As argued in detail by an article at Brownstone.org, which has done leading critical work on the social ramifications of the Covid plandemic, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), is as deadly to the security of people as is the UN's World Health Organization (WHO). Both organisations started out with supposed noble ideas, with FAO seeking food security for the planet. The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which averted mass starvation, we are told, is one of FAO's selling points. It involved the Third World moving from traditional agriculture,Big Agri use of fertilizers, pesticides, controlled irrigation, and hybridized seeds. But the end was soil and water pollution, and pests that emergence with resistance. A small price to pay to enter the world of modern agriculture, they would argue in reply.
At present FAO is entwined with the so-called sustainable development goals of Agenda 2030, and embraces 18 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to economic growth, social equity and well-being, environmental preservation, and international cooperation. In particular, Goal 2 is ending hunger in the world ("Zero Hunger") and Goal 1 on "ending poverty in all its forms everywhere," all to be achieved by 2030. However, the FAO's goals were severely impacted upon by the policies of WHO during the Covid plandemic, which due to lockdowns, and the restrictions upon free trade, produced even more poverty in the Third World. Even if the FAO was a legitimate organisation, instead of being one part of the globalist conspiracy to create a One World government of the New World Order, the elimination of poverty by 2030, six years away, is impossible.
Add to this is climate change hysteria. FAO has moved in the same direction of the World Economic Forum, to declare war upon traditional meat diets. While the media focus has been upon supposed rich Western people gorging themselves upon steaks, itself a myth given the price of steak, people in the Third World also have meat-based diets. The proposal to move to insect eating and a purely vegetarian diet will not be culturally appropriate for many peoples, such as the Eskimos, who have a primarily fish-based diet, with few plant foods. In this respect, the UN and organisations like FAO, are culturally imperialistic and oppressive to the very people they were supposed to champion. And we should not be surprised, as the UN is not what it seems.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-uns-green-agenda-will-spark-famine/
"The right to food once drove UN policy towards reducing hunger with a clear focus on low- and middle-income countries. Like the right to health, food has increasingly become a tool of cultural colonialism – the imposition of a narrow ideology of a certain Western mindset over the customs and rights of the 'peoples' that the UN represents. This article discusses how it happened and the dogmas on which it relies.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the farming equivalent of the World Health Organization (WHO), was founded in 1945 as a specialized United Nations (UN) agency with a mission to "achieve food security for all." Its motto "Fiat panis" (Let there be bread) reflects that mission. Headquartered in Rome, Italy, it counts 195 Member States, including the European Union. The FAO relies on more than 11,000 staff, with 30% being based in Rome.
Of its US$3.25 billion biennial 2022-23 budget, 31% comes from assessed contributions paid by Members, with the remainder being voluntary. A large share of voluntary contributions come from Western governments (US, EU, Germany, Norway), development banks (e.g. World Bank Group), and other lesser-known publicly- and privately-funded entities set up for assisting environmental conventions and projects (including the Global Environment Facility, Green Climate Fund and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Thus, like the WHO, most of its work now consists of implementing the dictates of its donors.
The FAO was instrumental in implementing the 1960s and 1970s Green Revolution, associated with a doubling in world food production that lifted many Asian and Latin American populations out of food insecurity. The use of fertilizers, pesticides, controlled irrigation, and hybridized seeds was considered a major achievement for hunger eradication, despite resulting pollution to soil, air, and water systems and facilitation of the emergence of new resistant strains of pests. The FAO was supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) founded in 1971 – a publicly funded group with the mission to conserve and improve seed varieties and their genetic pools. Private philanthropies, including the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, also played supportive roles.
Successive World Food Summits held in 1971, 1996, 2002, 2009, and 2021 have punctuated the FAO's history. At the second summit, world leaders committed themselves to "achieving food security for all and to an ongoing effort to eradicate hunger in all countries" and declared "the right of everyone to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger" (Rome Declaration on World Food Security).
Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined by more than half, falling from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015, with most progress having occurred since 2000.
On this basis, in 2015, the UN system launched a new set of 18 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to economic growth, social equity and well-being, environmental preservation, and international cooperation, to be achieved by 2030. In particular, Goal 2 on ending hunger in the world ("Zero Hunger") is coupled with Goal 1 on "ending poverty in all its forms everywhere."
These goals appeared highly utopian, not taking into account factors like wars, population growth, and the complexities of human societies and their organizations. However, they reflected the global mindset at the time that the world was progressing toward unprecedented, steady economic growth and agricultural production to improve the living conditions of the poorest.
Sustainable Development Goals (2015)
2.1 By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round.
2.2 By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons.
In 2019, FAO reported that 820 million people suffered from hunger (only 16 million less than in 2015) and almost 2 billion experienced moderate or severe food insecurity, and predicted that the SDG2 would not be achievable at current progress. The most affected areas were sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Western Asia.
Complicit Suppression of the Right to Food through Covid-19 Emergency Measures
Come March 2020, repeated waves of restrictions and interruption of income (lockdowns) were imposed on "the peoples of the UN" for two years. While UN staff, as part of the laptop class, continued to work from home, hundreds of millions of the poorest and most vulnerable lost their meagre incomes and were pushed to extreme poverty and hunger. The lockdowns were decided by their governments based on poor advice from throughout the UN system. On 26 March, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres set out his 3-step plan: suppressing the virus until a vaccine became available, minimizing social and economic impact, and collaborating to implement the SDGs.
It was remarkably naive or callous to claim that human, social, and economic impacts caused by the Covid response on hundreds of millions of the poorest and the most vulnerable were minimizable. Naturally, its promoters were not among those who suffered. A decision was made to impoverish populations and drag them down, yet claim publicly that development targets could still be achieved. Lockdowns were contrary to the WHO's recommendations in 2019 for pandemic influenza (non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza; 2019).
Only a few months prior to March 2020, the WHO had stated that in case of a pandemic, measures such as contact tracing, quarantine of exposed individuals, entry and exit screening, and border closures were "not recommended in any circumstances":
One can wonder if the UN had ever seriously weighed the social, economic, and human rights costs of the measures pushed by Guterres against expected benefits. Countries were encouraged to institute measures such as workplace and school closures that would entrench future poverty for the next generation.
As was predictable, the 2020 SOFI report on Food Security and Nutrition estimated at least 10% more hungry people.
These are the individuals, families, and communities with no or little cushion who suddenly lost jobs and incomes, particularly in informal or seasonal economies, because of the panic caused by a virus predominantly threatening elderly people in Western countries.
During 2020, the WHO, ILO, and FAO regularly published joint press releases, but they disingenuously attributed the economic devastation to the pandemic, failing to question the response. This narrative was systematically deployed across the UN system, with the rare exception of the ILO, probably the bravest entity of all, which once pointed directly at the lockdown measures as the cause of massive job losses.
Given the ILO's estimation, it is reasonable to assume that the number of people pushed into hunger may well be higher than officially estimated. Adding to this is the number of those who also lost access to education, medical care, and improved shelter.
The strangest thing about this entire episode is the lack of interest of the media, the UN, and major donors. While previous famines had generated wide and specific sympathy and responses, the Covid famine, perhaps because it was essentially directed by Western-based and global institutions and was more diffuse, has been mostly swept under the carpet. This could be a question of financial return on investment. Funding has been massively directed to initiatives to buy, donate, and dump Covid vaccines and supporting institutions driving the "pandemic express."
Recommended Approved Food Based on the Climate Agenda
The FAO and WHO have been collaborating on developing dietary guidelines in order to "improve current dietary practices and prevailing diet-related public health problems." They once recognized that links between constituents of food, disease, and health were poorly understood, and they agreed to conduct joint research. The cultural element of diets was also highlighted. After all, human societies had been founded on a hunter-gatherer model heavily reliant on wild meat (fat, protein, and vitamins), then introduced dairy and cereals step-by-step according to favorable climates and geography.
Their partnership led to the joint promotion of "sustainably healthy diets," which constitutes the consensus of individual approaches of the WHO's "healthy diet" and the FAO's "sustainable diets." As the wording indicates, these guidelines are motivated by sustainability, defined as reducing CO2 emissions resulting from food production. Meat, fat, dairy, and fish are now the declared enemies and should be limited in daily consumption, with protein intake predominantly from plants and nuts, thereby promoting a quite unnatural diet compared to that for which our bodies evolved.
The WHO claims that its healthy diet "helps to protect against malnutrition in all its forms, as well as noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) including diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer." However, it is then somewhat incongruously promoting carbohydrates over meat-based protein.
The following diet was recommended to both adults and young children by the FAO-WHO 2019 "Sustainable Healthy Diets: Guiding Principles" report:
Fruit, vegetables, legumes (e.g. lentils and beans), nuts and whole grains (e.g. unprocessed maize, millet, oats, wheat and brown rice);
At least 400 g (i.e. five portions) of fruit and vegetables per day, excluding potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava and other starchy roots.
Less than 10% of total energy intake from free sugars.
Less than 30% of total energy intake from fats. Unsaturated fats (found in fish, avocado and nuts, and in sunflower, soybean, canola and olive oils) are preferable to saturated fats (found in fatty meat, butter, palm and coconut oil, cream, cheese, ghee and lard) and trans-fats of all kinds, including both industrially-produced trans-fats (found in baked and fried foods, and pre-packaged snacks and foods, such as frozen pizza, pies, cookies, biscuits, wafers, and cooking oils and spreads) and ruminant trans-fats (found in meat and dairy foods from ruminant animals, such as cows, sheep, goats and camels).
Less than 5g of salt (equivalent to about one teaspoon) per day. Salt should be iodized.
Little evidence on the health impact of the guidelines was presented to back up the report's allegations of: i) red meats being linked with increased cancer; ii) animal source foods (dairy, eggs, and meat) accounting for 35% of the burden of food-borne disease due to all foods, and iii) the health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet and the New Nordic Diet promoted by the report – both plant-based, with little to moderate amounts of animal-sourced foods. Although these diets are new, the FAO and WHO assert that "adherence to both diets has been associated with lower environmental pressures and impacts in comparison to other healthy diets containing meat."
The sister organizations define sustainable healthy diets as "patterns that promote all dimensions of individuals' health and wellbeing; have low environmental pressure and impact; are accessible, affordable, safe and equitable; and are culturally acceptable." The paradoxes of this definition are paramount.
Firstly, imposing a diet is forcing cultural acceptance and, when reflecting the ideology of an external group, can reasonably be considered cultural colonialism. Diet is the product of culture based on centuries or even millennia of experience and food availability, production, processing, and preservation. The right to adequate food not only implies the sufficient quantity of food for the individuals and their families but also their quality and appropriateness. Examples are not scarce. The French still enjoy their foie gras despite the importation restriction, ban, and an international campaign against it. They also eat horse meat, which shocks their British neighbors.
Dog meat, also a victim of negative campaigns, is appreciated across several Asian countries. Invoking moral judgment in these cases may be seen as a neo-colonial behavior, and battery farms of chickens and pigs do not fare better than force-fed geese or alleged cruel treatment to animals considered humans' best friends in multiple contemporary societies. Western people, rich from fossil fuel use, demand that poorer people change their traditional diets in response is a similar but even more abusive theme. If the cultural aspect of diets is undeniable, then the right to self-determination of peoples, including cultural development, should be respected.
Secondly, at the time of their adoption in 1948 and 1966, the treaties' provisions recognizing the right to food did not link food to its "environmental pressure and impact." Article 11.2 of the binding ICESR (quoted above) refers to States' obligation to implement agrarian reforms and technologies for the best use of natural resources (i.e. land, water, fertilizers) for optimal food production. Farming certainly uses land and water and causes some pollution and deforestation. Managing its impacts is complicated and requires local context, and national governments and local communities are better placed to make such decisions with scientifically founded advice and neutral (unpoliticized) support from external agencies, such should be expected from the UN.