Recently Tom DeWeese, President of American Policy Center, has been writing articles about the Green New Deal and the attack on ranchers, here, here, and here. His articles have garnered tremendous response. I am the one who responds to the emails sent to American Policy Center and, lately, I have had to respond to people questioning Tom’s attacks on the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, also known as the World Wide Fund for Nature WWFN). The mail suggests that WWF is a St. Thomas of Assisi for cattle. That would be true only if you thought beef should no longer exist in our world, other than as something to worship.
I will give you some background data on WWF and its connection with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (USRSB), the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef (GRSB), the Nature Conservancy (TNC), the United Nations, Agenda 21, and the President’s Council on Sustainable Development (PCSD). Now if that isn’t a witches’ brew of alphabet soup, what is?
All of these seemingly disparate entities and their connections started coming together after the 1992 Earth Summit and the 1993, President’s Council on Sustainable Development was set up by Bill Clinton at President Bush’s behest. “The President’s Council on Sustainable Development was convened (on the one-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit) to harness corporations to green group ideology by promoting high-minded goals that sounded wonderful but silently eliminated natural resource extraction as part of a proper society.”[1]
The PCSD laid out ‘The Principles of Sustainability’ for ‘Our Vision of a Sustainable United States of America’:
Principle 4. Human Population must be stabilized at a level consistent with the capacity of the earth to support all its inhabitants in healthy conditions over the long term. Hunger and starvation around the world have been caused, mainly, because of either government policies or wars – not by overpopulation. This ruse is to fulfill the goal of reducing the human population.
Principle 5. In order to protect natural systems and preserve their benefits for future generations, current patterns of consumption should be altered through steady improvements in the efficiency of natural resource use. This is a biggie. First, patterns of consumption: we will see later in this article that meat eating is considered unsustainable, not by science but by those with an agenda. And those ‘steady improvements in the efficiency’ is a ruse to shut down natural resource use by humans, thus is both the Wildlands Project (taking land from property owners and allowing only animals to inhabit), and to reduce the human population.
Principle 9. Where public health may be affected adversely, or environmental damage may be serious or irreversible, protective action may be necessary even in the face of scientific uncertainty. What might necessitate protective action in spite of hard knowledge either lacking or to the contrary? This murky statement rings of 1984 and Brave New World. This is a ruse to shut people out of natural resources, i.e., the Wildlands Project.
Principle 10. The traditional behavior of government, private institutions, and individuals must change fundamentally if we are to ensure economic growth, environmental protection, and social equity over the long term. This one is blatantly that we need a top-down powerful government that controls industry and people through Public Private Partnerships, and removal of property rights and freedom, with the social equity of Orwell’s four legs good, two legs bad.
Principle 15. Since sustainability in the United States is closely tied to global sustainability, U.S. policies regarding trade, economic development, and environmental protection must evolve in the context of their international implications. A mouthful but basically saying that the U.S. must obey the U.N. on trade, economic development, and environmental protection – or in other words, we will sell what the UN wants to whom the UN wishes, we will limit what we produce to what we are allowed by the U.N., and most of our environment will be off-limits to us humans.
Principle 16. Citizens must have access to formal and lifelong non-formal education that enables them to understand the interdependence of economic growth, environmental quality, and social equity, and prepares them to take actions that support all three. Note the qualifying part of the access to education; it will not be education, but programming so that we understand exactly what we must do to be the ideal global citizen zombies.
One of the PCSD taskforces was the Sustainable Agriculture Task Force (SATF).
The Sustainable Agriculture Task Force is developing an integrated vision of sustainable agriculture, focusing on sustainable production practices and systems. The Task Force will recommend goals and actions in the areas of agriculture-related research and education, technology, and farming practices and systems to the Council for the National Action Strategy.
In other words, they will tell the farmers and ranchers how they must run their operations. SAFT’s definition of sustainable is not the dictionary’s definition. Sustainable, to SAFT, the UN, and NGOs is to provide enough for themselves and their useful idiots, and free up the rest of the land to be Wildlands.
From: https://clintonwhitehouse1.archives.gov/White_House/EOP/pcsd/vision/revised-draft.html
That was written back in 1995, almost a quarter of a century ago. Since then, there has been major ‘progress’ to advance the Agenda 21 (and now, 2030) goals. Now you can see where those other alphabet/NGO groups come in. This taskforce was chaired by John H. Adams, Executive Director, Natural Resources Defense Council; Richard Barth, Chairman, President & CEO, Ciba-Geigy Corporation; and Richard Rominger, Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, i.e., big Green + Big Pharma with a little government added. Other members were Carol M. Browner of the EPA; John Sawhill, President and CEO of the Nature Conservancy; and Jonathan Lash, President of World Resources Institute (WRI).
A note on WRI: The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), Worldwatch Institute, EPA, Sierra Club, and others argue that the cost in human tragedy is a cost well incurred if there is even a remote chance that global warming will occur with all its forecast catastrophes.[2] The Institute generally argues through its key research leaders that national economics must be controlled by interventionists and that natural resources should not be used at all. The Institute’s highly impressive studies generally ignore the costs of environmentalism, the value of private property and individual liberty. The intellect this Institute brings to bear to stop development throughout the world is equaled only by its financing.[3] (emphasis mine)
Back to beef ranchers and their foe. In 2010, the NCBA invited World Wildlife Federation’s Jason Clay to be the keynote speaker at their Summer Convention. That signaled the imbedding of the WWF’s global sustainability guidelines as well as production standards into the U.S. beef industry. That included adding the WWF’s panda onto the Beef Check-off logo. And the road to so-called sustainable beef was taken. You might ask where this road is going. Let the World Wildlife Federation’s 2017 report, Appetite for Destruction, reported here in “Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report”, tell you the destination:
Meat consumption is devastating some of the world’s most valuable and vulnerable regions, due to the vast amount of land needed to produce animal feed, a report has warned.
The growing popularity of a Western diet, which contains high levels of meat and dairy, means an area 1.5 times the size of the European Union would be saved if global consumption of animal products was reduced to meet nutritional requirements. The report went on to say that, to save the Earth, it was vital that we change human consumption habits away from meat.
Now, if this happened 20 years ago – if the beef industry put itself under the control of an organization that was working toward their imminent demise – sane people would have ask why in the world they would do that. But we have far fewer people in the world who are able to think critically, so when people go to the grocery store to buy their beef and see the WWF panda logo on the package, they think nothing of it (if they think at all) or think it is cute.
We all know that government never met a regulation that they didn’t like. Yet, the NCBA and cohorts were successful in persuading Congress to repeal Country of Origin Labeling (COOL), which was actually a good piece of legislation for both the public and the ranchers. Now, beef can be brought in from other countries and labeled as US beef; we know that no other country has such strict guidelines for both quality and animal welfare as the U.S., so we will never know what we are getting with the new so-called U.S. beef.
Next, the USRSB, the US Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, formed in 2015, “ is a multi-stakehold initiative developed to advance, support and communicate continuous improvement in sustainability of the U.S. beef value chain. The USRSB achieves this through leadership, innovation, multi-stakeholder engagement, and collaboration”.
A lot of the fuzzy-wuzzy Sustainable Development words, but what do they mean? Stakeholders are those who are involved but few have any physical stake in the cattle business other than what they will squeeze out of it by being one of those wielding control from afar. This includes Civil Society: Academic institutions, non-government and non-commercial institutions, foundations, alliances and associations with a stake in the beef value chain (it doesn’t say how these groups get a stake in the chain).
When they talk about “to advance, support and communicate continuous improvement in sustainability of the U.S. beef value chain”, they are blowing smoke. Many, if not most, of today’s ranchers have been on their land for several generations. They know more about making their land sustainable (in the true sense of the word), than any ‘sustainablist’ from the UN ever could (or would want to). If the ranchers hadn’t been using the best practices in caring for their land, they wouldn’t have any usable land at all by now. And that ‘beef value chain’, what is it? It is vertical marketing – controlling every aspect of beef production from the feed to the barns, to the care, to the slaughterhouse, to the packaging, selling, and transporting of the final product. They are intent at controlling every aspect of the beef industry; that way they have to do only minor changes to shut down the entire US beef supply when they are ready.
I hope this clears up a lot of misinformation that is spread thicker than cow manure in the MSM. But if you have questions, I am the one answering the emails at American Policy Center. I will try to answer any you have.
p.s. if none of that convinced you that the American beef industry shouldn’t be in bed with the World Wildlife Fund, how about this: “Anti-poaching guards backed by the World Wide Fund for Nature have gang-raped women and tortured villagers by tying their penises with fishing lines, according to the charity’s own investigators. WWF told its partners to treat the findings in a ‘non-public fashion.’”
[1] Arnold, Ron and Alan Gottlieb, Trashing the Economy, p 280;…
[2] Coffman, Michael S., Ph.D., Saviors of the Earth?, p.45.
[3] Arnold, Ron and Alan Gottlieb, Trashing the Economy, p 537.
Editor’s note: This article is from the American Policy Centre (APC) website https://americanpolicy.org/. The APC was founded by Tom DeWeese. It is privately funded and non-profit. DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence. Mr. DeWeese will be the guest speaker at the OLA’s Annual General Meeting in Arnprior, Ontario on October 26, 2019.