The new scheme, unveiled late last year and moving ahead rapidly, is known as “50 in 5” because 50 governments expect to have the Orwellian “digital infrastructure” of tyranny in place within five years. Almost a dozen governments, including numerous corrupt kleptocracies and socialist regimes, have volunteered their populations to serve as “First Mover” countries so far.

However, the UN’s assumption is that every government will eventually impose this on every person on Earth. This is clearly expressed throughout its announcements. “All countries, regardless of income level, geography, or where they are in their digital transformation journey, can benefit from being a part of 50-in-5,” the UN agency behind the scheme declared. “Joining the campaign helps ensure countries don’t have to tackle DPI implementation alone or start from scratch.”

Led by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the new “digital infrastructure” is being framed as a tool to accelerate the imposition of the highly controversial UN’s 2030 Agenda “Sustainable Development Goals,” referred to in 2015 by key UN leaders as the “Master Plan for Humanity.” The SDGs, as they are known, call for global wealth redistribution and drastically more government power over people’s lives at all levels. The mass-murdering regime ruling China boasted of playing a “crucial role” in developing the plan.

Gates, who had a troubling relationship with convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, celebrated the role of these technologies in imposing the UN SDGs on humanity. “The G20 reached a groundbreaking consensus on the role of digital public infrastructure as a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals,” he said on X. “I’m optimistic about the potential of DPI to support a safer, healthier, and more just world.”

The whole program is being guided by the UN and elitists including Gates and others such as the Rockefellers, longtime financiers of globalism, eugenics, and population-control schemes. Multiple front groups steered by such “controligarchs” were created for the purpose. But U.S. and European taxpayers are being conscripted to foot much of the bill via UN agencies and international “development” banks.

If not stopped, critics say the new suite of “digital public goods” and “infrastructure” will create a technological panopticon allowing for total surveillance and control of all people everywhere. Indeed, as the 2030 Agenda makes clear, “no one will be left behind.” Once in full swing, literally every transaction would be tracked, monitored, and controlled.

UN bureaucrats put a happy face on the program. “For UNDP, a DPI approach that combines people-centric governance is critical to ensure that this new infrastructure can accelerate the [2030 Agenda] SDGs,” argued Keyzom Ngodup Massally, head of digital programs at UNDP. “This country-led 50-in-5 campaign is a core part of how UNDP continues to support meaningful global digital cooperation and strengthens local ecosystems to design and implement rights-based DPI.”

Already, virtually all national governments and central banks around the world are working on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), according to the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland that is helping to guide and coordinate the rolling out of such currencies worldwide. As cash is sidelined and then disappears, CBDCs will create a permanent record of all transactions.

Perhaps even more troubling, the digital currencies will also be programmable, leading experts and officials say. That will allow governments an unprecedented degree of control over the economy and individual decisions of consumers. In fact, the Biden White House has even called for CBDCs to advance “racial equity” and “environmental priorities.” Leading luminaries have called for them to track individual carbon footprints, too.

Along with CBDCs, governments around the world are rolling out digital IDs to go with them. The Australian Senate just voted to approve such a system last week. Multiple American state governments, including some controlled entirely by Republicans, are pursuing similar schemes. And various organizations associated with Gates, the Rockefeller dynasty, and the UN have been promoting such IDs for years, including through groups such as ID2020.

Ultimately, the digital IDs and CBDCs will become inseparable. The Financial Times discussed the relationship between all the different systems in the digital infrastructure system in a 2021 piece headlined “Why CBDCs Will Likely Be ID-based.” It reveals how CBDCs and digital IDs can (and will) be used together to ultimately control people.

“What CBDC research and experimentation appears to be showing is that it will be nigh on impossible to issue such currencies outside of a comprehensive national digital ID management system,” wrote FT’s Izabella Kaminska. “Meaning: CBDCs will likely be tied to personal accounts that include personal data, credit history and other forms of relevant information.”

Eventually, healthcare will become intertwined with all of it, as CCP-backed World Health Organization boss (and former ethno-Marxist terrorist leader) Tedros Ghebreyesus explained. “The COVID19 pandemic highlighted the value of digital health solutions in facilitating access to health services,” he declared before touting COVID “vaccine passports” imposed by the European Union. The WHO is now using the EU’s system to design a similar regime for all of humanity.

Top globalists have hinted at where this is all going. “The trick is to build public digital infrastructure, that is interoperable, open to all and trusted. Let me give you one example that is reality today,” said EU “President” Ursula von der Leyen at the G20 summit in September. “Many of you are familiar with the COVID-19 digital certificate. The EU developed it for itself. The model was so functional and so trusted that 51 countries on 4 continents adopted it for free.”

A social-credit score whereby each individual receives a rank based on his or her compliance with technocrats’ demands is essentially inevitable under this regime as well, critics say. “Advocates are adamant that DPI is essential for participation in markets and society — just like we saw with vaccine passports — only on a much broader scope,” explained The Sociable editor Tim Hinchliffe, one of the first to sound the alarm.

The potential for control, he continued, is almost endless. “If successful, DPI will give governments and corporations the power to implement systems of social credit that can determine where and how you can travel, what you are allowed to consume, and how you will be able to transact with your programmable money,” added Hinchliffe.

Of course, this sort of system already exists in Communist China, something The New American has been warning about for almost a decade. The CCP serves as a “role model,” according to World Economic Forum boss and Great Reset frontman Klaus Schwab and countless other globalists. And so, it is only a matter of time before such a regime is eventually unveiled in the West without massive opposition.

Tracking children is a the top of the priority list, according to the WEF, as the data gathered is used to make decisions for people. “Fundamentally, a digital public infrastructure is about enabling data to flow seamlessly across sectors and systems, thereby enabling data-driven decision-making and policies,” the globalist organization says in a piece about tracking children with DPI.

The “Digital Public Infrastructure” will also fuel increasing restrictions on everyday life, including on movement amid the emergence of 15-minute cities. It will be used to impose all sorts of mandates, including “lockdown” policies under pretexts ranging from alleged “public health” emergencies to supposed man-made “climate change,” opponents are warning, citing statements by the peddlers of these systems.

But it gets weirder. At the end of what Schwab describes as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” there will be a “fusion of our digital, our physical, and our biological identities,” the German technocrat has said on multiple occasions. The full implications of that vision have not been worked out, but Schwab himself frequently promotes microchips to be implanted inside of human brains, among other transhumanist schemes.

The “50 in 5” campaign for DPI officially launched late last year in New York. It aims to “radically shorten” the length of time that it would take to digitize everything from identification to currency. That will happen through collaboration between the UN and governments as they share technology to eventually create an interoperable system in at least 50 countries by 2028. The whole world is expected to follow suit.

In addition to the UNDP, the Gates Foundation, and the governments that have already signed up, a wide array of AstroTurf groups and UN agencies is also involved — many of them funded by governments as well as profiteers such as Gates and his technocratic allies. These include UNICEF, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Centre for Digital Public Infrastructure, and the Digital Public Goods Alliance.

The first governments to jump on the bandwagon — most with promises of “free” money extracted from Western taxpayers — include Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, and Togo. A handful of wealthier governments, including those in Norway and Singapore, have also signed on.

“These countries serve as beacons of progress and inspiration for countries to build their own digital foundations and improve their economies and the well-being of people,” claimed the UNDP in a press release announcing the first 11 governments to participate in imposing these digital surveillance and control tools on their populations.

By bringing 50 governments into the program, the UN is hoping each one can focus on one area or element of the “DPI” scheme. Then, each government will share what it learned with other governments, so the digital surveillance and control architecture can be imposed faster and in a way that transcends national borders.

Sierra Leonean Minister of Communication, Technology, and Innovation Salima Monorma Bah called on all governments to sign on. “Sierra Leone is excited to be part of 50-in-5 and urges everyone else to join the campaign — the next five years are the window of opportunity to speed up safe and inclusive DPI implementation together and thereby accelerate positive outcomes for people globally,” Bah said.

Even as totalitarian technocrats rush ahead with these technologies, opposition is growing. In Florida, for example, a new law has officially banned CBDCs. Numerous other states are pursuing similar measures. After the devastating lies and tyranny that underpinned the Covid “pandemic” were exposed, billions of people around the world are unlikely to ever have their trust in institutions restored, with most Americans now saying the media is an “enemy.”

Read more of this article at The New American.

The Biden administration leans on its latest National Climate Assessment report as evidence that global warming is accelerating because of human activities. The document states that human emissions of “greenhouse gases” such as carbon dioxide are dangerously warming the Earth.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) holds the same view, and its leaders are pushing major global policy changes in response.

But scientific experts from around the world in a variety of fields are pushing back. In peer-reviewed studies, they cite a wide range of flaws with the global temperature data used to reach the dire conclusions; they say it’s time to reexamine the whole narrative.

Problems with temperature data include a lack of geographically and historically representative data, contamination of the records by heat from urban areas, and corruption of the data introduced by a process known as “homogenization.”

The flaws are so significant that they make the temperature data—and the models based on it—essentially useless or worse, three independent scientists with the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) explained.

The experts said that when data corruption is considered, the alleged “climate crisis” supposedly caused by human activities disappears. Instead, natural climate variability offers a much better explanation for what is being observed, they said.

Some experts told The Epoch Times that deliberate fraud appeared to be at work, while others suggested more innocent explanations. But regardless of why the problems exist, the implications of the findings are hard to overstate.

With no climate crisis, the justification for trillions of dollars in government spending and costly changes in public policy to restrict carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions collapses, the scientists explained in a series of interviews about their research.

“For the last 35 years, the words of the IPCC have been taken to be gospel,” according to astrophysicist and CERES founder Willie Soon. Until recently, he was a researcher working with the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian.

“And indeed, climate activism has become the new religion of the 21st century—heretics are not welcome and not allowed to ask questions,” Mr. Soon told The Epoch Times. “But good science demands that scientists are encouraged to question the IPCC’s dogma. The supposed purity of the global temperature record is one of the most sacred dogmas of the IPCC.”

The latest U.S. government National Climate Assessment report states: “Human activities are changing the climate.

“The evidence for warming across multiple aspects of the Earth system is incontrovertible, and the science is unequivocal that increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases are driving many observed trends and changes.”

In particular, according to the report, this is because of human activities such as burning fossil fuels for transportation, energy, and agriculture. Looking at timescales highlights major problems with this narrative, Mr. Soon said.

“When people ask about global warming or climate change, it is essential to ask, ‘Since when?’ The data shows that it has warmed since the 1970s, but that this followed a period of cooling from the 1940s,” he said.

While it is “definitely warmer” now than in the 19th century, Mr. Soon said that temperature proxy data show the 19th century “was exceptionally cold.”

“It was the end of a period that’s known as the Little Ice Age,” he said.

Data taken from rural temperature stations, ocean measurements, weather balloons, satellite measurements, and temperature proxies such as tree rings, glaciers, and lake sediments, “show that the climate has always changed,” Mr. Soon said.

“They show that the current climate outside of cities is not unusual,” he said, adding that heat from urban areas is improperly affecting the data. “If we exclude the urban temperature data that only represents 3 percent of the planet, then we get a very different picture of the climate.”

Homogenization

One issue that scientists say is corrupting the data stems from an obscure process known as “homogenization.” According to climate scientists working with governments and the U.N., the algorithms used for homogenization are designed to correct, as much as possible, various biases that might exist in the raw temperature data.

These biases include, among others, the relocation of temperature monitoring stations, changes in technology used to gather the data, or changes in the environment surrounding a thermometer that might impact its readings.

For instance, if a temperature station was originally placed in an empty field but that field has since been paved over to become a parking lot, the record would appear to show much hotter temperatures. As such, it would make sense to try to correct the data collected.

Virtually nobody argues against the need for some homogenization to control for various factors that may contaminate temperature data. But a closer examination of the process as it now occurs reveals major concerns, Ronan Connolly, an independent scientist at CERES, said.

“While the scientific community has become addicted to blindly using these computer programs to fix the data biases, until recently nobody has bothered to look under the hood to see if the programs work when applied to real temperature data,” he told The Epoch Times.

Since the early 2000s, various governmental and intergovernmental organizations creating global temperature records have relied on computer programs to automatically adjust the data. Mr. Soon, Mr. Connolly, and a team of scientists around the world spent years looking at the programs to determine how they worked and whether they were reliable.

One of the scientists involved in the analysis, Peter O’Neill, has been tracking and downloading the data daily from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its Global Historical Climatology Network since 2011. He found that each day, NOAA applies different adjustments to the data.

“They use the same homogenization computer program and re-run it roughly every 24 hours,” Mr. Connolly said. “But each day, the homogenization adjustments that they calculate for each temperature record are different.”

This is “very bizarre,” he said.

“If the adjustments for a given weather station have any basis in reality, then we would expect the computer program to calculate the same adjustments every time. What we found is this is not what’s happening,” Mr. Connolly said.

These concerns are what first sparked the international investigation into the issue by Mr. Soon and his colleagues. Because NOAA doesn’t maintain historical information on its weather stations, the CERES scientists reached out to European scientists who had been compiling the data for the stations that they oversee.

They found that just 17 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were consistently applied. And less than 20 percent of NOAA’s adjustments were clearly associated with a documented change to the station observations.

“When we looked under the hood, we found that there was a hamster running in a wheel instead of an engine,” Mr. Connolly said. “It seems that with these homogenization programs, it is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.”

A spokesman for NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information downplayed the significance, but said the agency was working to address the issues raised in the papers.

“NOAA uses the well-documented Pairwise Homogenization Algorithm every day on GHCNm (monthly)—version 4, and the results of specific adjustments to individual station series can differ from run to run,” the spokesman said, adding that the papers in question didn’t support the view that the concerns about the homogenization of the data made it useless or worse.

“NOAA is addressing the issues raised in both these papers in a future release of the GHCNm temperature dataset and its accompanying documentation.”

Urban Heat Islands

One of the major flaws in the temperature data that creates a need for homogenization in the first place is the so-called urban heat island effect. In essence, the temperature stations that were once located in rural areas are now in many cases surrounded by roads, buildings, airports, and cities. This produces additional localized warming around the thermometer, which gives the appearance of drastic “global warming” when many similar stations are examined together.

The IPCC has acknowledged the urban heat island effect and the contamination of the data; however, according to the scientists who spoke with The Epoch Times, the U.N. agency has mistakenly assumed it’s a minor issue.

In a new peer-reviewed study, the coalition of scientists estimate that as much as 40 percent of the observed warming since the 19th century used by the IPCC is actually the result of this urban heat bias—not CO2-driven global warming.

“When we look at non-urban temperature data for the land, oceans, and other temperature records, the warming is much less dramatic and seems similar to other warm periods prior to the Industrial Revolution,” Mr. Connolly said.

The IPCC doesn’t control for the urban heat island effect, he said. When Mr. Connolly and other scientists created a temperature record using only rural temperature stations, almost half of the global warming alleged by the U.N. body disappeared.

Indeed, the rural-only datasets match the weather balloon and satellite data much more closely.

Taken together, the rural-only record shows that the moderate warming is likely just a recovery from the Little Ice Age from about A.D. 1300 to A.D. 1900, which itself followed the Medieval Warm Period from about A.D. 800 to A.D. 1200 that saw Vikings farming in Greenland.

“The Medieval Warm Period seems to have been about as warm as the modern warm period, but only when we use the rural-only record,” Mr. Connolly said.

While there has been global warming since the end of the Little Ice Age, if the urban datasets are excluded, all of the primary global temperature estimates show “that the planet alternates between phases of warming and cooling,” he said.

The current warming period began in the 1970s as scientists were still warning about alleged man-made global cooling, which had begun in the 1940s.

Michael Connolly, another independent scientist at CERES and Ronan Connolly’s father, noted that urban warming in cities, which cover about 3 percent of the Earth’s land surface, is in fact becoming a “major problem” that ought to be addressed.

“But, it cannot be cured by greenhouse gas policies,” he said. “Instead, we should be investing more into urban greening and other measures to try and reduce urban heat waves.”

Blending Rural and Urban Data

A separate issue with homogenization algorithms was examined in another paper published last year in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. The problem, which Ronan Connolly and his colleagues refer to as “urban blending,” involves the comparisons made between temperature records from one station and others in the surrounding area.

If one seems way out of sync with the others, the program assumes it was a non-climactic bias that should be corrected. Perhaps the biggest problem with this is that it allows urban warming to contaminate the entire temperature record by blending it with rural data.

The result is that urban and rural data are blended together, allowing some of the urban warming to be mixed in with the rural data that doesn’t have the problem.

“A useful analogy is if you mix strawberries and bananas in a blender, afterward you have a blended homogenous mix that is neither strawberries nor bananas,” Ronan Connolly said.

“Looking at the temperature data, this means that the homogenized rural records contain the urban warming, too.”

The supposed “unusual” global warming cited by the IPCC and other sources is only found in the urban data contaminated by heat associated with cities, he said. But by using the homogenized data, all of it becomes artificially biased by the urban heat effect.

“If we look at the temperature data that has not been contaminated by urban warming, it seems that the temperature changes since before the Industrial Revolution have been almost cyclical—cooling periods followed by warming periods,” Ronan Connolly said. “This cannot be explained in terms of increasing greenhouse gases, since those have been only going upward. Instead, it suggests that the scientists who have been mistakenly mixing together urban warming with non-urban temperature changes have been chasing a red herring with their belief that CO2 is the main climate driver.”

However, not everyone is convinced that these issues are as significant as CERES scientists have suggested.

Professor Robert Lund, a recognized expert in this field and chair of the statistics department at the University of California–Santa Cruz, told The Epoch Times that the arguments put forth by Mr. Soon and his colleagues made him “cringe.”

“It is true that many climate scientists generally don’t use the best methods to clean up the data,” Mr. Lund said.

But the CERES scientists’ “contention that the warming inferences we are making are bunk because of the gauge changes and station relocation issues, and their suboptimal handling in homogenization procedures, are just not true,” he said.

“In fact, no matter how you deal with the changepoint issues, all globally averaged series (like the IPCC series) contain strong upward trends. It’s just that simple.”

The homogenization issue “might account for maybe 0.1 or 0.2 degrees Celsius per century of the 1.3 [degrees Celsius] that we are globally warming, but not more,” Mr. Lund said.

He accused the CERES scientists of “trying to take any amount of uncertainty, exponentiate it, and discredit everything.”

Asked if he was planning to refute their studies in a paper of his own, Mr. Lund said he and others in the field have grown weary of battling scientists who, he suggested, were mostly interested in discrediting the climate narrative.

A number of other scientists on both sides of the debate didn’t respond to requests for comment. Several critics of the manmade global warming narrative asked to speak off the record for fear of retaliation by their institutions, colleagues, journals, or funding sources.

Other Problems

Historical temperature data don’t really exist prior to the 1970s, which hampers any type of long-term study. And outside of Europe and North America, there’s very little coverage.

Until recently, data from the oceans—making up more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface—were also sparse, confined primarily to occasional readings from major shipping lanes in the Northern Hemisphere.

NOAA has been criticized for allowing more than 90 percent of its climate stations to be affected by the urban heat bias, The Epoch Times reported in January, citing scientists and a separate study examining NOAA’s temperature records. By 2022, about 96 percent of the stations failed to meet the agency’s own standards for reliability, a study by meteorologist Anthony Watts revealed.

Michael Connolly pointed out that when the weather stations were originally set up, they were meant to monitor day-to-day weather, not long-term climate changes.

“While most of the scientists that I talk to on a personal level admit that they have reservations about aspects of the current climate change narrative, they say that their institutions would suffer if they speak out,” he said.

Mr. Soon acknowledged that measuring climate change was a “very difficult scientific problem,” especially because the data are imperfect. But scientists have an obligation to be honest about that.

“Many research groups—in a rush to get grants and to get their work published—seem to have overlooked the serious problems of the data they are using,” he said, adding that many scientists are concerned about job security and are unwilling to speak out.

But some analysts who have seen the issues say it’s deliberate fraud. Scientist and engineer Tony Heller of the website Real Climate Science said that the temperature data—both historical and geographical—are “grossly inadequate.”

Echoing the concerns about homogenization and blending, he told The Epoch Times that “the operating theory seems to be that mixing in a lot of very bad ingredients will create a good soup.”

Mr. Heller accuses NOAA of tampering with its data to create the “appearance of warming” and calls the global and U.S. temperature records “propaganda, not science.”

The misleading adjustments made to the data and the broader deception are “absolutely intentional,” he said.

“Trillions of dollars are being poured in to push global warming and climate change.”

So far, the studies by Mr. Soon and others haven’t been countered in any peer-reviewed literature.

However, some prominent scientists working for the federal government and other bodies tied to the climate movement have ridiculed and insulted the authors, as The Epoch Times reported in October 2023. Neither the IPCC nor NASA’s top climate scientist Gavin Schmidt responded to a request for comment.

In its 59-page report released this month, the U.N. Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) outlined a series of “concrete measures which must be implemented by all stakeholders: governments, regulatory authorities, civil society, and the platforms themselves.”

This approach includes the imposition of global policies, through institutions such as governments and businesses, designed to stop the spread of various forms of speech while promoting objectives such as “cultural diversity” and “gender equality.”

In particular, the U.N. agency aims to create an “Internet of Trust” by targeting what it calls “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and “conspiracy theories.”

Examples of expression flagged to be stopped or restricted include concerns about elections, public health measures, and advocacy that could constitute “incitement to discrimination.”

Critics are warning that allegations of “disinformation” and “conspiracy theories” have increasingly been used by powerful forces in government and Big Tech to silence true information and even core political speech.

Just this month, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released a report blasting the “pseudoscience of disinformation.”

Among other concerns, the committee found this “pseudoscience” has been “weaponized” by what lawmakers refer to as the “Censorship Industrial Complex.”

The goal: silence constitutionally-protected political speech, mostly by conservatives.

“The pseudoscience of disinformation is now—and has always been—nothing more than a political ruse most frequently targeted at communities and individuals holding views contrary to the prevailing narratives,” states the congressional report, “The Weaponization of ‘Disinformation’ Pseudo-Experts and Bureaucrats.”

Indeed, many of the policies called for by UNESCO have already been implemented by U.S.-based digital platforms, often at the behest of the Biden administration, the latest congressional report makes clear.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers nevertheless expressed alarm about the new UNESCO plan.

“I have repeatedly and publicly criticized the Biden administration’s misguided decision to rejoin UNESCO, putting U.S. taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars,” House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) told The Epoch Times regarding the social-media plan.

Calling UNESCO a “deeply flawed entity,” Mr. McCaul said he is especially concerned that the organization “promotes the interests of authoritarian regimes—including the Chinese Communist Party.”

Indeed, UNESCO, like many other U.N. agencies, includes multiple members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its leadership ranks, such as Deputy Director-General Xing Qu, The Epoch Times has reported.

The CCP has repeatedly made clear that even while working in international organizations, CCP members are expected to follow communist party orders.

Lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee dealing with international organizations are currently working to cut or reduce funding to various U.N. agencies that lawmakers say are using U.S. taxpayer money improperly.

Already, the U.S. government has twice exited UNESCO—under the Reagan and the Trump administrations—due to concerns about what the administrations described as extremism, hostility to American values, and other problems.

The Biden administration rejoined earlier this year over the objections of lawmakers, The Epoch Times reported.

The UNESCO Plan

While being marketed as a plan to uphold free expression, the new UNESCO regulatory regime calls for international censorship by “independent” regulators who are “shielded from political and economic interests.”

“National, regional, and global governance systems should be able to cooperate and share practices … in addressing content that could be permissibly restricted under international human rights law and standards,” the report explains.

Unlike the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibiting any governmental infringement on the right to free speech or free press, UNESCO points to various international “human rights” instruments that it says should determine what speech to infringe on.

These agreements include the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which states that restricting freedom of expression must be provided for by law and must also serve a “legitimate aim.”

In a recent review of the United States, a U.N. human-rights committee called for changes to the U.S. Constitution and demanded that the U.S. government do more to stop and punish “hate speech” in order to comply with the ICCPR.

Another key U.N. instrument is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states explicitly in Article 29 that “rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”

In short, the U.N. view of “freedom of expression” is radically different from that enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The UNESCO report says that once content that should be restricted is found, social-media platforms must take measures, ranging from using algorithm suppression (shadow banning) and warning users about the content, to de-monetizing and even removing it.

Any digital platforms found to not be “dealing with content that could be permissibly restricted under international human rights law” should “be held accountable” with “enforcement measures,” the report states.

UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay, a former French culture minister with the Socialist Party, cited risks to society to justify the global plan.

“Digital technology has enabled immense progress on freedom of speech,” she said in a statement. “But social media platforms have also accelerated and amplified the spread of false information and hate speech, posing major risks to societal cohesion, peace, and stability.

“To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights,” said Azoulay, who took over the U.N. agency from longtime Bulgarian Communist Party leader Irina Bokova.

In the forward to the new report, headlined “Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms,” Azoulay says that stopping certain forms of speech and at the same time preserving “freedom of expression” is “not a contradiction.”

Citing a survey commissioned by UNESCO itself, the U.N. agency also said most people around the world support its agenda.

According to UNESCO, the report and the guidelines were developed through a process of consultation including more than 1,500 submissions and over 10,000 comments from “stakeholders” such as governments, businesses, and non-profit organizations.

UNESCO said it will work with governments and companies to implement the regulatory regime around the world.

“UNESCO is by not (sic) proposing to regulate digital platforms,” a spokesman for UNESCO, who asked not to be named, told The Epoch Times in a statement.

“We are, however, conscious that dozens of governments around the world are already drafting legislation to do so, some of which is not in line with international human rights standards, and may even jeopardize freedom of expression.

“Similarly, the platforms themselves are already making millions of human and automated decisions a day with respect to the moderation and curation of content, based upon their own policies,” the spokesman said.

The European Union, which already places severe limitations on free expression online, has already provided funding for implementation worldwide, UNESCO added.

The Biden administration told The Epoch Times that it wasn’t involved in creating the plan.

“We will reserve comment until we finish carefully studying the plan,” the State Department said in an email.

Free Speech Concern Grows

Concerns over the implications for freedom of speech and free expression online are mounting as awareness of the UNESCO plan spreads.
Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), expressed alarm.

“FIRE appreciates that UNESCO’s new action plan for social media recognizes the value of transparency and the need for protecting freedom of expression, but remains deeply concerned about efforts to regulate online ‘disinformation’ and ‘hate speech,’” Ms. McLaughlin told The Epoch Times.

“As we’ve seen in recent weeks, enforcement of the EU’s Digital Services Act, for example, has created even more uncertainty about platforms’ content moderation policies and users’ ability to speak freely online,” she said. “Local legal restrictions and norms can ultimately influence how platforms operate on a global scale.

“As countries around the world ramp up regulation of speech on the internet, it becomes increasingly likely that platforms’ enforcement will affect users—including Americans—outside of the states enforcing such rules.”

Indeed, across Europe, “hate speech” rules have increasingly been used not just to silence speech on issues such as marriage, immigration, sexuality, and religion, but even to prosecute those who violate speech laws.

This month, Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a member of the Finnish Parliament and the former interior minister, triumphed after a years-long “hate speech” prosecution over her online speech supporting the biblical understanding of homosexuality and marriage.

In Poland, several members of the European Parliament are facing charges of “hate speech” for sharing political advertisements warning about possible effects of mass Islamic immigration into Europe.

Even more troubling to critics is that the concept of “hate speech” itself was introduced into the U.N. system by the Soviet Union, which regularly described anti-communist speech as “hate speech,” explained Jacob Mchangama in a 2011 paper for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Patrick Wood, founder and chairman of Citizens for Free Speech, warned that the UNESCO plan will certainly be used to silence critics of its agenda.

“When UNESCO trots out statements like—’the result of extensive worldwide consultations and is backed by a global opinion survey’—the fix is in,” Mr. Wood told The Epoch Times.

“In this case it will lead to a deluge of global programs to censor speech deemed counter to its agenda.”

The George Soros-funded Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which styles itself “the leading nonprofit” defending free speech, said it didn’t have anyone available to comment on the UNESCO plan.

Concerns about the U.N. attitude toward free speech are not new and have been growing in recent years—especially as so many of its member states with agents in U.N. leadership are known for suppressing dissent.

The new UNESCO plan also comes after the agency unveiled a plan last year to combat what it described as “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” through education, The Epoch Times reported at the time.

According to the organization, “conspiracy theories” can “reduce trust in public institutions” and cause problems, such as decreasing people’s desire to “reduce their carbon footprint.”

Examples of “conspiracy theories” cited in last year’s report include everything from widely held beliefs such as “climate change denial” and concerns about “manipulation of federal elections” in the United States, to more far-fetched and fringe notions such as the “earth is flat” or “Michelle Obama is actually a lizard.”

U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming last year spoke at a World Economic Forum event and boasted that the global organization had “partnered” with Google to promote its materials and suppress those that contradict it in search results.

“We own the science,” she said. “We think the world should know it.”

In an October 2020 World Economic Forum podcast on “Seeking a cure for the infodemic,” Ms. Fleming bragged of having enlisted over 100,000 volunteers to amplify U.N. views while squelching competing narratives that she dubs “misinformation.”

The revelation came after years of U.N. and governmental efforts to suppress what the global organization describes as extremism, misinformation, and more on the internet.

In 2016, the U.N. Security Council launched a “framework” to fight “extremism” online on the heels of a program from the previous year that pledged to battle “ideologies” that it said might lead to violence. Communism was not one of the targeted ideologies.

UNESCO Defends the Plan

The UNESCO spokesman defended the new plan, framing it more as an effort to protect free expression rather than a plan to limit it.

“Protecting freedom of expression has been at the heart of all of UNESCO’s initiatives to promote best practices in communications for decades, and this principle underpinned our approach to the Guidelines from the start,” the spokesman said.

The statement also pointed to a section of the guidelines that calls for adhering to “legal due process” when dealing with “hate speech.”

“They put a particular focus on the need for transparency as well as systematic human rights due diligence and impact assessments, as well as accountability to users,” the spokesman said, adding that the plan calls for “equal distribution of moderation capacity.”

“It is also clearly stated that the Guidelines should be considered in their entirety, rather than picking and choosing—for example, a policy on content moderation implemented by regulators that do not meet the definition of independence set out in the Guidelines would not be in alignment, regardless of the specific nature of the policy,” said the UNESCO spokesman, claiming that the guidelines will actually “expand” freedom of expression.

The organization didn’t provide a timeline for implementation, but more meetings are scheduled in the lead-up to the September 2024 U.N. summit in New York City.

The economic and political implications of the dollar’s possible loss of its prized status as global reserve currency are hard to overstate, according to experts.

In fact, such a development—if and when it occurs—could prove catastrophic to U.S. consumers as their spending power evaporates, economists are warning amid debt-ceiling negotiations that have sent tremors around the world.

Numerous analysts who spoke with The Epoch Times warned that the CCP and other U.S. adversaries were actively advancing the global effort to undermine the dollar.

However, current and former U.S. lawmakers and policymakers also placed much of the blame on the Biden administration, U.S. government spending, and the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies.

“The dollar is clearly at risk from foreign enemies who wish to challenge American power and domestic fools who believe the American credit card has no limits on spending,” explained Kevin Freeman, host of the Economic War Room and an authority on economic warfare.

In comments to The Epoch Times, Freeman, who has briefed top U.S. military officials and policymakers, pointed to CCP strongman Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin as foreign adversaries seeking to undermine the dollar.

The Saudis and numerous powers across Africa and Latin America have joined the “anti-dollar cabal” in recent months, he added. But the U.S. government deserves some of the blame for the developments, he said.

“Sadly, we are making it easy for them with massive debt increases, an erratic foreign policy, and Washington’s arrogance that ignores the threat,” said Freeman, who also serves as a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy.

Multiple members of Congress who spoke with The Epoch Times echoed the concerns about the Biden administration’s role in the accelerating shift away from the dollar.

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) pointed to the president himself. “Joe Biden’s war mongering, runaway inflation, and irresponsible spending sprees have threatened our currency’s value,” he said.

A broad range of experts who spoke with The Epoch Times were divided on when or even if the U.S. dollar might lose its status as global reserve currency, and what that could mean for the U.S. economy and the American people.

While many are warning of calamity, some even said there may be a “silver lining” to the U.S. dollar losing its global position.

But regardless of when or how the saga plays out, the significance of the trends surrounding the U.S. dollar and its role in the world will be profound and highly disruptive at the very least, experts said.

De-dollarization

Thanks to the unchallengeable supremacy of the United States in the aftermath of World War II and the dollar’s nominal backing by gold at the time, and later its endorsement by oil exporters as the “petro-dollar,” the American currency has reigned supreme among currencies for over 70 years.

The dollar still benefits from what is known as the “network effect” as well as the fact that U.S. capital markets are the deepest and most liquid in the world, experts told The Epoch Times.

But if current trends away from the dollar and political instability continue, analysts say the American currency’s coveted status as the global reserve could be shaken or even lost for good. In fact, the process is already underway, some experts warned.

The dollar’s share of global reserves just two decades ago was at about 75 percent, according to experts and analysts. Today, estimates suggest it is under 50 percent and shrinking fast.

Speaking at the 2023 Milken Institute Global Conference, International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Kristalina Georgieva highlighted the trend.

“There has been a gradual shift away from the dollar,” she said, adding that the euro, the British pound, and the CCP’s yuan were all gaining ground.

While Georgieva said she did not anticipate an imminent rise of a viable alternative as “we may migrate to central bank digital currencies massively,” that does not mean it will not come eventually.

Non-Western central banks are also buying gold in record quantities, and analysts expect that demand to remain strong.

“We think this trend of central bank buying is likely to continue amid heightened geopolitical risks and elevated inflation,” Swiss bank UBS said in a note.

“In fact, the US decision to freeze Russian foreign exchange reserves in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine may have led to a long-term impact on the behavior of central banks.”

Even traditional U.S. allies have been conducting deals in non-dollar currencies. In late March, for example, the French government completed its first cross-border liquified natural gas deal in Chinese yuan.

Also in March, authorities in Brazil—an economic powerhouse that historically has had close relations with the United States—also inked a deal with the CCP to trade in domestic currencies rather than the dollar.

The trends are accelerating. According to a recent note by prominent currency analyst Stephen Jen at Eurizon SLJ, the dollar lost market share in 2022 at 10 times the pace as during the previous 20 years—a trend he says most analysts have missed.

The speed at which this is happening is dramatic, too. “Adjusting for these price changes, the dollar, we calculate, has lost some 11 percent of its market share since 2016 and double that amount since 2008,” added Jen, who previously worked at Morgan Stanley.

Much of the recent acceleration has to do with U.S. policy on Ukraine. “This erosion in the USD’s reserve currency status has accelerated precipitously since the start of the war in Ukraine,” noted Jen, pointing to “exceptional actions” against Russia that “startled” large reserve-holding countries.

“What we witnessed in 2022 was sort of a ‘defund-the-global-police’ moment, whereby many reserve managers in the world disagreed with the conduct of both Russia and the US.”

CCP Agenda

Calls for a new global monetary system and reserve currency are not new, though. Even a decade ago, the CCP was promoting the idea through its propaganda machine.

“What may also be included as a key part of an effective reform is the introduction of a new international reserve currency that is to be created to replace the dominant U.S. dollar, so that the international community could permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States,” Liu Chang wrote in an opinion piece for Xinhua, a CCP propaganda and intelligence-gathering operation.

Analysts said the Xinhua editorial was undoubtedly approved by senior CCP officials and clearly reflected Beijing’s views.

One benefit of such a policy would be to “encourage Washington to play a much more constructive role in addressing global affairs,” the CCP piece continued, calling for a “de-Americanized” so-called “new world order.”

It was hardly the first time the CCP touted the idea. In a 2009 report by People’s Bank of China chief Zhou Xiaochuan dubbed “Reform the International Monetary System,” the CCP called for an “international reserve currency that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run.” The proposed global currency could be issued by the IMF, he said.

In other words, almost 15 years ago, the highest echelons of power in Beijing were plotting a global currency to replace the dollar as the world reserve.

When asked about the idea at a Council on Foreign Relations event, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner shocked observers. “We’re actually quite open to that,” he said, causing the dollar to plunge.

Many of the same policymakers from the Obama administration in 2009 who were supportive of the idea remain in positions of influence in the Biden administration today. And as The Epoch Times reported in 2021 amid the CCP virus crisis, the IMF has been moving in that direction with its special drawing rights, a sort of proto-global currency issued by the global financial institution.

Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations Kevin Moley, a leading voice warning of the CCP’s agenda, said the shift away from the U.S. dollar was “one of the most dangerous developments in the post-war era.”

While he blasted the Biden administration for angering and alienating U.S. allies, he pointed to the CCP—the “greatest existential threat to the Republic since 1776”—as the main driver of the ongoing shift.

“This is all part and parcel of their plan to dominate the world,” he said. “It is China’s intention to become the dominant superpower of the 21st century.”

Key members of the Biden administration have publicly celebrated the CCP’s growing role on the world stage. For example, senior Biden administration diplomat Bathsheba Crocker, who served as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs during the Obama administration, was quoted by CCP paper China Daily as saying she was “particularly pleased” to see Beijing taking more responsibility in the United Nations.

Previous presidential administrations, which Moley said were “misled” by their own “arrogance,” have also contributed to the CCP’s ongoing push to dethrone the dollar, he said.

With House Republicans revealing evidence of CCP money being funneled to Biden family members in suspicious transactions, questions about CCP influence in Washington continue to grow.

Domestic Causes

But while the CCP may be hoping to see the dollar replaced as the global reserve, that would be much more difficult to accomplish if not for the policies pursued by the federal government and the federal reserve,” lawmakers told The Epoch Times.

Gosar, for instance, told The Epoch Times that “war mongering” by Biden along with “runaway inflation and irresponsible spending sprees” have contributed in a major way to the dollar’s escalating woes.

“Americans have taken for granted that most countries try to do business using U.S. dollars,” he said. “Our dollar has historically been seen as stable, reliable, and useful. This benefits our nation greatly.”

Now, however, U.S. financial dominance is “under threat” because of Biden’s “incompetence,” the GOP lawmaker told The Epoch Times.

“Countries like Russia, China, and India are now looking at using other currencies because Biden has abused our currency and banking system,” he said, pointing to legislation he and others introduced to link the dollar to gold again as a way to rein in the problems.

Former Congressman Ron Paul, a longtime advocate for monetary reform who served in key congressional positions relating to currency and banking, also pointed to U.S. policy as a leading cause of the shift away from the dollar.  While it’s true that foreign governments and central banks right now appear to be “ganging up” on the dollar, Dr. Paul told The Epoch Times that much of the blame belongs with U.S. policy makers.

“Other governments are ditching the dollar because of our foreign policy causing so much harm to them and also our warmongering policy, which is not healthy for the world or our own peace,” said the veteran lawmaker and author of the best-selling book “End the Fed.”

David Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in the Reagan administration, said he was not surprised at the global trend away from the U.S. dollar considering U.S. financial and monetary policies.

“For years, the Federal Reserve has been flooding the financial system with dollars,” he said. “As a result, people are looking for alternatives that have a better chance of maintaining their value over time.”

Another expert, prominent financial forecaster and economic analyst Charles Nenner, cited his models and macro trends to suggest that the looming “major de-dollarization” was tied to the end of a 250-year “super cycle.”

“The United States has such a big deficit that it is leading to the start of longer-term inflation,” said the former Goldman Sachs analyst, whose Charles Nenner Research Center advises hedge funds, banks, brokerage firms, family offices, and individual clients.

“The world has lost confidence in the leadership of the USA,” he added.

Amid those trends, governments and central banks of the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—are currently creating what Nenner described as an “anti-dollar economy.”

“We expect most of the world to follow the alternative currency that BRICS countries are trying to develop,” he said.

Indeed, former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill openly called on the BRICS governments to deliberately counter the dollar.

“The U.S. dollar plays a far too dominant role in global finance,” he wrote in the journal Global Policy.

Effects

This shift away from the dollar could lead to huge outflows from the U.S. bond market, an “enormous rise in inflation,” and other problems for the U.S. economy, Nenner explained.

Obviously, there would be major implications for the purchasing power of the dollar, too, as the cost of imports and commodities measured in dollars soared.

It would also accelerate the ongoing global shift toward central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), said Nenner, who has worked with numerous leading banks around the world.

On the geopolitical front, Nenner suggested, the world may be rapidly approaching the end not just of dollar supremacy but of the global dominance of the United States, with the collapse of the dollar merely one symptom of a broader trend.

Historically, the average age of empires has been about 250 years, Nenner said, pointing to the rise and fall of the Roman, Dutch, and British empires as examples.

“The USA shows the same symptoms as these previous empires showed right before their downfall including the loss of trust from other nations,” he said.

In other words, the loss of the dollar’s status appears to be an important part of—not just a cause of—a broader geopolitical realignment with profound implications for the world.

Paul, a three-time presidential contender who for decades warned about what was happening to the U.S. currency as well as what he viewed as the danger of an interventionist foreign policy, told The Epoch Times in a wide-ranging interview that the United States was already facing an “inflationary depression.”

“And it’s going to get worse as the dollar continues losing ground,” he said, arguing that prices would rise dramatically. “There will be so much pain and suffering when they have to give up on the dollar.”

While many analysts are “clucking” about the trend being potentially catastrophic for America, Stockman suggested it may not necessarily be a bad thing for the United States over the long term, as it would force Congress to act more responsibly.

“This is just a gift to Congress that allows them to spend and spend and build up the public debt to the point that we’re at $31 trillion today, to the point that we’re having a debate about paying our bills and not cutting any spending,” he said, sounding flabbergasted.

It will be very painful and Americans will have to accept a significantly reduced standards of living, Stockman said. But the “silver lining” of the U.S. dollar losing its global-reserve status is that “it will wake up the politicians and policymakers to understand that we’ve been living way, way beyond our means, and we’re going to have to pay the piper,” he said.

“It’s about time for us to face the facts—the reality—and change policy quite dramatically,” he added.

In economic terms, the loss of global reserve status will mean Americans will have to export more to be able to import the same amount, explained Dr. Thorsten Polleit, chief economist at Degussa, Europe’s largest precious metal trading house.

In comments to The Epoch Times, the honorary professor of economics at the University of Bayreuth said this means a decline in living standards.

“Moreover, as capital inflows would most likely also decline, there would be lower investments and lower economic growth in the U.S. going forward,” he said.

Ultimately, the world may even end up divided between a “dollar block” and a “non-dollar block” as a more “multipolar world currency system” emerges and other currencies such as the yuan and the euro gain ground.

Experts who spoke with The Epoch Times had widely divergent views on whether the transformation would be sudden or gradual, as well as on how long it might take for the dollar to lose its prized status. Neither the U.S. Treasury nor the IMF responded to requests for comment.

Article from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Indeed, several of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly implicated in policies that are squeezing farmers, ranchers, and food supplies around the world.

High-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members within the U.N. system helped create the SDGs and are currently helping lead the organization’s implementation of the global plan, The Epoch Times has previously documented.

If left unchecked, multiple experts said, the U.N.-backed sustainability policies on agriculture and food production would lead to economic devastation, shortages of critical goods, widespread famine, and a dramatic loss of individual freedoms.

Already, millions of people worldwide are facing dangerous food shortages, and officials around the world say those are set to get worse as the year goes on. There is an agenda behind it all, experts told The Epoch Times.

Even private land ownership is in the crosshairs, as global food production and the world economy are transformed to meet the global sustainability goals, U.N. documents reviewed by The Epoch Times show. As explained by the U.N. on its SDG website, the goals adopted in 2015 “build on decades of work by countries and the U.N.”

One of the earliest meetings defining the “sustainability” agenda was the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements known as Habitat I, which adopted the Vancouver Declaration.

The agreement stated that “land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals” and that private land ownership is “a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.”

“Public control of land use is therefore indispensable,” the U.N. declaration said, a prelude to the World Economic Forum’s now infamous “prediction” that by 2030, “you’ll own nothing.”

Numerous U.N. agencies and officials have outlined their vision of “sustainability” since then, including calls for drastic restrictions on energy, meat consumption, travel, living space, and material prosperity.

Experts interviewed by The Epoch Times say that some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporate leaders are working with communists in China and elsewhere in an effort to centralize control over food production and crush independent farmers and ranchers.

The WEF, a network of major multinational businesses that collaborates closely with the CCP, is a “strategic partner” of the U.N. on Agenda 2030.

The increasing regulation of food production and even efforts to shut many farms and ranches come as officials around the world such as U.S. President Joe Biden and U.N. World Food Programme chief David Beasley warn of looming food shortages worldwide.

But instead of easing restrictions and encouraging more production, Western governments and many governments dependent on aid are clamping down even harder.

Dutch farmers, already at the breaking point, have responded this summer with massive nationwide protests. That followed violent unrest in Sri Lanka tied to food shortages caused by government policy.

Governments and international organizations have cited various pretexts for the policies, ranging from increasing “sustainability” and protecting various flora and fauna, to promoting “economic justice” and even returning lands to aboriginal peoples.

According to critics of the policies, though, the goal isn’t to preserve the environment or fight climate change at all. Instead, the experts warn that the “sustainability” narrative and the other justifications are a tool to gain control over food, agriculture, and people.

“The end goal of these efforts is to reduce sovereignty on both individual nations and people,” said Craig Rucker, president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a public policy organization specializing in environmental and development issues.

“The intent for those pushing this agenda is not to save the planet, as they purport, but to increase control over people,” he told The Epoch Times, adding that the goal is to centralize power at the national and even international level.

UN Sustainable Development Goals—Agenda 2030 

The U.N. Sustainable Development Goals, often referred to as Agenda 2030, were adopted in 2015 by the organization and its member states as a guide to “transforming our world.” Hailed as a “master plan for humanity” and a global “declaration of interdependence” by top U.N. officials, the 17 goals include 169 targets involving every facet of the economy and life.

“All countries and all stakeholders, acting in collaborative partnership, will implement this plan,” declares the preamble to the document, repeatedly noting that “no one will be left behind.”

Among other elements, the U.N. plan calls for national and international wealth redistribution in Goal 10, as well as “fundamental changes in the way that our societies produce and consume goods and services.”

Using government to transform all economic activity is a critical part of the SDGs, with Goal 12 demanding “sustainable consumption and production patterns.”

Among the specific targets outlined in Goal 12 are several directly linked to agricultural policies that undermine food production. These include “sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources.”

Perhaps more importantly, the document demands “environmentally sound management of chemicals and all wastes throughout their life cycle, in accordance with agreed international frameworks.”

As a result, people and especially farmers must “significantly reduce their release to air, water, and soil in order to minimize their adverse impacts on human health and the environment.”

Other SDGs that are directly tied to what critics have called the “war on farmers” include Goal 14, which addresses “marine pollution of all kinds, in particular from land-based activities, including … nutrient pollution.” The U.N. regularly describes agriculture and food production as a threat to the ocean.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), led by former CCP Vice Minister of Agriculture and Rural Affairs Qu Dongyu, is helping to lead the charge.

In its 2014 report “Building a Common Vision for Sustainable Food and Agriculture: Principles and Approaches,” the U.N. agency calls for drastic restrictions on the use of fertilizers, pesticides, emissions, and water in the agricultural sector.

As an example of how agriculture must be reformed to be considered sustainable by the U.N., the FAO report declares that “excessive use of nitrogen fertilizer is a major cause of water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.”

The Rome-based FAO didn’t respond to a request for comment. Another of the 17 SDGs with a direct impact on agriculture and food production is Goal 2, with its calls for “sustainable agriculture” and “sustainable food production.”

Goal 6, meanwhile, calls for “sustainable management of water,” which includes various targets involving agricultural water use and runoff.

Because U.N. leaders see agriculture and food production as key contributors to what they call manmade climate change, Goal 13 is important, too. It calls for governments to “integrate climate change measures into national policies, strategies, and planning.”

Goal 15, which deals with sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, also has multiple targets that affect agriculture and food production. All over the world, national and regional governments are working with U.N. agencies to implement these sustainability goals in agriculture and other sectors.

For instance, responding to U.N. biodiversity agreements, the European Union has enacted various U.N.-backed biodiversity programs such as Natura 2000 and the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030, which have been cited by the Dutch government and others in their agricultural policies.

The U.N. also boasts publicly about its role in imposing the SDGs in Sri Lanka and other nations suffering from food shortages and economic calamities linked to the very same global sustainability programs. Around the world, almost every national government says it’s incorporating the SDGs into its own laws and regulations.

World Economic Forum ‘Partnership’ 

Alongside the U.N. are various “stakeholders” that are critical to implementing sustainable development policies through “public-private partnerships.”

At the heart of that effort is the WEF, which since 2020 has been pushing a total transformation of society known as the “Great Reset.” In 2019, the WEF signed a “strategic partnership” with the U.N. to advance Agenda 2030 within the global business community.

The official agreement defined “areas of cooperation to deepen institutional engagement and jointly accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

Many of the key officials behind Agenda 2030, including top U.N. leaders such as current Secretary-General António Guterres—a self-proclaimed socialist—have also been working with the WEF for decades.

Meanwhile, the WEF has been explicit with its goals. It recently launched a “Food Action Alliance” (FAA) that acknowledges on its website that Agenda 2030 “informs the ambition of the FAA to provide an enduring and long-term platform for multi-stakeholder action on food systems to meet the SDGs.”

Alongside the U.N.’s “Food Systems Summit” in September 2021, the WEF’s FAA released a report outlining its own “leadership agenda for multi-stakeholder collaboration to transform food systems.”

Among other elements, the document summarizes the FAA’s insights on “supporting transformative food system partnerships, and its value proposition beyond the UN Food Systems Summit 2021 towards achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

The WEF’s public concern with transforming agriculture and the food supply goes back over a decade, at least.

In partnership with various companies, the WEF released a 2010 report outlining a “new vision for agriculture” that included a “roadmap for stakeholders.” Many of the world’s largest food companies that dominate the market and own countless popular brands are involved.

The WEF’s website is packed with information purporting to justify a total transformation of the food supply by “stakeholders.”

“As global food systems become increasingly interconnected, effective coordination among a diverse set of stakeholders will be required,” WEF says on its “Strategic Intelligence” platform, frequently citing the FAO as its source.

“The potential to craft new, systemic approaches to food systems that include a diverse array of stakeholders presents opportunities to help sustainably feed the world well into the future.”

The organization’s frequent references to “stakeholders” refers to governments, companies, and so-called nongovernmental organizations that are often funded by those same companies and governments. They are all working together on the issue.

For instance, the WEF boasts that it has brought corporate giants such as Coca-Cola and Unilever into the fold toward promoting a “more sustainable future.”

The Rockefeller Foundation, which recently released a report on how to “Reset the Table” and “Transform the U.S. Food System,” is also a key player. The WEF’s “Food Innovation Hubs” around the world are set to be a major part of this global transformation.

Speaking to the World Economic Forum on “transforming food systems and land use” at last year’s Davos Agenda Week, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced that the Netherlands would host the “Global Coordinating Secretariat of the World Economic Food Innovation Hubs.”

The secretariat, he said, “will connect all other Food Innovation Hubs” in order to facilitate creating “the partnerships we need.”

Neither the WEF nor the Rockefeller Foundation responded to requests for comment on their role in Agenda 2030 and on the agricultural policies being pursued around the world.

Other organizations and entities involved in the push include powerful tax-exempt foundations such as the Gates Foundation, the EU-style regional governments proliferating around the world, and various groups funded by them.

Squeezing Farmers—and the Food Supply 

All over the globe, U.N. SDG-aligned government policies are squeezing farmers—especially smaller, independent producers unable to absorb the added costs of added regulation and control.

Celebrating U.N. sustainability ideas, recently ousted Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced at the U.N. COP26 climate summit in 2021 that his government was banning chemical fertilizers and pesticides.

“Sri Lanka recently restricted the imports of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weedicides due to public health concerns, water contamination, soil degradation, and biodiversity impacts,” Rajapaksa told world leaders, to widespread acclaim.

“Although opposed by entrenched lobbies, this has created opportunities for innovation and investment into organic agriculture that will be healthier and more sustainable in future.”

In reality, even though they were promptly rolled back, the policies produced catastrophic food shortages, widespread hunger, and eventually a popular revolt that ousted the president and his government.

In 2019, the socialist Sri Lankan government also partnered with the U.N. Environment Programme to establish the U.N. Global Nitrogen Campaign, which promotes the U.N.-backed policies on nitrogen that are now proliferating worldwide.

In the Netherlands, headquarters for the WEF’s “Food Innovation Hub” secretariat, authorities are imposing nitrogen policies that are expected to decimate the nation’s highly productive agricultural sector. The plans also include widespread expropriation of farms.

“The expropriation plans of the cabinet are a downright declaration of war on the agricultural sector,” said Dutch Member of Parliament Gideon van Meijeren, of the Forum for Democracy party, as cited by De Dagelijkse Standaard. “Under false pretenses, farmers are being robbed of their land, centuries-old farms are being demolished and farmers’ families are being totally destroyed.”

Experts warned of dangerous consequences stemming from such sustainability policies including food shortages, skyrocketing prices, social unrest, and more.

“You can glimpse the green, sustainable future by beholding Holland and Sri Lanka now,” Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Epoch Times.

And yet, the agenda is spreading rapidly. Canadian federal authorities last week announced similar restrictions on fertilizers and nitrogen after restrictions on energy production were put in place, sparking outrage from provincial officials and farmers.

In Ireland, the United Kingdom, and other European nations, various government entities are also working to slash agricultural production under sustainability programs.

Meanwhile, aside from continuing with policies that pay farmers not to grow food, the Biden administration is seeking to impose WEF-backed “Environmental, Social, Governance” metrics and reporting on companies through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Farm associations and more than 100 members of Congress argue that the plan would bankrupt owners of small and medium-size farms unable to comply with climate reporting requirements to do business with public firms, even as the world moves toward widespread food shortages. In part, experts say the insistence on these sorts of policies is because those imposing them are largely insulated from the damage they are causing.

“Global elites in government, transnational organizations, corporate boardrooms—well represented in the WEF—are so caught up in their climate virtue signaling, from which many hope to benefit financially through investments in green energy, that they are slow to notice that they are completely detached from reality,” said National Center for Public Policy Research’s Cohen, who specializes in environmental issues.

“Few of those imposing regulations on farmers have ever set foot on a farm. By virtue of the power and wealth these people already have, they are shielded from the consequences of the misguided policies they impose on the rest of the world. That burden is borne by ordinary people around the world, about whom the Davos crowd and their partners in crime know nothing.”

Small, Independent Farms at Risk: Experts 

Sri Lanka’s disaster offers a preview of what will happen to the United States and Europe if policymakers continue to follow the U.N. sustainability agenda, according to Sterling Burnett, who holds a doctorate in environmental ethics and leads the nonprofit Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.

“It’s not a war on farming; it’s a war on small farming and independent farmers,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s a war in support of elite, large-scale agricultural industries.”

Even though the U.N. SDGs speak of helping “small-scale food producers,” Burnett argued that independent farms and ranches are in the U.N.’s crosshairs to help consolidate control over the food supply. Policymakers are “in the pocket” of major corporate interests including Conagra, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and others, he said.

“They would just as soon have all their small competitors put out of business,” he said, echoing concerns expressed by numerous other experts.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose firm manages more money than any other company in the world, “wants to impose his values on companies using other people’s money,” Burnett said.

Fink, who serves on the board of the powerful Council on Foreign Relations and works closely with the WEF, is a key architect of the push to impose “environmental, social, governance” metrics on U.S. companies.

“This is the super-rich foisting their values on the rest of us,” said Burnett, pointing to those he says are happy to work with communists on the effort.

“As far as the World Economic Forum is concerned, you can’t have a Great Reset if you don’t reset the food supply, because food is necessary to everybody,” he said. “Stalin recognized this: Whoever controls the food controls the people. Same with energy.”

As prices soar and farmers go bankrupt, major corporations, in league with governments and international organizations, will pick up the pieces. In the meantime, as seen recently in Sri Lanka, hungry people pushed to the brink are likely to react.

“People were not starving on January 6,” said Burnett, referring to the Jan. 6, 2021, protest and breach at the U.S. Capitol. “The supply chain crisis is happening, shelves are already going empty, and when people are hungry, they will not sit around and do nothing.”

American Policy Center founder and President Tom DeWeese, a leading expert on and critic of U.N. notions of sustainability, warned that the war on farmers was part of a broader agenda to strip people of freedom.

“Always in the past, when tyrannical forces wanted to rule the world, they built armies and invaded, broke things, killed people, and forced subjugation,” DeWeese told The Epoch Times. “We are now dealing with a diabolical force that has figured out a way to get us to voluntarily surrender our liberties and help them subjugate us.

“What could be such a powerful tool? The threat of Environmental Armageddon,” he said, pointing to the climate-change narrative as the prime example.

Citing numerous U.N. officials and documents, DeWeese says the agenda isn’t to save the climate, but to transform the planet and centralize control over the populace.

Aside from the U.N. and the WEF, major companies such as Vanguard and BlackRock are working to take over and control the food supply, he said. Already, a handful of companies in which those two investment firms are top shareholders dominate the global food and beverage industry. By taking over the farming, they will control it all.

“The goal is to have total control over food production,” he said, noting that they seek to own all seeds and even grow synthetic meat in facilities already being backed financially by Bill Gates and other billionaires.

Genetically engineered crops are high on the agenda, too. The U.N., the WEF, and others are also moving forward with promoting insects and weeds as food. Across the Western world, insect protein production facilities are popping up rapidly.

But it gets even darker, DeWeese says.

“If people are starving, they are much easier to subjugate,” he said, adding that depopulation and control over humanity have been on the agenda of global elites for decades.

The “war on farmers” also comes amid what critics have described as a government-backed “war on energy” that’s affecting agriculture and virtually every other sector.

This includes limiting energy exploration, shutting down power plants, charging special fees and taxes, and other policies that have resulted in rapidly rising costs across the Western world, although not in places such as China.

The experts interviewed by The Epoch Times urged Americans to resist the war on farmers and the U.N.-backed sustainability policies using a variety of means. These include getting involved politically, adopting different shopping habits, finding alternative sources of food such as local farmers, and other measures.

Officials at the U.N. didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Article Cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.