Crisis Update - From Welfare State To Communitarianism

Pensions and Medicare to go; replaced by digital allowance. Food rationing is a pretext

Dutch and Canadian farmers share common plight with Sri Lankans.
Policies disrupt food supply by accident or intent, by hook or by crook.
Convergence of outcomes between corporate and intergovernmental strategies.

Catastrophe of Sri Lanka’s organic policy was foreseeable and thus likely intended.
Agenda 2030 calls to “end world hunger” while reducing farmers’ footprint.
Contradiction is intentional: the mechanism will be equity and levelling down.

Instead of arguing over contested information look for the actors and objectives.
Central Bank Digital Currency would limit people’s allowance. Net zero is the pretext.
(2,300 words or about 11 minutes of your time.)

Imbalance or doublethink — who is being jettisoned?

Aug 2, 2022

What topic is likely to shut down conversation, even among many who consider themselves friends and free-minded consumers of alternative media?

Global warming or depopulation, perhaps.

Canadian farmers are now protesting, like those in the Netherlands and Sri Lanka, at capricious and untested government policies that depress food production in the name of… well, the excuse changes with the political climate.

Proposals to reduce the use of fertilizer threaten to slash production of spring wheat and canola says the Western Canadian Wheat Growers commission.

The pretext is to cut emissions of nitrous oxide from fertilizer. The proposal comes not from Canada’s agriculture ministry but from Environment and Climate Change Canada. The target of a 30 per cent cut was imposed without modeling or analysis, and farmers and food producers say they weren’t consulted.

With food shortages spreading around the world, it’s a strange time to accelerate cuts to fertilizer. Even nitrogen is in short supply. As gardeners know, it is a crucial plant food. [1]

Canada’s farmers propose a gradual switch to different fertilizers and methods of production. The government insists on an immediate cut.

Intensive farming was encouraged by petrochemical companies who make fertilizers and pesticides, and the giant food processors like Nestlé, Cargill and Weston and Tyson Foods. The supermarket chains lure farmers into contracts, offering to buy larger volumes of produce if farmers can make it at an ever lower cost.

Those supermarket chains include Britain’s Sainsbury’s, whose founding family is the principal funder of the Institute for Government, which developed the psychological manipulation MINDSPACE document, used to nudge behaviour during Event Covid.

Zeal or sabotage

Sri Lanka is a small country, about the size of Ireland or twice the land mass of the Netherlands, with a bigger population at 20 million. It is one of the few developing countries that was persuaded to board the Green bandwagon.

In the middle of 2021 — middle of the pandemic, notably — its government banned imports of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, in order to encourage organic farming. By the year’s end a survey showed farmers were expecting a near 50 per cent fall in yields of some crops like millet, potatoes and maize.

Mayank Parihar, chief operating officer, Sikkim IFFCO Organics in India has pointed out the egregious and avoidable errors by government: the experience of Indian tea growers of going organic in not less than five years; the risks of impacting rice as a staple of the local diet; and the well known drop in yields that follows a move to organic.

Chemically-fertilized and organic farming continued side-by-side in Sikkim, northeastern India, with a conversion to organic over more than 15 years. [2]

The impact of immediate conversion in Sri Lanka was not hard to forecast: shortages and higher prices at home, and a 20 per cent collapse in exports of tea and rubber, which subsequently helped to bankrupt the country.

It had little to do with Covid, no connection to the war in Ukraine, and everything to do with the champions of a ban on chemical fertilizers and imaginings of a world without oil.

Gates of perception

The media, such as the BBC, presents these policies as beyond contention. It blamed Sri Lanka’s food and fuel crisis on President Vladimir Putin of Russia and did not even mention the country’s catastrophic climate initiative.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the few state and corporate media to point out that subsidy “splurge” is a poor tool for developing new energy sources but it exists “because organized groups and politicians want the money, and the public wants to be a sucker.” [3]

There is a twist, however: one should beware taking events at face value.

Professor Priyantha Yapa, Lecturer at the Sabaragamuwa University, Sri Lanka, told The Organic Magazine that “agrochemical giants in Sri Lanka are so strong that they spend billions to disrupt the organic program.” They target agricultural schools and political parties, he alleged. [4]

How better to disrupt the move to organic farming than to push it too quickly, in the expectation that it may fail catastrophically. Developing countries may be less likely to follow the urgings of Western Green activists with their agendas and roadmaps.

Controlling the narrative

This recalls the documentary Planet Of The Humans (2019) for its exposé that oil companies, far from opposing environmentalists, finance and subvert the movement from within.

Why? To control the narrative (and redirect taxpayer money).

In the documentary, the Indian ecologist Vedanta Shiva points out that the renewable energy movement benefits the wealthy owners of natural resources by allowing them to keep their oil in the ground without losing the power and control it affords them.

The mechanism for the oil barons to retain their grip is United Nations Agenda 2030, and the associated euphemistically-named projects like the New Normal, The Great Reset and Build Back Better.

She accused the environmental movement of playing into the hands of billionaires, like the Rockefeller family fund 350.org, by backing subsidies for wood-fired power stations that consume forests.

Yet her Navdanya movement was an eager supporter of Sri Lanka’s too-rapid organic reform, which has turned into one more example of elitist hubris. Like the opening of Russia to corporate influence in the 1880s, the Bolsheviks’ use of collectivisation to secure control of the countryside, and China’s Great Leap Forward, the elites presume to know what is best for the masses — or consider that the price of the deaths of millions is “worth it.”

Regardless of intent, elitism in each case destroyed the nascent middle class and entrenched the elite: thus revolution (in reality, putsch) could only replace one elite with another. Radical social experiments make impossible the warp and weft of society, the organic networks that interweave our economies with nature — however frustrating and slow that may seem to Utopians.

We are, it seems, experiencing a similar winnowing out of society in the name of equity and inclusiveness: from farmers in Sri Lanka, North America and the Netherlands, to middle-class small business owners in Britain and across Europe.

Just as going organic is a gradual, nuanced process that is simpler with some crops than others, so renewable energy is much more complex than replacing “fossil” fuels with windmills and solar panels.

Is this simply a dispute over the pace of reform or is it something deeper?

EC Europa Research

Moving target

Canadian MP Leslyn Lewis says the consequences and target of net zero farming, as rolled out in Canada, the Netherlands and Sri Lanka are never defined. Dutch farmers had been asked to “set aside” farmland and adopt new technology. Once they complied, the target was changed again. [5]

Lewis also pointed out the subjective nature (hypocrisy) of net zero calculations when it comes to electric vehicles: the cobalt or lithium mines; child labour; the poisoning of humans, flora and fauna; and the despoliation of landscape.

“And then you look at the battery in an electric car and how it gets disposed of afterwards and the years that it would take to break down that battery, and you do a carbon footprint on that, you would see that that is far more damaging than agriculture but is agriculture that is being attacked and that is why I think there is an agenda.”

Lithium fields - Salar de Atacama salt flats, northern Chile Tom Hegen

The Natural Resources Defense Council points out that Chile, the second biggest lithium producer, faces a shortage of water which is used to separate by evaporation lithium on the salt flats on South America’s Atacama Plateau. [6]

The claim to be acting in the name of the environment rings hollow.