Agribusiness Takeover

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Industrial farming is on the rise and small farmers are being put out of business. But this isn’t a coincidence or an unfortunate accidental side effect of progress. Dutch investigative journalist Elze van Hamelen suggests that there is a deliberate campaign to control the land and our food supply, that is not only damaging our health but ripping apart communities, traditions, and families.

Among other topics on today’s episode, Elze digs into the Rockefeller Foundation’s initiative to “Reset the Table,” the “30 x 30 land conservation” plan, the history of land consolidation in the Netherlands (which she never learned about in school) and more. She also discusses a surprising way we can support small farmers who are at risk of losing their land and push back against the worldwide propaganda that promotes the idea that small farming is bad for nature and for humanity.

Visit Elze’s website: vanhamelen.eu

Register for the Wise Traditions conference in the fall of 2024

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Elze van Hamelen.

There is a movement afoot in the Netherlands, but also in much of the world, that promotes big ag over small farming. They say it’s better for feeding the world and for the climate, but is it? This is episode 468, and our guest is Elze van Hamelen. She is a researcher and investigative journalist who is pushing back against what she calls the Policy Tsunami that is putting small farms out of business.

The propaganda says that farmers are bad for nature and bad for the climate, but Elze contends that there is an underlying agenda to control the land and our food supply. In the process, they are ripping apart communities and families, and damaging our health. Among other topics, Elze addresses the 30 by 30 land conservation plan, the history of land consolidation in the Netherlands, and insights on surprising ways to support small farmers who are at risk of losing their land.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to join us at the annual Wise Traditions Conference. It will be taking place in Orlando, Florida, October 25 to 27. As far as I’m concerned, it’s going to be sunny inside and out with an amazing lineup of speakers and friendly faces around the Wise Traditions tables, replete with nourishing food. Go to WiseTraditions.org to sign up while the early bird pricing is still in effect. This is the conference that nourishes me in every way. I hope to see you there.

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Visit Elze’s website: VanHamelen.eu

Register for the Wise Traditions Conference in the fall of 2024

Check out our sponsors: Nutrition Therapy Institute and the New Biology Clinic

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Welcome to Wise Traditions, Elze.

Hi, Hilda. It’s nice to be here again.

Land Grabbing

Last time, we focused on biotech. This time, I want to talk to you about agribusiness and how there’s a takeover happening in terms of land on that angle of the subject. First, have you heard that Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the United States? What do you make of that? Why do you think he’s trying to grab up all that land? Give me your insights on the subject.

I cite that in the chapter. It’s a Solari report by Katherine Austin Fittz and I did this big research on the farmers and fishermen. One of the chapters is about controlling and taking off all the land. Bill Gates is one of many players in a major land grab. What this looks like is that Catherine Austin-Fittz of course reports a lot about the financial system. This is blown up by pumping all this money and printing this money and by the derivatives bubble. What’s going on now it seems like a game of musical chairs and everyone is going for the hard assets. It’s land, houses, factories, and businesses. This is part of a much bigger push basically to grab property.

Bill Gates is just one of the many players in a major land grab.

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that people with wealth are going to go after the hard assets, as you call them. I remember back in the day the movie Gone with the Wind ends with Scarlett O’Hara saying, “Yes, land is the only thing that matters.” We shouldn’t be surprised that people are going for that and yet, there is alarm about what’s happening. Why would you say that is?

For this research, Catherine asked me, “Can you write the big picture?” I used the Netherlands as a case study because I thought it was so weird in the narrative and the media here. They paint farmers as being bad for nature. I thought this was such a primal. It’s not a profession, it’s a calling, it’s a vocation. It’s not bad for nature. It’s industrial agriculture, but where does industrial agriculture come from?

In the Netherlands, I was aware that after the Second World War, there were major land consolidation efforts to prepare the land for industrial agriculture. What I found out in my research is that this happened worldwide and it was one of the strategic goals of the US Farm Ministry of the State Department to control the food supply, to control the food production.

This was in the incorporation with the Rockefeller family that in this after-war period at the State Department, each person that had a pivotal role there had a career before that at the Rockefeller Foundation. In Western Europe, the system of industrial agriculture was largely funded through the Marshall Plan. I don’t know if you’re aware of this. This was to rebuild Europe.

The Marshall Plan. It sounds familiar.

This was not primary financial help. It was also basically a major social engineering effort. With advisors, with study trips, with the universities, with the banks, with the government. There was, I believe, one government advisor per 300 farmers. This was a very intensive push. There were articles, and documentaries to explain to these farmers that they needed to go through the industrial model and you had to realize that during the war we had a major famine.

A lot of farms were destroyed and the country was a mess. They said we should never have hunger again and that’s why you should get into industrial agriculture. The same thing happened in the southern half of the world, but here it was called the Green Revolution. I understand in the US, you also had this implementation of industrial agriculture, but that’s at the root of many of the issues where we say the environmental damage. This is where the land consolidation and the land grab start but now it’s heading up.

The Agribusiness Takeover

I want to hear more about this, but I want to interject that this, as you call it, social engineering experiment or effort is still taking place today. I saw something that the US government put out recently saying that industrial farming is better for the environment than homesteading or the small farmers’ efforts. My mind was also blown by this information which is quite contradictory to my experience and understanding of agriculture. I feel like this push is still happening to get us all to buy in on the industrialized model, saying it’s better for the environment and it’s better to feed the world.

That’s still the case and this is also causing a divide between the farmers because you have a couple of farmers that consciously choose organic agriculture. You then have the industrial farmers, but they have a completely different business model because it was an autonomous business model. Before, you own your land and you produce what you need from your land. After the land consolidation, you’re in debt.

You need to produce a lot against low margins but you’re dependent on external inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, etc. You get a model that’s very dependent on financing and on the international global market. It creates a lot of dependency and it’s also the start of agribusiness. That’s why we called the tagline of this report, The Agribusiness Takeover, because what we talked about last week was all the synthetic food. It’s like a biotech takeover.

Here, you see that this industrial model goes hand in hand with these oligopolies that control the whole food chain and make it very difficult also for the farmers who want to stay independent. They don’t have these economies of scale, so they can’t compete with those prices. They have to go into mixed models and they have to work very hard to stay afloat.

 

What’s coming to my mind right now is something I heard about farmers in India who were given GMO seeds. Of course, GMO seeds, let’s say of corn, I don’t remember if it was corn or soy, but they don’t regenerate. In other words, you have a season, you plant them, they grow, you do the harvest, and then you need to buy the seeds again. It was causing these farmers who once had been independent to become dependent on those selling this GMO seed. Many farmers despaired so much because they would go into debt, as you said, and they would commit suicide. It became a whole epidemic.

This was not only in India. This happened in South America as well. Monsanto was a big player in this. William Engdahl wrote a book about this and it’s called Seeds of Destruction. It’s difficult to get that on Amazon, but you can still order it on the site Global Research. If you want to learn more about how this happened, I can recommend that book.

You were saying that this situation also creates tension between farmers, those who choose the more regenerative model, and those who choose the more conventional model. How so?

The policy has been pushing farmers to work scale enlargement, which is not so good for nature. At the same time, when this scale was enlarged, a lot of farmers went bankrupt so we lost a lot of farmers. The small ones, that are still around, they’ve chosen for that mess and now they can deal with that. There’s less solidarity. This is not the case in all cases. What the policy does is that they make it difficult for everyone.

For the industrial model, now at the end of the line, they say, “You’re bad for nature.” They get hit with this type of legislation. They have a phosphate policy and some of the big farms got exemptions and very good mixed farms. We called ground-bound mixed farms good farms. They went bankrupt because they were hit with a policy that was not even meant for them. I call this in my research the Policy Tsunami.

Everyone gets hit with this policy and the end result is that many say, “I need to quit, it’s impossible for me to commence to still make a profit.” What happens is that because they have these different models, the farmers that are an industrial model, they’ve been taught that this is the right thing to do. Many still believe it. Everyone, all the advisors, they learned this in their education, everyone is telling them that this is the right thing to do. You have to break through this propaganda barrier to start realizing that there are other methods and it’s not necessary.

The general public, the population of the Netherlands, do you think they see through some of this agenda and this agribusiness takeover, as you call it?

It depends on which media they consume, but there are a lot of people who are in support of the farmers because I think they recognize that we see in many areas of society that there are these unjust policies that bring people and businesses and small businesses into difficult positions. There’s solidarity with the farmers there. For example, the people who live in cities are pretty woke. They don’t understand.

They think the farmers are bad for nature, the farmers are bad for the climate. Of course, they should go, but they don’t realize who is feeding them. Two years ago, this is perhaps interesting. There were these farmers’ protests and apparently for a ship at sea, if you want to signal that you’re in stress, you put up an upside-down flag. There was this spontaneous action and the whole countryside for months on end was full of upside down flags.

That is interesting and you were talking about media. You don’t see that generally in the media, at least in the US. There’s no focus on this. I understand even now in Ireland, in France, and in different countries, there has been an influx of farmers saying, “We want to farm the way we know serves our humanity the best.”

Effects To The Food Supply

I’m heartened by that and hoping that people will wake up, not in the woke sense, but in the other sense. How does it trickle down to the population when it comes to food supply? For example, who feeds the Netherlands? Would some say, Elze, “After all, the proof is in the pudding, and look here, we’re feeding all the people very well with this industrialized model?”

For now, we are. Also in our part of the world, it’s not everywhere like this, but you can also say what is feeding people because it’s not nutritious food. You have to look purely at the calories. I think the real risk is perhaps not the food supply, but the dependency because you see this enormously. This report paints this history as a longer arc.

You see that urbanization was not purely a natural process. It was carefully managed through land use policies to make it more difficult to live in the countryside and only build within the urban boundaries under certain conditions. There’s this policy push from the UN that trickled down and now, a lot of people are living in these smart cities or the 15-minute cities, which are being rolled out at high speed as we speak.

 

I’m so glad you mentioned the 15-minute cities or the smart cities because, on the one hand, the way they’re painting them is as cities that are walking friendly and better for your health and you don’t need cars and you can have everything within 15 minutes of where you live. That’s one way they present it and the way some people see it is with skepticism saying, “Wait a minute, if I don’t have a car, then I’m dependent on you for everything, for my food, for my healthcare, for my education. Maybe this is more like a jail than a city.” Your point about dependency is well taken, Elze.

That was the point I was trying to make about dependency. You cannot go to the farmer around the corner. You still have all these corporations that are producing food and many of them are producing synthetic foods. There’s a whole influx of crazy genetic manipulation that goes way beyond what we’re used to. It’s a very corrupt food system.

For example, in 2021, there was a Rockefeller Foundation document called Reset the Table, and they’re talking about food as medicine. Of course, if you’re familiar with Ayurveda, then you think that’s fine. If you look at the synthetic foods that they are investing in, they put everyone in lockdown, and then they say, “Now there are a lot of children going hungry.”

We have a SNAP program and there’s all these government programs that you have to sign up for that and you get these tokens and it’s a digital ID conditional credit system. I think that’s very concerning. Perhaps the real risk is not being without food, but corruption of food, centralization of food, and the conditions on which you get access to food.

The real risk is not being without food, but corruption of foods, centralization of food, and the conditions on which you get access to food.

Maybe what’s at play here too, again, I’m going back to the social engineering concept you brought up earlier, is that we become grateful for the tokens. We become like beggars, dependent on what they’re giving us and grateful to our captors when we forget the price that we’re paying. It is we’re losing our food sovereignty, we’re losing our autonomy, and our freedoms on a lot of levels.

This whole thing about the Rockefellers, I think I’d heard that they were also behind the abolishment of Homeopathy and what we now call Alternative Health Protocols. They were behind abolishing all of that and instituting in all of the schools of medicine pharmaceuticals. They were behind that and it’s no surprise to me now that they want to reset the table and do even bigger things like the Great Reset.

I’m not sure if that’s there, but it’s called Reset the Table and it’s about the food policies in conjunction with the lockdown. That was concerning and food is medicine but the great reset is, of course, the book of Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum. But there’s a book by Jason Nordengardt. It’s called Controlling the Game.

He goes through a hundred years of history to look at all the agendas, like social agendas that the Rockefellers have financed. It’s very impressive because it shows you that if you have enough money and you launder it through these foundations and it’s being implemented in policy, you can change the direction of society in some ways.

Coming up, Elze reminds us of the history of Victory Gardens in the United States and of the small Russian dachas or land outside of the city. She points out how these small plots of land can make a big difference in sustaining communities with nourishing food and important biodiversity.

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In 2020 in the United States, we went through some food shortages. We realized how fragile the infrastructure was of conventional food or what we would call over here Big Food. In other words, a lot of the stuff that ends up at our supermarkets comes in trucks across the country and there were some breakdowns in our ability to do that. People realized, “This infrastructure is more fragile than we thought.” It seems to me if there’s a consolidation of land and a continued push for this agribusiness, we could end up right back where we were in 2020.

Yes, or worse. I think to have access to your local food is very important. This is actually in a pharma food report, but I give a couple of examples. In the US, you had the Victory Gardens and within a couple of years, people in very small garden plots were producing 40% of the vegetables and greens in cities, in parks, and everywhere in a couple of years.

There’s another example. Do you know the Russian dachas? I think one of the Russian tsars gave these plots of land to people who were in the city and these are small plots of land outside the city, but it has this whole historical thing. For the Russians, it’s very normal to have a plot of land outside the city with a little house on it. They grow a lot of vegetables on it and when Russia collapsed in the ‘90s when the Soviet system imploded, that was one of the reasons that they survived a lot because they were growing a lot of their own food.

By our standards, we would say it’s very inefficient because it takes so much manual work but when I saw the numbers, and I forget the numbers now, but it’s in the report. They are producing a lot of food on a small amount of land because that’s also in these UN reports, that’s always the argument. Regular farming costs land and it costs water but no, if you have people who love what they’re taking care of, the land is very generous.

It reminds me that human beings in a way are inefficient and we’re also born very vulnerable. In other words, the human infant needs its parents to protect it from predators, and to nourish it. It takes a while. It doesn’t get on its feet till about twelve months. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s something beautiful in that design.

What some would label as inefficient is not a drawback and in the same way, the quality of the food when there are fewer artificial inputs, more manpower, and more of that beautiful human energy going into the land. That provides a quality that doesn’t come up short compared to the industrialized model. That’s something that you can’t quantify either.

It’s part of the culture and also the stories that you read, it’s a lot about sharing because everyone has too much. There’s a lot of sharing going on and that’s part of their culture to share. That’s a beautiful thing as well.

Homesteading And Communities

What’s interesting is I don’t know if you’ve heard that Joel Salatin wrote a book called Homestead Tsunami. What he’s saying is there is this movement, I think because of 2020 in a way, a lot of people realized, “Something is wrong and we want our food freedom. We want our independence.” More and more families have started to have those very gardens you were describing from the 1930s, like taking their land and cultivating food on it rather than having green grass, which a lot of us have done for some time. They’re finding a lot of joy and they’re able to nourish their families through this movement.

The important thing about this too is with the homesteading, but also the dachas, it’s the biodiversity because of course, a crop can fail and you can have a pest, but if you have a lot of diversity, there’s resilience. You don’t have this with the monocropping.

That’s true and because you did this in-depth research for Solari and the Solari report, was there anything that surprised you as you read the numbers or the data on this worldwide movement to take the land away from the small farmers and industrialize our food supply?

Two things. One is that I was never taught in school about these land consolidation efforts. Seventy-five percent of the country went through a consolidation process. I thought, “How is it possible that I didn’t learn that in school?” I also started to wonder, what does this do to our culture? Because in 1945, we had 400,000 farms and we have 50,000 now.

Before, the farmers would have little plots of land and would take care of nature, these were mixed farms and they were organic before we called it organic. They would work the land together with others and the land was spread over different villages. There must have been a strong community and these are also often religious Christian communities.

You have these land consolidation efforts and you get government advisors that tell the sons that cannot stay and work on a farm how to find work in the city. I also realized, and I can’t find this in the literature, that it went beyond the scope of my research, but I thought they pulled the families apart. They pulled these communities apart because there were all these winners and losers.

Also, the way I know these farmers’ communities, you don’t talk about it. You’re not going to, but there must have been a lot of hard feelings about all the people losing their land. The church played a role in this because they were against this government intervention and people losing their land but when the government said, “We would pay their pensions,” and other kinds of subsidies, they went ahead and supported it as well.

I feel that it’s a very important part of our history. I also researched the fishermen and I was in this fishermen’s village that still has a very strong community and a very strong Christian community. They didn’t go along with a lot of what happened in the last couple of years. What I realized is that they have, with their biblical knowledge, with their community, with speaking to each other, they have a reality check outside everything that the screen is telling them. It gives them a natural Nonsis Regera.

They had the reality check. That’s fascinating. What you’re saying is resonating with me too because of the travels I’ve taken around the world. I was in Ethiopia last summer, and the government has banned hunting. Some of the tribes that traditionally would get wild game as part of their diet no longer could.

What does that do? That takes away some of their independence. They were telling me in some of the communities that their children now go to schools established by the government. There is this social engineering at play and dependence that’s being created that’s infringing on the most traditional peoples around the world as well.

If you look at the satellites, for example, they monitor everything, not the cities, but all the lands and they want to control all the land. It’s very clear from all these policy documents and that’s perhaps why I’m so glad that Catherine gave me this opportunity to do this research because I put all these pieces of the puzzle together. For me, it was a discovery journey.

I was trying to take the others, my readers, along with the journey because if I start with the end conclusion, you think, this is so insane but I started a long arc of history and I put it all together. At some point, you think, “It’s all adding up and building up to the same thing.” You need the space to tell the story because I also write for this paper and then you have one page and that’s not enough to tell this type of story.

How To Buy Some Of The Land Back

I remember what you said when we talked about biotech appearing on our plates, that you shifted your diet as a result of some of the research you did and the things you learned. What has shifted in terms of your understanding of the land and farmers’ plight today?

With this research, it’s in tandem. I try to not buy anything at the supermarket. Of course, sometimes I do, but I buy from local farmers, I buy from some intermediaries. I know somebody who buys cheeses in the region and then he’s at the market, but he can show me pictures of the cows and he knows all the farmers. Whenever I can, I do not buy at the supermarket.

You mentioned we need to know our local providers and support those that we know are doing it in a regenerative way on a smaller scale, those that we can be closer to. What else In addition to these two things do you think we can do? Can we buy some of that land back? That’s what I’m wondering. Buy it back from Bill Gates.

I think, for example, a lot of these farmers are in debt and they have difficulty staying afloat. There’s one farmer, it’s called Lodewijk Poel from the Goyelande, but he thought he wanted to become less dependent on the banks. He sold plots of land for, I think, 10,000 or 20,000 and he sold it to the people who buy his food then he leased it back. It becomes a community investment model. He rather is dependent on the people who want to buy his food than on the bank. It gives him independence, but the consumers as well. If you have money to invest, that could be something very interesting.

That is so interesting. We recently interviewed Sophie Eng, who wrote the Nourishing Asian Cookbook and she talked about something very similar. She said there was a local farmer who was struggling, and couldn’t hold onto his farm, and she and some others, I think, invested in the land so that he could keep providing food to that community.

It’s important because I think there’s a political agenda that needs a political answer. I think in the US it’s called 30 by 30. It’s also a land grab to protect 30% of the land. Margaret Bielfeldt has reported on this but there is this major push to put land under government control, to turn it into nature areas. There’s this major push to bankrupt people and buy it up through BlackRock. As I document in this report, this agenda goes back 70 years. This is not since yesterday, but it’s speeding up right now.

It needs a political answer and I think the most important political answer and that’s something I’m working on now is that I noticed that a lot of people who are a member of the municipality like the politicians in the municipality. They get all this policy and they think that because they were voted in they have to execute the policies that get dumped in their lap.

What we are trying to explain to them now is this is all your own policy. The people have not asked for this. They do not want it. They have very often not been informed. You are here as a representative of us. Why are you doing this?” A lot of people don’t realize what they’re participating in, so it takes a bit of education. I think it needs to take place at the local level or perhaps in the US or also at the state level.

Here in the Netherlands, the higher up you get, the more dense these networks are. You cannot reach these people. That’s not where the change is coming from but at the local level, a lot of people are passionate about what they do and they don’t want to do the right thing. We have to show them what’s the right thing and what’s the wrong thing and start discussions about this.

We have to show people what’s the right thing and what’s the wrong thing and start discussions about the issues of land grabbing.

It reminds me of something Daniel Griffith told me a while ago. He said, “Look down at your feet, start right where you are.” Super local, right beneath your feet. This has been a fascinating conversation. We’re so thankful for your time, Elze. Now I want to pose to you the question that I did last time, because it’s always at the end of the show, if the audience could do one thing to improve their health, what would you recommend that they do?

There’s a lot of aluminum in the environment and it’s toxic and you can quite easily detox it with Salicium water or a Salicium supplement. If you have rain fog, that’s one of the things for some people to help to drink Salicium water. I told you last time, like drink clean water, filter your water, but this is one other thing.

That’s great. Thank you so much. It’s been a fabulous conversation.

You’re very welcome. Thank you for the invitation again.

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Our guest was Elze van Hamelen. Visit her website, VanHamelen.eu to learn more. For a recent review from Apple podcasts from Linda Berniak. She called it the Family Health Bible. Linda says this, “A trusted resource of helpful information. If we can’t figure it out ourselves, we always go to the Weston A. Price Foundation.” Linda, thank you for your kind review. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Elze van Hamelen

Elze van Hamelen is a former corporate consultant turned researcher, who writes for various new media publications, such as the Dutch reader funded printed paper ‘De Andere Krant’ (The other paper, the other side of the story). She writes on topics that relate to people, power and empowerment, such as food, agriculture, surveillance, technocracy and governance. To stay connected to people, and help them turn knowledge into action, she loves sharing her discoveries in workshops and lectures.

 

Important Links

• Elze van Hamelen – LinkedIn
• VanHamelen.eu – website
• Seeds of Destruction – Book
• World Economic Forum – Book
• Controlling the Game – Book
• Homestead Tsunami – Book
• Nourishing Asian Cookbook – Cookbook
• Wise Traditions Conference
• Nutrition Therapy Institute
• New Biology Clinic

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