State and multinationals hijack the food chain

Published online at De andere krant, Netherlands, July 9, 2022.⁽¹⁾

Not much noise in the power media about what’s going on in Holland. It is normal that farmers are revolting against the plans of the World Economic Forum that their government is obediently implementing. Under the pretext of population growth and the need to feed 10 billion people soon, agriculture 2.0 is prized, to the detriment of the traditional one, where we still put our hands in the ground. An article from our Dutch colleagues, with their kind permission to reproduce it here.

The Dutch government is working closely with the World Economic Forum (WEF) to radically reform the food sector. The Netherlands is the spider in the web of a global food chain that has not yet been formed, which is controlled by the so-called WEF Food Innovation Hubs. The head office is located in Wageningen. The role of the traditional farmer in the WEF plans is marginal.

The WEF, the elite club of multinational corporations and political leaders based in Davos, has established food innovation hubs around the world. « Market-based, multi-stakeholder partnership platforms aimed at strengthening local innovation ecosystems, » is how the WEF describes them. They need to ensure that the food chain is prepared for the future.

According to the WEF, a radical reform of the food system is needed to eliminate hunger in the world by 2030. There is still a long way to go, as currently « nearly two billion people do not have access to safe, nutritious and adequate food and 690 million people die of hunger.

To solve the problem, a « comprehensive plan » was put in place in 2020 — outside of parliament. The Netherlands plays a leading role in this. The European Food Innovation Hub of the WEF and even the global secretariat of the Hubs are located in Wageningen. The WEF works in collaboration with Wageningen University (WUR) and the Food Valley NL food innovation platform sponsored by the province of Gelderland. The plan leaves little room for traditional farmers. The WEF focuses mainly on public-private partnerships with large companies. Food Valley NL is a good example: it is financed by the province of Gelderland, is chaired by former minister Edith Schippers (VVD) — who is also president of the food multinational DSM — and has companies such as Jumbo, Aldi, HAK, Rabobank and DSM as members. « The role of food companies must be stimulated to create scalable solutions, » Prime Minister Rutte said at a WEF Zoom meeting last year.

Rutte made his statement at a Zoom meeting with the revealing title « Transforming Food Systems and Land Use », where he said that the global secretariat of the food hubs had been assigned to our country by the WEF, after the Netherlands had already been designated as the headquarters for European countries. The coordination is in the hands of Wageningen University.

Because most media outlets report little or nothing about the WEF plan — even now that the debate between farmers and politicians has become heated — it seems that this is not reality, or at most a conspiracy theory. However, commitment to the WEF-led plan and goals has already been openly proclaimed by former Agriculture Minister Carola Schouten, as well as by the Prime Minister himself. The agreements on food hubs are even sealed in legally binding contracts, as the Forum for Democracy showed last year after parliamentary questions in Schouten. In meetings with the WEF, Rutte himself suggested that the transformation of the food chain was in full swing. « The World Economic Food Innovation Hubs connect regional shareholders (what the WEF calls so-called stakeholders, ed. note) to scale up innovations, » Rutte said. It is notable that many companies in the industrial and technology sector in particular are making a major contribution to food sector reform plans.

The government and the WEF say that more food must be produced because « the expected growth in the world’s population (to 10 billion by 2050, and the consequences of the climate crisis only add to the urgency of the current food insecurity, » as stated in a government article last year. Why then drive these farmers off the land, as the Dutch government is now openly doing? More food on less farmland, is it possible? Yes, we thought of something: vertical agriculture, that is, agriculture that goes up. « Vertical Agriculture. Is this the future of agriculture? » the WEF asks a rhetorical question. A video shows how Danish start-up Nordic Harvest in Copenhagen has set up a 75,000 square meter warehouse so that food can be grown in fourteen layers stacked on top of each other. Technological highlights such as LED lighting, rotating mechanisms and sensor-controlled watering ensure that crops grow in « perfect conditions ».

« Our productivity is extremely high and we leave a small footprint, » said David Rosenberg, CEO of Aerofarming, who calls his company a cross between an agricultural and a technology company. « Our crops grow — from seed to harvest — in fifteen days. It takes 30 to 45 days in a greenhouse or in a field. The company-which also does genetic modification of seeds using CRISPR technology-claims that it takes 95% less water than on a farm and can produce 390 times more crops per square meter and even that the food is healthier than on a healthy farm (though many skeptics dispute this). If this phenomenon spreads around the world, much less farmland will be needed. In fact, far fewer farmers will be needed. None other than Bill Gates has pumped $50 million into the company for agricultural robots that can do the job much faster.

While the WEF and the government still claim that farmers will continue to play an important role in the food supply in the future, this seems to be a strategy to keep people quiet as long as possible. It seems that only those parties willing to adopt the Food Hub’s innovations will play a role in the food chain of the future. In general, the agricultural sector is lagging behind, according to the WEF. « The innovations that can help transform our food systems are often already here. Unfortunately, the adoption and scaling of innovations in the agri-food sector lags behind other sectors. »

Nitrogen Minister Van der Wal, Picnic and Bill Gates

The lines with the globalist ruling elite are not only short on the production side of the food chain, there is also an (apparent) conflict of interest on the distribution side. It turns out that the brother-in-law of nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal (VVD) — Bouke van der Wal — is the owner of Picnic. Bill Gates invested 600 million euros in this online supermarket last year. He said he wanted rich countries to « switch to 100% synthetic meat consumption to help fight climate change. » This phenomenon is entirely consistent with another food innovation idea promoted by the WEF: 3D printed « meat. »

Ido Dijkstra

Translation : Bernard Legros