Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.

Professor Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University has described how closing down the global economy in early 2020 under the guise of fighting a supposedly new and novel pathogen allowed the US Federal Reserve to flood collapsing financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

According to investigative journalist Michael Byrant, €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019. The appearance of a ‘novel virus’ provided a convenient cover story.

The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.

In response to a collapsing neoliberalism, we are now seeing the rollout of an authoritarian great reset — an agenda that intends to reshape the economy and change how we live.

SHIFT TO AUTHORITARIANISM

The new economy is to be dominated by a handful of tech giants, global conglomerates and e-commerce platforms, and new markets will also be created through the financialisation of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the notion of protecting the environment.

In recent years, we have witnessed an overaccumulation of capital, and the creation of such markets will provide fresh investment opportunities (including dodgy carbon offsetting Ponzi schemes)  for the super-rich to park their wealth and prosper.

This great reset envisages a transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance. Being rolled out under the benign term of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the World Economic Forum (WEF) says the public will eventually ‘rent’ everything they require (remember the WEF video ‘you will own nothing and be happy’?): stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ and underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. But they also serve another purpose: social control.

Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state.

To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security (those terrible Russians, Islamic extremists or that Sunak-designated bogeyman George Galloway) or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good.

The real reason for this ideological shift is to ensure that the masses get used to lower living standards and accept them. Consider, for instance, the Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill saying that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. And then there is Rob Kapito of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock, who says that a “very entitled” generation must deal with scarcity for the first time in their lives.

At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of the conflict in Ukraine and supply shocks that both the war and ‘the virus’ have caused.

The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet.

NET-ZERO AGENDA

But what of this shift towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and the plan to slash our carbon footprints? Is it even feasible or necessary?

Gordon Hughes, a former World Bank economist and current professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, says in a new report that current UK and European net-zero policies will likely lead to further economic ruin.

Apparently, the only viable way to raise the cash for sufficient new capital expenditure (on wind and solar infrastructure) would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10 per cent. Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war; even then, never for more than a decade.

But this agenda will also cause serious environmental degradation. So says Andrew Nikiforuk in the article The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics, which outlines how the green techno-dream is vastly destructive.

He lists the devastating environmental impacts of an even more mineral-intensive system based on renewables and warns:

“The whole process of replacing a declining system with a more complex mining-based enterprise is now supposed to take place with a fragile banking system, dysfunctional democracies, broken supply chains, critical mineral shortages and hostile geopolitics.”

All of this assumes that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Not everyone agrees. In the article Global warming and the confrontation between the West and the rest of the world, journalist Thierry Meyssan argues that net zero is based on political ideology rather than science. But to state such things has become heresy in the Western countries and shouted down with accusations of ‘climate science denial’.

Regardless of such concerns, the march towards net zero continues, and key to this is the United Nations Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development Goals.

Today, almost every business or corporate report, website or brochure includes a multitude of references to ‘carbon footprints’, ‘sustainability’, ‘net zero’ or ‘climate neutrality’ and how a company or organisation intends to achieve its sustainability targets. Green profiling, green bonds and green investments go hand in hand with displaying ‘green’ credentials and ambitions wherever and whenever possible.

It seems anyone and everyone in business is planting their corporate flag on the summit of sustainability. Take Sainsbury’s, for instance. It is one of the ‘big six’ food retail supermarkets in the UK and has a vision for the future of food that it published in 2019.

Here’s a quote from it:

“Personalised Optimisation is a trend that could see people chipped and connected like never before. A significant step on from wearable tech used today, the advent of personal microchips and neural laces has the potential to see all of our genetic, health and situational data recorded, stored and analysed by algorithms which could work out exactly what we need to support us at a particular time in our life. Retailers, such as Sainsbury’s could play a critical role to support this, arranging delivery of the needed food within thirty minutes — perhaps by drone.”

Tracked, traced and chipped — for your own benefit. Corporations accessing all of our personal data, right down to our DNA. The report is littered with references to sustainability and the climate or environment, and it is difficult not to get the impression that it is written so as to leave the reader awestruck by the technological possibilities.

However, the promotion of a brave new world of technological innovation that has nothing to say about power — who determines policies that have led to massive inequalities, poverty, malnutrition, food insecurity and hunger and who is responsible for the degradation of the environment in the first place — is nothing new.

The essence of power is conveniently glossed over, not least because those behind the prevailing food regime are also shaping the techno-utopian fairytale where everyone lives happily ever after eating bugs and synthetic food while living in a digital panopticon.

FAKE GREEN

The type of ‘green’ agenda being pushed is a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining the pockets of rich investors and subsidy-sucking green infrastructure firms and also part of a strategy required to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

It is, furthermore, a type of green that plans to cover much of the countryside with wind farms and solar panels with most farmers no longer farming. A recipe for food insecurity.

Those investing in the ‘green’ agenda care first and foremost about profit. The supremely influential BlackRock invests in the current food system that is responsible for polluted waterways, degraded soils, the displacement of smallholder farmers, a spiralling public health crisis, malnutrition and much more.

It also invests in healthcare — an industry that thrives on the illnesses and conditions created by eating the substandard food that the current system produces. Did Larry Fink, the top man at BlackRock, suddenly develop a conscience and become an environmentalist who cares about the planet and ordinary people? Of course not.

Any serious deliberations on the future of food would surely consider issues like food sovereignty, the role of agroecology and the strengthening of family farms — the backbone of current global food production.

The aforementioned article by Andrew Nikiforuk concludes that, if we are really serious about our impacts on the environment, we must scale back our needs and simplify society.

In terms of food, the solution rests on a low-input approach that strengthens rural communities and local markets and prioritises smallholder farms and small independent enterprises and retailers, localised democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture.

It would involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense due to diverse cropping patterns and free from toxic chemicals while ensuring local ownership and stewardship of common resources like land, water, soil and seeds.

That’s where genuine environmentalism and the future of food begins.

Bank of America (BofA), Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are all members of a United Nations (UN)-organized program called the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) that is “committed to financing ambitious climate action.” One of NZBA’s primary goals is to force the United States economy into producing zero “greenhouse gas” emissions by the year 2050, which the Republican state agriculture commissioners say will result in “severe consequences” for the nation’s farmers.

“Achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture requires a complete overhaul of on-farm infrastructure – one of the goals of the NZBA,” the letter reads.

“This would have a catastrophic impact on our farmers. Proposed net-zero roadmaps describe dramatic, impractical and costly changes to American farming and ranching operations such as switching to electric machinery and equipment; installing on-site solar panels and wind turbines; moving to organic fertilizer; altering rice-field irrigation systems; and slashing U.S. ruminant meat consumption in half, costing millions of livestock jobs.”

(Fact check: Most carbon “offset” projects are a scam, as is just about the entirety of the climate change industry.)

ESG, net zero and mass genocide

By 2050, global food demand is expected to increase dramatically as it is. Coupled with the NSBA’s net-zero scheme to basically ban emissions, the end result will be widespread food shortages and famine, followed swiftly by mass starvation and death.

“… these changes will increase food costs and decrease food production at a time when global food demand is expected to rise dramatically,” the letter further reads.

“This is compounded by the fact that the average American has been struggling to keep up with inflation during the tenure of the Biden Administration. The reality could be much worse. These effects will hit the poor the hardest.”

Should the net-zero emissions scheme win out over reason and sound science, America’s agriculture sector could sustain permanent damage, which in turn threatens the country’s food security.

“American farmers should not be forced to put our food supply at risk,” the letter declares.

The agriculture commissioners who signed onto the letter include those of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas and West Virginia.

The letter asserts that, as members of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), @BankOfAmerica, @Citi, @JPMorgan, @MorganStanley, @WellsFargo, and @GoldmanSachs are all working in lockstep to force the ESG agenda onto the entire domestic food supply chain: pic.twitter.com/1phYm6iOvo

— Will Hild (@WillHild) January 29, 2024

In a statement, Will Hild, executive director of the watchdog group Consumers’ Research, noted that farmers and ranchers underpin the U.S. economy, and yet they are the targets of “international climate cartels like the NZBA.”

“The ag officials and commissioners hit the nail on the head in their letter: should their misguided climate extremism continue unabated, these mega-banks will put our entire food supply in serious jeopardy,” Hild further said.

“I applaud the states for their action, and I look forward to working with them to defend American consumers from this corporate malfeasance.”

Any involvement in net zero, by the way, represents crimes against humanity because, as we continue to report, climate fanaticism at its core is all about mass depopulation and genocide of the “useless eaters,” as the elitists often refer to the world’s poor.

The latest news about the climate change scam can be found at GreenTyranny.news.

Sources for this article include:

• ZeroHedge.com
• NaturalNews.com

These are the very institutions responsible for the social, ecological and environmental degradation associated with the current food system. The same bodies responsible for spiralling rates of illness due to the toxic food they produce or promote.

In this narrative, there is no space for any mention of the type of power relations that have shaped the prevailing food system and many of the current problems.

Tony Weis from the University of Western Ontario provides useful insight:

World agriculture is marked by extreme imbalances that are among the most durable economic legacies of European imperialism. Many of the world’s poorest countries in the tropics are net food importers despite having large shares of their labor force engaged in agriculture and large amounts of their best arable land devoted to agro-export commodities.”

He adds that this commodity dependence has deep roots in waves of dispossession, the establishment of plantations and the subjugation of peasantries to increasing competitive pressures at the same time as they were progressively marginalised.

In the 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their productive means) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

In more recent times, neoliberalism has further reinforced the power relations that underpin the system, cementing the control of agricultural production by global corporations and facilitated by the policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

CORPORATE FOOD TRANSITION

The food transition is couched in the language of climate emergency and sustainability. It envisages a particular future for farming. It is not organic and relatively few farmers have a place in it.

Post-1945, corporate agribusiness, largely backed by the US state, the Rockefeller Foundation and financial institutions, has been promoting and instituting a chemical-dependent system of industrial agriculture. Rural communities, ecological systems, the environment, human health and indigenous systems of food cultivation have been devastated in the process.

Now, the likes of Bayer, Corteva and Syngenta are working with Microsoft, Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate farmerless farms driven by cloud and AI technology. A cartel of data owners and proprietary input suppliers are reinforcing their grip on the global food system while expanding their industrial model of crop cultivation.

One way they are doing this is by driving the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, a contested commentary that has been carefully promoted (see the work of investigative journalist Cory Morningstar), and net-zero ideology and tying this to carbon offsetting and carbon credits.

Many companies from various sectors are securing large areas of land in the Global South to establish tree plantations and claim carbon credits that they can sell on international carbon markets. In the meantime, by supposedly ‘offsetting’ their emissions, they can carry on polluting.

In countries where industrial agriculture dominates, ‘carbon farming’ involves modifying existing practices to claim that carbon is being sequestered in the soil and to then sell carbon credits.

This is explained in a recent presentation by Devlin Kuyek of the non-profit GRAIN who sets out the corporate agenda behind carbon farming.

One of the first major digital agriculture platforms is called Climate FieldView, an app owned by Bayer. It collects data from satellites and sensors in fields and on tractors and then uses algorithms to advise farmers on their farming practices: when and what to plant, how much pesticide to spray, how much fertiliser to apply, etc. FieldView is already being used on farms in the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Europe.

To be part of Bayer’s Carbon Program, farmers have to be enrolled in Bayer’s FieldView digital agriculture platform. Bayer then uses the FieldView app to instruct farmers on the implementation of just two practices that are said to sequester carbon in the soils: reduced tillage or no-till farming and the planting of cover crops.

Through the app, the company monitors these two practices and estimates the amount of carbon that the participating farmers have sequestered. Farmers are then supposed to be paid according to Bayer’s calculations, and Bayer uses that information to claim carbon credits and sell these in carbon markets.

In August 2022, Bayer launched a new programme in the US called ForGround. Upstream companies can use the platform to advertise and offer discounts for tilling equipment, forage seeds and other inputs. But Bayer’s big target is the downstream food companies which can use the platform to claim emissions reductions in their supply chains.

Places like India are also laying the groundwork for these types of platforms. In April 2021, the Indian government signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft, allowing its local partner CropData to leverage a master database of farmers.

Microsoft will ‘help’ farmers with post-harvest management solutions by building a collaborative platform and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, market demand and prices. In turn, this would create a farmer interface for ‘smart’ agriculture, including post-harvest management and distribution.

CropData will be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details –

1. Profile of land held – cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions.
2. Production details – crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession.
3. Financial details – input costs, average return, credit history.

The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution.

However, this initiative also involves providing data on land holding deeds with the intention of implementing a land market so that investors can buy up land and amalgamate it – global equity funds regard agricultural land as a valuable asset, and global agritech/agribusiness companies prefer industrial-scale farms for rolling out highly mechanised ‘precision’ agriculture.

‘Data-driven agriculture’ mines data to be exploited by the agribusiness/big tech giants who will know more about farmers than farmers know about themselves. The likes of Bayer and Microsoft will gain increasing control over farmers, dictating exactly how they farm and what inputs they use.

And as GRAIN notes, getting more farmers to use reduced tillage or no-till is of huge benefit to Bayer.  The kind of reduced tillage or no-till promoted by Bayer requires dousing fields with its RoundUp (toxic glyphosate) herbicide and planting seeds of its genetically engineered (GE) Roundup resistant soybeans or hybrid maize.

Bayer also intends to profit from the promotion of cover crops. It has taken majority ownership of a seed company developing a gene-edited cover crop, called CoverCress. Seeds of CoverCress will be sold to farmers who are enrolled in ForGround and the crop will be sold as a biofuel.

GE has always been a solution in need of a problem. Along with its associated money-spinning toxic chemicals, it has failed to deliver on its promises (see GMO Myths and Truths, published by Open Earth Source) and has sometimes been disastrous when rolled out, not least for poor farmers in India.

Whereas traditional breeding and on-farm practices have little or no need for GE technologies, under the guise of ‘climate emergency’, the data and agritech giants are commodifying knowledge and making farmers dependent on their platforms and inputs. The commodification of knowledge and compelling farmers to rely on proprietary inputs overseen by algorithms will define what farming is and how it is to be carried out.

The introduction of technology into the sector can benefit farmers. But understanding who owns the technology and how it is being used is crucial for understanding underlying motivations, power dynamics and the quality of food we end up eating.

NET-ZERO PONZI SCHEME

In its article From land grab to soil grab: the new business of carbon farming, GRAIN says control rather than sequestering carbon is at the heart of the matter. More than half of the soil organic matter in the world’s agricultural soils has already been lost. Yet, the main culprits behind this soil catastrophe are now recasting themselves as soil saviours.

Under the guise of Green Revolution practices (application of chemicals, synthetic fertilisers, high water usage, hybrid seeds, intensive mono-cropping, increased mechanisation, etc), what we have seen is an exploitative form of agriculture which has depleted soil of its nutrients. It has also resulted in placing farmers on corporate seed and chemical treadmills.

Similarly, carbon farming draws farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices (big tech companies, like Microsoft and IBM, are major buyers of carbon credits). The companies intend to make their digital platforms one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the data harvested from the participating farms.

Those best placed to benefit from these programmes are the equity funds and the wealthy who have been buying up large farmland areas. Financial managers can now use digital platforms to buy farms in Brazil, sign them up for carbon credits, and run their operations all from their offices on Wall Street.

As for the carbon credit and carbon trading market, this appears to be another profitable Ponzi scheme from which traders will make a financial killing.

Journalist Patrick Greenfield states that research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products ‘carbon neutral’ or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the ‘climate crisis’ worse.

Washington-based Verra operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than a billion carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves.

Although Verra disputes the findings, only a handful of Verra’s rainforest projects showed evidence of deforestation reductions – 94% of the credits had no benefit to the climate.

The threat to forests had been overstated by about 400% on average for Verra projects, according to analysis of a 2022 University of Cambridge study.

Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, has been researching carbon credits for 20 years, hoping to find a way to make the system function.

She says that companies are using credits to make claims of reducing emissions when most of these credits don’t represent emissions reductions at all:

“Rainforest protection credits are the most common type on the market at the moment. But these problems are not just limited to this credit type. These problems exist with nearly every kind of credit.”

GENUINE FOOD TRANSITION

The ‘food transition involves’ locking farmers further into an exploitative corporate-controlled agriculture that extracts wealth and serves the market needs of global corporations, carbon trading Ponzi schemes and private equity funds. Farmers will be reduced to corporate labourers or profit-extracting agents who bear all of the risks.

The predatory commercialisation of the countryside is symptomatic of a modern-day colonialist mindset that cynically undermines indigenous farming practices and uses flawed premises and fear mongering to legitimise the roll-out of technologies and chemicals to supposedly deliver us all from climate breakdown and Malthusian catastrophe.

A genuine food transition would involve transitioning away from the reductionist yield-output industrial paradigm to a more integrated low-input systems approach to food and agriculture that prioritises local food security, diverse cropping patterns and nutrition production per acre, water table stability, climate resilience, good soil structure and the ability to cope with evolving pests and disease pressures.

It would involve localised, democratic food systems and a concept of food sovereignty based on self-sufficiency, agroecological principles and regenerative agriculture (there are numerous concrete examples of regenerative agriculture, many of which are described on the website of Food Tank).

This would also involve facilitating the right to culturally appropriate food that is nutritionally dense and free from toxic chemicals and ensuring local (communal) ownership and stewardship of common resources, including land, water, soil and seeds.

This is the basis of genuine food security and genuine environmentalism – based on short-line supply chains that keeps wealth within local communities rather than it being siphoned off by profit-seeking entities half a world away.

Article cross-posted from Off-Guardian.