Dutch Template for Ecomodernism's Brave New World?
Source: (
https://bit.ly/3WwBMy9)
Disaster capitalism and crisis narratives are currently being used
to manipulate popular sentiment and push through a set of unpalatable
policies that would otherwise lack sufficient political support.
These policies are being promoted by wealthy interests that stand
to make billions of dollars from what is being proposed. They seek
to gain full control of food and how it is produced. Their vision is
tied to a wider agenda aimed at shaping how humanity lives, thinks
and acts.
Throughout much of 2022, protests by Dutch farmers have grabbed
the headlines. Plans to reduce the Netherlands' nitrogen output by
half come 2030 have led to mass protests. The government talks
of the need to move away from animal-based agriculture and its
climate-impacting emissions.
This 'food transition' often goes hand-in-hand with the promotion
of 'precision' agriculture, genetic engineering, fewer farmers and
farms and lab-made synthetic food. This transition is sold under
the banner of 'climate-friendly' and piggybacks on the 'climate
emergency' narrative.
Campaigner Willem Engel claims the Dutch government is not seeking
to eliminate farmers from the landscape for environmental reasons.
Instead, it is about the construction of Tristate City, a megalopolis
with a population of around 45 million extending to areas of Germany
and Belgium.
Engel suggests the 'nitrogen crisis' is being manipulated to drive
through policies that will result in reshaping the country's
landscape. He argues that the main nitrogen emitter in the
Netherlands is not agriculture but industry. However, land currently
occupied by farms is strategically important to industry and housing.
The tristate concept is based on a giant unified 'green' urban region
linked by 'smart' technologies that can economically compete with
the massive metropolises we see in Asia, especially in China.
The Dutch government recently announced plans to buy out up to 3,000
farms in a bid to comply with controversial targets to reduce run-off
from synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Dutch nitrogen minister
Christianne van der Wal says farmers are to be offered more than
100 per cent of the value of their farms. But there are plans
to enforce buyouts in 2023 if voluntary measures fail.
Is what we see happening in the Netherlands the initial step in
trying to get the public to accept GM crops, lab-engineered 'food'
and 90 per cent of humanity being crammed into mega-cities?
And is it just a coincidence that the following ecomodernist vision
of the future appears in Dutch on the Netherlands-based RePlanet.nl?
It says that by 2100, there will be ten billion people on the planet:
More than 90 per cent of these live and work in the city, compared
to 50 per cent in 2000. Around the city are large farms full
of genetically modified crops that achieve four times as high a yield
as at the beginning of the 21st century."
It also states that beyond the farmland begins nature, which now
occupies most of the surface of our planet. Whereas in 2000 half
of the earth's surface was still in use by humans, by 2100 it is only
a quarter. The rest has been returned to nature, biodiversity and CO2
emissions are back to pre-1850 levels and hardly anyone is in extreme
poverty anymore.
So, there you have it. Drive farmers out of farming, grab their land
for urbanisation and rewilding, and we will all live happily ever
after on genetically engineered crops and synthetic food created
in giant vats. In this techno make belief land, no one is poor, and
everyone is fed.
A technocratic vision where the stranglehold of the current food
conglomerates remains intact and is further entrenched, and politics
is reduced to decisions about how best to tweak the system for
optimal gains (profit).
In this future, digital platforms will control everything, the brain
of the economy. E-commerce platforms will become permanently
embedded once artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms plan and
determine what will be produced and how it will be produced and
distributed.
We will be reduced to little more than serfdom as a handful
of digitally enabled megacorporations control everything. Bayer,
Corteva, Syngenta, Cargill and the like will work with Microsoft,
Google and the big-tech giants to facilitate AI-driven farmerless
farms and e-commerce retail dominated by the likes of Amazon
and Walmart. A cartel of data owners, proprietary input suppliers
and retail concerns at the commanding heights of the economy,
peddling toxic industrial (fake) food.
And what of elected representatives (if they still exist in this
dystopian vision)? Their role will be highly limited to technocratic
overseers of these platforms.
This is where the interlocking hegemonic class steered by the likes
of the Gates Foundation, Big (Agri)Tech, Big (digital) Finance, Big
Pharma and 'environmentalists' like journalist George Monbiot who
peddle this vision want to take us.
And they will tell you this is for your own good - to avoid hunger
and starvation and to ensure wildlife is protected, the planet
is 'saved', zoonotic pandemics are avoided or that some other
doomsday scenario is dodged.
The current food system is in crisis. But many of its problems were
brought on by the same corporate interests who are behind what is
outlined above. They are responsible for an inherently unjust food
regime driven by World Bank, WTO and IMF policies which act
on their behalf.
These corporations are responsible for soil degradation, synthetic
fertiliser run offs into waterways, the displacement of rural
populations and land appropriation, the flight to over-populated
cities and proletarianization (former independent producers reduced
to wage labour/unemployment), the massive decline in bird and
insect numbers, less diverse diets, a spiralling public health crisis
due to chemical-intensive farming and so on.
And yet, despite the massive problems caused by this model
of agriculture, it is an inconvenient truth that the (low input
/low-energy) peasant food web - not industrial agriculture - still
feeds most of the world even though the industrial model sucks up
huge amounts of subsidies and resources.
Those who promote the ecomodernist vision are using genuine
concerns about the environment to push through an agenda. But where
does genuine environmentalism begin?
It does not begin with bought democracy (see the article How big
business gets control over our food) or state coercion (see
WikiLeaks: US targets EU over GM crops) to get GM crops and
food onto the market.
It does not start with 'precision' agriculture in which gene-editing
and the like is akin to using a blunt ax and constituting genome
vandalism (according to Harvard professor George Church).
And it does not begin and end with genetically engineered crops that
have failed to deliver on their promises and chemically doused
plants to be used as 'feed' for energy-consuming vats that engineer
matter into food.
Nor does it begin and end with the World Bank/IMF using debt (see
the article Modi's Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years
Ago) to enforce dependency, displace populations, crowd people into
densely packed high-rises and strip humanity of its inherent
connection to the land.
Many of the problems mentioned above could be overcome in the
long term by prioritising food and seed sovereignty, localised
production and local economies and agroecological farming. But
this is of no interest to Bayer, Microsoft, Cargill and the like
because none of that fits their business model - indeed, it poses
an existential threat.
Rather than forcing farmers out of farming, the Dutch government
could encourage them to farm differently.
But that requires a different mindset from that which depicts farmers
and farming as a problem in order to ram through an agenda based
on a fairy tale techno utopian vision of the future.
The globalised system of food production based on an industrialised,
high-input, chemical-dependent and corporate-dependent model
underpinned by geopolitical interests is the real problem.
Hans Herren, World Food Prize Laureate, says:
We need to push aside the vested interests blocking the
transformation with the baseless arguments of "the world needs more
food" and design and implement policies that are forward-lookingÂ…
We have all the needed scientific and practical evidence that the
agroecological approaches to food and nutrition security work
successfully."
These policies would facilitate localised, democratic food systems
and a concept of food sovereignty, based on optimal self-sufficiency,
agroecological principles, the right to culturally appropriate food
and local (communal) ownership and stewardship of common
resources, not least land, water, soil and seeds.
Because when discussing food and agriculture, that's where genuine
environmentalism starts.
