the government prohibits certain types of behaviour and regulates production processes."
Evidently, those who set the agenda understand that they must achieve their objectives against the will of the people and that the changes must "be induced." Thankfully, the deplorable farmers and the proles have other ideas and pushback is building up along with alternative food systems, organized from the bottom up. We can expect the governments in the UK and elsewhere to try and suppress these alternatives, but having or not having food to eat is too important to capitulate to government intimidation. However, broader awareness and support for farmers will be needed in this struggle.
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First, we hang all the watermelons.