Environmentalists in the U.S. and Europe are now shining the spotlight on what we eat, as they once did on what we drive. Is a new meat tax on the horizon? Will farmers be required to offset their carbon footprint? Does it benefit farmers if the IRA withdraws financial assistance to hundreds of conservation, natural resource, and wildlife habitat practices for not being “climate smart”? Will the U.S. repeat the mistakes of the European Union’s green policy that has European farmers up in arms this week?
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For the time being, the U.S. farm spending bill being negotiated in Congress will have to maintain the climate funds envisioned by the IRA if it is to be able to count on the Democrats’ vote, as confirmed recently by House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member David Scott. Along with social programs such as reducing hunger or improving equity, the non-negotiable Democratic farm bill proposal includes support for renewable energy and bioenergy, as well as a sustainable agriculture plan that could leave out more than half of currently funded projects. This is one of the reasons why Republicans in the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry denounce the Democratic farm bill as having too much Green New Deal and not enough agriculture. No wonder, considering that our political era has become much more ideological than practical.
On the other hand, the Food System Economics Commission, in line with the climate proposals of the Davos World Economic Forum of 2024, has just published the first global report on the environmental costs of not tackling an immediate transformation of the food system to reduce food production and meat consumption. Like all climate change reports, its prognosis and conclusions are a prelude to an apocalypse so immense that it would make an amateur of the French seer Nostradamus. However, they claim that if their recommendations are enforced, the transformation could generate up to $10 trillion in economic benefits per year worldwide, benefits that, according to the commission, would be first and foremost environmental and social.
This report is also being debated by the European Commission. On Feb. 5, the EU’s main scientific advisory body recommended a radical reduction in meat consumption and food wastage and criticized those countries that have not yet got up to speed with Brussels’ climate targets.
In another less institutional but still influential sphere, last Jan. 28, former White House chef and Barack Obama adviser Sam Kass hosted one of his dinners at a Minneapolis restaurant. It was a climate awareness project eloquently called “The Last Supper.” Attendees paid nearly $300 to taste plates of salmon and oysters and drink coffee and wine and to be lectured during dinner on the idea that all four products could soon become extinct because of global warming. Sam Kass has performed this same show at the COP21 and WEF meetings in Davos, giving high visibility to the idea that a global food restructuring is urgently needed.
I do not know if it is necessary to be reminded that the WEF, together with the Food and Agriculture Organization, is one of the international organizations pushing the introduction of insects into our food system — a motion that was crucial for the EU to approve the sale of cricket flour for human consumption last year, in the manufacture of baked goods, thus generating great controversy in public opinion, especially with regard to its confusing labeling regulations.
The problem is that, as P.J. O’Rourke wrote in On the Wealth of Nations, “Any advice given to government, no matter how reasonable, intelligent, or well principled, has only one result — more government.” Perhaps that’s why, while sustainable food is the main political issue in the West, European farmers and cattlemen are invading major European cities, riding their tractors in protest against the EU and the national climate laws and bureaucratic hurdles that are ruining their businesses. In an attempt to calm things down, and perhaps to avoid a loss of votes on the eve of the European elections in June 2024, Brussels has withdrawn the project that forced them to reduce the use of pesticides by 50 percent, but even this measure has not succeeded in stopping the demonstrations.
The first victim of the environmentalist policies promoted by the globalist elites, both in transportation and food, is individual freedom. Just as it is becoming increasingly difficult and costly to drive the car you want, everything seems to be leading up to a time in the near future in which we will have to get past an increasing number of obstacles in order to eat the food we want to eat. All this on the premise that the only universal consensus on the causes of climate change is that one mustn’t disagree on the causes of climate change.
The second group of victims are the farmers and cattlemen themselves, as we are seeing these days in Europe, whose green bureaucratic knot is still more tangled than the one implemented so far in the United States. Most of the tractors in the protests these days carry flags with the logo of the “Sustainable Development Goals” crossed out by a forbidden sign. They state that the 2030 agenda is ruining them, forcing them to comply with endless climate requirements that, on top of it all, the EU does not require for non-EU food, allowing it to be offered at cheaper prices. It is important to underline that the victims are asking not for local protectionism, which would be a setback in the global economy, but only to compete on equal terms with those outside the EU.
In short, in terms of its agricultural policy, the United States will have to choose between the (for now) failed EU model, and a model of its own that meets certain reasonable demands of the promoters of sustainable farming, but without restricting freedoms, without flooding commerce with bureaucracy, without skyrocketing public spending, and without ruining the workers in the field. A sensible position that so far only conservatives (and farmers) seem willing to defend, and not even all conservatives.
