Alex Newman: How UN’s 2030 Agenda Is Driving Farming Restrictions

The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for sustainable development informs government policies to restrict farming and transform the food systems in different parts of the world, said Alex Newman, an award-winning international journalist who has covered this issue for over a decade.

The 2030 Agenda is a plan of action devised by the United Nations (U.N.) to achieve 17 sustainable development goals (SDG). The goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development were adopted by all UN member states in 2015.

Then-Secretary General of the U.N. Ban Ki-moon called the 2030 Agenda “the global declaration of interdependence,” (pdf) Newman said in a recent interview on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.

“In my opinion, [it] was a direct swipe at our Declaration of Independence … So instead of being independent nations, we will all be now interdependent.”

The 2030 Agenda “covers every element of human life, every element of the economy,” including global wealth redistribution not only within the nations but also among the nations, Newman commented. The Agenda “specifically says that we need to change the way that we consume and produce goods,” he added.

Goal number two on the 2030 Agenda deals specifically with food, Newman said.

In September 2021, the U.N. held the Food Systems Summit, which emphasized the need “to leverage the power of food systems” for the purpose of achieving all 17 sustainable development goals by 2030, according to a U.N. statement.

“Everyone, everywhere, must take action and work together to transform the way the world produces, consumes, and thinks about food,” the statement said.

Taking Over Farmland

The sustainable development agenda emerged in the 1970s when the United Nations tried to define it at a conference in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976. Newman said.

The conference, which was the first U.N. Conference on Human Settlements known as Habitat I, adopted the Vancouver Declaration (pdf), a report that provided recommendations for U.N. member states.

Newman quoted an excerpt from this report: “Land cannot be treated as an ordinary asset controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth, therefore contributes to social injustice.”

Newman said that, in his view, the U.N. ultimately wants to get rid of private land ownership. “We see this all over the world. This is not just happening in the Netherlands.”

He thinks that a war is taking place against farmers and ranchers, especially those who are independent or those who are not part of the system. “They want to remove small farmers, even medium farmers, from their land, and they want to bring it all under the control of these—I think there’s no other term to describe it—fascistic public-private partnerships.”

Newman noted some examples to illustrate his opinion: The Chinese regime forces peasants to move to megacities, farmers are killed in South Africa, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States proposed a new rule that could bankrupt small and medium farmers.

In March 2022, the SEC proposed a regulation that “would mandate publicly traded companies to report on their carbon emissions and other climate-related information,” as well as report similar information from any companies with which they do business, according to an SEC statement.

As a consequence, all companies in the business supply chain of a publicly traded entity would have to report their carbon emission and climate-related data.

U.S. Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and John Hoeven (R-N.D.) led 30 lawmakers to urge SEC to repeal its proposal, calling it a “regulatory overreach.”

”Imposing regulatory overreach on farmers and ranchers falls outside of the SEC’s congressionally provided authority,” the senators said in a statement. “This substantial reporting requirement would significantly burden small, family-owned farms.”

The American Farm Bureau Federation said in a statement that the proposed rule could create “substantial costs” for farmers because they do not have teams of compliance officers or attorneys like large corporations. Moreover, it may push out of business small and medium-sized farmers and force food-processing companies to look for agricultural raw products outside of the United States, the statement asserted.

“If you control the food supply, you control everything,” Newman said.

POSTED BY: ELLA KIETLINSKA AND JOSHUA PHILIPP