How the War on Farmers Could Trigger a Famine

How the War on Farmers Could Trigger a Famine

Doug Casey

International Man: Recently, we have seen governments in the Netherlands, and Canada move to shut down farms under the pretext of climate change.

According to John Kerry, Biden’s “climate czar,” similar moves against US farms are in the works.

The US and the Netherlands are two of the largest agricultural producers in the world.

It seems certain Western countries are waging war against farmers in the name of climate change.

What is really going on here?

 ...what appears to be a war against agriculture on the part of “the elite” is both real and serious. People in power are anxious to control every aspect of the plebs’ lives, usually either for the supposed good of humanity or the planet itself. They believe there should be rules governing where the plebs live, what they can say and think, and even what they eat. The “elite” like to say farm animals are partly responsible for global warming by emitting methane.

But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s a general belief, even among the plebs themselves, that the world’s population, composed mostly of useless eaters, is too high. The powers that be have said on any number of occasions that eight billion people is “too many” and that an optimal level would be less than a billion.

Here’s an outlandish thought: They can’t put people in gas chambers anymore and hope to get away with it. But perhaps reducing the quantity and quality of their food consumption, among other measures, can have the same effect. A crazy thought? Don’t forget that governments have sponsored wars, famines, and persecutions that have killed hundreds of millions. There’s no reason to think that today’s “elite” are any less nefarious than their antecedents. Rather the contrary…

There’s plenty of evidence that the kind of people who control the world and run governments have evil intentions toward their fellow humans. Even while they masquerade as philanthropists and humanitarians, they typically treat them either as a means to their ends or a nuisance.

International Man: Government central planning of agriculture can be catastrophic.

For example, millions of people perished in famines in the Soviet Union due to disastrous policies forced upon farmers.

Do you see any parallels today?

Doug Casey: Government, as an institution, is congenitally incapable of creating anything.

Farmers always fare poorly when “the elite” capture the apparatus of the State. One reason is that, as a group, farmers are basically entrepreneurs. They don’t work a 9:00 to 5:00 day. They don’t take orders from supervisors working in cubicles. They’re necessarily independent.

Farmers have to buy and sell like merchants. They have to be practical field-level biologists, botanists, and zoologists. They have to be businessmen, mechanics, meteorologists, and a dozen other things.

A successful farmer is naturally multi-faceted and multi-talented—not the type of person prone to taking orders from high up. He’s a person that owns property and values it.

As a class, farmers are natural enemies of socialist governments. It’s true that they can be corrupted, much as many farmers have been in the US with subsidies since the 1930s. But farmers tend to be independent freethinkers.

Governments, therefore, hold them in suspicion and are inclined to pay special attention to farmers.

The US Department of Agriculture has about 100,000 employees. It’s one of the many US government departments that should be abolished. If any of those 100,000 employees actually know anything about agriculture or farming—most of them don’t—they should go out and do it, as opposed to making the lives of farmers miserable.

Interestingly, the #1 mission of the USDA, stated on its website, is to combat climate change. Not to improve food production.

The USDA, the EPA, and many others create regulations on everything and anything that farmers do today. I’d point out that according to USDA rules, a “farm” is any piece of land that produces over or can produce over $1000 worth of product. That’s an unbelievably low amount. A garden in your backyard can be deemed a farm if it suits the authorities.

No matter what a farmer produces, he can rely on lots of oversight from a regulator who is intent on justifying his existence.

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