WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Amid a global crisis in food supply, with government officials in the Netherlands moving to forcibly close 3,000 farms by 2030, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry has vowed to put American agriculture “front and center” in addressing the “climate crisis.”
Giving a keynote address during the Department of Agriculture’s AIM for Climate Summit last week, Kerry expressed shock that “[a] lot of people have no clue that agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world.”
“We can’t get to net-zero, we don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution. So all of us understand here the depths of this mission,” he said as reported by Fox News.
“Food systems themselves contribute a significant amount of emissions just in the way in which we do the things we’ve been doing,” Kerry warned.
And suggesting human beings are a global climate threat, the former secretary of state added, “With a growing population on the planet – we just crossed the threshold of 8 billion fellow citizens around the world – emissions from the food system alone are projected to cause another half a degree of warming by mid-century.”
Kerry said that “lives depend” on world leaders and scientists addressing this issue with an aggressive plan.
As a means of achieving the same stated goals of combating the “climate crisis,” the government in the Netherlands moved to reduce nitrogen emissions in 2019 and expressed its intention to forcibly close 3,000 farms and cut meat production in half by 2030.
Being Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second largest food exporter in the world (behind the U.S.), this policy will not only have significant impacts on the cost and availability of food worldwide but has also sparked determined resistance by Dutch farmers in a campaign of civil disobedience.
The farmers have shut down motorways with tractor convoys, sprayed the police with manure and camped outside a minister’s house. Yet their attempts to preserve their livelihoods, which provide much of the world’s food amid a global crisis in food supply, have been characterized by the Western media as terrorism.
Last November, the Dutch government made clear that those who are unwilling to comply with increasingly stringent environmental standards will be allowed to sell their farms and farmland to the administration at 120 percent of their value on a voluntary basis.
According to LifeSite Paris correspondent Jeanne Smits, these policies and more will obviously “lead to less food, fewer dairy products, and a reduction in production of agricultural goods, of which the tiny Netherlands is one of the world’s top exporters. Thus, “humanity at large will be confronted by increasing food shortages.”
Focusing on the largest food producer in the world, the United States, Kerry assured his audience that the agricultural sector “needs innovation now more than ever,” and “I refuse to call it climate change anymore. It’s not change. It’s a crisis.”
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